Skyping the Heck Out of My Kids – An Experiment in Transcontinental Parenting

I’ve been away from home for the past three days at the AMAZING Mom Congress Conference in Washington, D.C., attending as a blogger for Parenting.  I haven’t done a lot of blogging or sleeping here.  I’ve been too busy having my mind blown.

I then stay up until all hours of the night crafting a post that doesn’t remotely do justice to what I’ve learned and the people I’ve met and then crash into bed for a few hours, rinse and repeat.  I’m exhausted in that really good, productive way.

You can read some of my thoughts about the conference on Twitter and the few posts I’ve put up on Mom Congress so far. There’s just too much information to do it justice in a couple of posts so I’ll be expanding on my tweets and more on the Mom Congress blog over the next several days and weeks.  I highly suggest you subscribe to the blog or like it on Facebook if you want to improve education for your child and others.  I will be passing along invaluable tips and ideas that I’ve learned, things you can do today to help your young child become kindergarten ready, ways you can help fight childhood obesity or take small steps to bring equality to education.  I’m pretty pumped up.

And I miss my kids and my husband.

I think it’s good to miss each other every once in a while so we don’t take each other for granted.  They are the great joy of my life and I can’t wait to see them Thursday morning.  Dan and my mom friends back in the Seattle area have been taking good care of the kids and each night we hook up on Skype.

Logging in from my computer in the hotel room, I chat with them about their days, give them tours of the hotel room, blow kisses and wave to Wanda, grin and make faces.  They asked how my panel went on Monday and I told Laylee that it was better than the last presentation I was part of, but not awesome.  We talked about how excited I was that my presentation skills are improving with practice.  I wonder how old she'll be before she figures out how often I try and turn a conversation into a teaching moment.

Dan changed Wanda’s diaper while I talked to the kids one night.  Laylee told me riddles and danced for me and Magoo did cool tricks.  At the end of each night, we read scriptures over the phone and knelt hundreds of miles apart and said a family prayer.  There was something incredibly tender about this and I’m so grateful for technology that brings us so close together even when we’re far apart.

Kisses on a webcam aren’t exactly the same as slobbery baby kisses but they’re a pretty great long distance substitute. 

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