I’m fairly certain my phone thinks I am an idiot. It didn’t come right out and say so, but it definitely implied it.

We spend a lot of time together, my phone and me. Having a phone in 2020 is a lot like having a toddler. If you don’t know where it is, you have to find it before something terrible happens like you get a text, or a notification that it’s going to be a bad weather day, or someone goes crazy on your Amazon account. Or, in the case of a toddler, they have locked themselves in the house and figured out how to turn on the stove while climbing a ladder and holding scissors.

Danger is lurking everywhere yet the phone (and your toddler) brings you great joy. Sometimes you want to get away from it/them and try to take a nap. That is when your phone or toddler will need you the most. Sometimes they bother you in the middle of the night and they are especially inconvenient when you are trying to have a conversation that doesn’t involve it/them. Yet, you are glad you have it/them, and most days you wouldn’t trade it/them for anything in the world.

They can both say some pretty brutal things. I remember one day while coloring with my then two-year-old granddaughter, Mia, she asked me to draw a horse. This is way out of my wheelhouse, or stable, or whatever you’d like to call it. But I drew a horse. I think you may have even been able to tell that it was a horse. But Mia just looked at me and said, “Grandmom, you’re not a very good drawer.”

Oh, the searing pain of truth told by a toddler! Yet, I was proud that she knew it wasn’t a good drawing but also disturbed that it wasn’t good enough for a two-year-old.

That same disturbed feeling came over me yesterday when my phone popped up with this notification – “You have a memory.”

While any woman my age appreciates the encouragement of that sentence, I knew I was supposed to go to that memory, so I clicked on it to discover that the memory was from two days prior. I mean really. Did my phone think I was incapable of remembering something from two days ago? Don’t answer that.

I know how to deal with my phone.

If only toddlers were so easy.

Two weeks from today, Mia will turn 17. She’s our first grandchild and we share a birthday. Happy Birthday (almost), Mia! (By the way, she still thinks I’m not a very good drawer, but she’s a little more delicate about it)