How time flies

With the birth of Anna, I have had some time to reflect on how communication has changed in the past 25 years since Karen was born. I talked about this some after dinner but thought I would write about it. When Thresa and I had Karen, we were just as excited as Karen and Jeremy are.  Proud. Happy beyond words. Maybe a little scared about the future. More than anything, we wanted to share our beautiful daughter with the rest of our family. We had visitors of friends and family. And we took lots of pictures. Part of preparing for a baby was to load up the camera so they we could take plenty of pictures. Not much of a difference yet. Realize that cellular phones and the Internet were not even dreams yet in 1985. PC's had just been invented.

If we wanted the pictures, we had to take the film to the store to be developed. We would get the pictures about a day or two later. Pictures that we wanted to send to people had to be mailed after we developed the film. Basically, it took a week or more for anyone to get a picture of our daughter.

Calling people was about as primitive. We had to use a real phone (cord and all).  Calling from the hospital room required a long distance calling card (do any of you even know that they is?). There were no cell phones so I did most of the calling from home. People just knew to wait for any news.

Contrast this to last Thursday when Karen and Jeremy shared Anna with us. We took lots of pictures (digital of coursse) and Jeremy put some on facebook within a couple hours. Thresa and I took pictures using our iPhones and put them on facebook. Within less than 2 hours of Anna being brought home, we got a phone message from Boyer's congratulating us on being grandparents. They saw the news on facebook since Sue is a friend of mine. Cellular Calls and text messages were used to let people know about this great news within an hour or two. Julie and Joey even got to see their new niece using Skype even though they were miles away at college.

My point is that change only speeds up with each generation. The communication we used for Anna's birth in 2011 was not even dreamed of in 1985. Not even seen in any "future" movies. So, what advances will we see in the next 25 years? How primitive will out current cell phones, skype, facebook and digital cameras seem when Anna is 25?