It’s that time of the year again. A fun summer with lazy days and adventures has come to an end and the kids are back at school. For those of you with children, you know that this time of year usually means a crazy amount of shopping for school clothes, school supplies, new shoes, backpacks and for those with kids in an after-school sport or band there is the added expenses of an instrument, a choir outfit or sports gear. It’s the time of the year I dread. Not because of all the shopping, (confession: I find that fun), and not because the kids go back to school, because let’s face it: Two and a half months of 24/7 non-stop parenting…er…bonding is enough to drive any sane person crazy. No, what I absolutely hate the most are the mountains of paper that are brought home that first week of school. I spend tedious hours of filling out page after page and reading piles of paper filled with important information about this, that and the other.
However, after nine years of being a part of this show, I am happy to say that it has become much easier. Not because I am now a pro at the game, but because of social media and other very helpful apps. This year, for instance I did most of my back to school clothes shopping online. Well-placed retargeting ads from brands like Abercrombie and Fitch, Hollister, and Nike popped up with deals not to be missed while I was on Facebook connecting with my Facebook friends. Going onto their sites and selecting clothing items by a click of a finger made shopping for my kiddos a breeze.
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"With great power comes great responsibility." I knew all along that I wanted that to be the title of this blog post, and I was certain that it was a quote from Obi-Wan Kenobi. This worked well for me because I was going to work Star Wars® into our Christmas blog post for the third year in a row.
Except that it wasn’t Obi-Wan Kenobi. It was a different Ben altogether. Well, sorta.
A distracting two-hour voyage down the Google/Wikipedia rabbit hole taught me that it wasn’t Obi-Wan at all. In fact, conclusive evidence was hard to come by. It was possibly Voltaire or something to do with the French Revolution, but it has also been paraphrased by President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the US Supreme Court. And perhaps most famously, in pop culture no less, it was attributed to Uncle Ben Parker, the short-lived father figure of Spiderman’s secret identity. Although even here, he didn’t actually say it; it was just a narrative box in the original comic book.
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