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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

We’ve got the toys, but where’s the time?

It’s funny how things change with time.

In 1987, just before the birth of my second child, we got crazy and purchased a video camera. It was a big, boxy affair that made us look like we were shooting footage for the evening news. It cost a whopping $1,000 – more than the house payment – and we had to put it on the credit card. What a luxury.

We didn’t really need the camera, of course, but we wanted it badly. And once we got the camera, it quickly became hard to imagine life without it. Since the day the thing arrived we’ve watched our children grow up through the viewfinder. We’ve watched every piano and dance recital, every soccer game and school play with one eye closed.

In 1989, because I thought I would just die if I didn’t get one, we bought our first computer. It cost more than the video camera. The noisy dot-matrix printer took perforated continuous-feed paper that was a headache to deal with.

Later we moved online and surfed the Web with a dial-up modem that was frustratingly slow and temperamental. And we paid by the minute.

Ostensibly, it was all supposed to be a tool to give the children an advantage, and to make writing easier for me. But it was, to be honest, just another luxury. And it really stretched the budget.

That was just the beginning.

Computer prices dropped lower and lower, but we kept buying more. We upgraded and replaced. We needed to be faster and more powerful. We needed more memory.

Eventually, one computer wasn’t enough. We graduated to notebooks, and wireless, and a network, and the freedom to travel to the coffee shop or to the park and work on our computers at the same time. A far cry from that first purchase.

In 1991 we bought a cellular phone. There were three babies by that time. The phone was expensive and all it did was send and receive phone calls. That was it. Phone calls in and phone calls out. No MP3 player, no camera, none of the bells and whistles phones have now.

The thing was a brick, big, bulky and terribly inconvenient to carry around. It stuck up out of my purse and I looked like an Army field officer when I held it up to my ear. But it could have been worse. At that time some people were still carrying around battery packs the size of lunchboxes to power their giant “portable” phones. We splurged on the latest model, and although we justified it by dreaming up elaborate scenarios for when and where a portable phone might come in handy – stranded on a dark night on a lonely road, menacing strangers and so on – it was really just another expensive toy.

The truth is the biggest emergency we faced while we had that phone was running out of diapers. But we haven’t been without a cell phone since. Now we’re on the family plan. Most of the children have their own phones. Just in case there’s an emergency, of course.

Eventually, all those items that were once splurges became necessities. We’ve forgotten that we could ever live without them.

Today my 10-year-old, my fourth child, feels a little left out because many of her friends have cell phones. And she’d like her own notebook computer.

The good news is that computers, video cameras and cell phones are cheaper than they used to be. They’ve all gotten smaller and more powerful. We use them in ways we could never have imagined just a few years ago: Now we can make a movie of the kids at the beach with a tiny camera that fits in the palm of your hand, pop the DVD out of the camera and mail it (or e-mail it) to the grandparents that afternoon. We beam important files between laptops and store and edit our photos on the computer. We send text messages and take photos with our cell phones. We answer important phone calls in the bathroom and we check our e-mail standing in line at the grocery store.

But a funny thing has happened along the way. Now, for many of us, true self-indulgence is a moment stolen away from those gadgets we once desired so deeply. The things we worked so hard to get.

Now, happiness is a matter of time. Time without the cell phone. Time spent away from the computer screen.

We got all the toys we wanted. We are tethered to technology.

These days it is time, the thing we used to have so much of, the one thing that never cost us a dime, that we yearn for.