Goodbye to Screens as the Family Heads to our Summer Retreat

This is one of those shoscreensrt weeks where I have so much to do that I probably won’t get that much done. It’s all crashing down as a result of being gone last week and this week, leaving Friday for a week vacation with family in an undisclosed Pennsylvania location.  I cherish that time, every July, where we gather the big family, from the littlest grandchild to my eldest sister Anne, to enjoy a week of mostly screen-free living. I’m looking forward to giving up on work for a week.

I am so aware of the presence of screens and its ubiquity depresses me some times. I wake up in my daughter’s house looking for little Sofie…there she is, nose inside the iPad, watching YouTube.  Never ever let’s grandpa see what she’s watching, a trick she learned from her older brother Nathan. We’ve made a pact that during this trip, neither adults nor teens nor pre-teens will have their noses in the phones. We will bring out our books, bring our boardgames, bring out our rusty conversational skills and share some quality time catching up in our undisclosed location near a lake in western Pennsylvania.

I will reserve a little bit of time in the evenings for some email but nothing more…I gotta walk this walk, right?