Text Messaging for Dummies

I swore I would never resort to text messaging to communicate with my kids.  Nuh-uh.  I would insist they actually talk to me in person or call me on our landline (aka home phone). I would not bow down to social media tools. Hands-on parenting was MY generation. Then *sigh* came the “teen years”.  I finally caved and started texting when J2 (then 16 years old) decided any type of verbal communication with the parents other than the occasional grunt here and there took too much effort. 

When I first started texting I had the typical flip phone with the alpha/numeric keyboard that required you to press the number 7 key four times in order to get the letter “s”.  AUGH! Then there was something called Autocomplete which “involves the program predicting a word or phrase that the user wants to type in without the user actually typing it in completely” (Wikipedia). OMG!  The Mother of the Year Committee was at it again with even MORE acronyms to learn. Shoot me now!  Thank goodness for Webopedia’s Text Messaging and Online Chat Abbreviations page.

Well you can imagine how thrilled I was when I got my first text message from J2 and he signed off with “LOL”.  I KNOW!  Can you believe it!  At 16 he was well past showing any form of PDA yet here he was signing off with “Lots of Love”!!!  *wink*

Three years later I like to think I am a pretty accomplished text messenger.  Last summer I even upgraded to a phone with a “qwerty” keyboard - not virtual as I still am old school have principles.  OK so the new phone was mainly because of the letter ‘s’ thing and virtual keyboards are just too freakin finicky for me! 

Like with most everything, there is apparently text messaging etiquette.  According to J2 it is a definite no-no to “drunk text”.  Not that this has EVER happened to moi but for those of us you who just can’t help yourselves; maybe there should be a warning message. 

Just saying...