Hey!

How was your summer? Mine was awesome:-)

Sorry I haven’t posted anything in a while. I was playing lots of tennis, visiting relatives in Canada, and hanging out with my friends.

Speaking of friends… Charlie, showed me this interesting article on how teenagers and kids are getting off social media. Or at least taking a break.

I can believe it! I don’t love just scrolling through my phone, seeing what my friends are doing. I’d rather be doing stuff with them! All my close friends are on the same page.

Plus, in my house, we’ve always had rules with our phones:

We never bring a phone to the table when we’re eating, and never upstairs at night.

We all have a drawer to put our phones away (even my parents), so they don’t distract us and pull us out of family activities, like movie night. (Although, with the last couple of movies we’ve picked, I could have used some distraction! Yeah, they were bad.)

I never thought much about it until we were on vacation, and my cousins were constantly on their phones. It was kind of a bummer. We were waterskiing (or at least trying to – I did get up for three and a half seconds), and my cousin was in the cottage on her phone, posting crap on Instagram, and checking to see what all her friends were doing. She totally missed out. (She also missed out on my spectacular wipe out, but that’s besides the point!)

And they all had their phones at the dinner table. I thought my mom’s ears were going to start spewing steam, she looked so miffed. (It was kind of funny.) I could tell that my little sister, Fiona, was disappointed too.

Finally, on the second last day of our visit, Fiona proposed an experiment: Everyone put their phones away, except to check them here and there. Everyone agreed, probably because Fi’s the youngest cousin, she’s cute, and everyone wanted to humor her.

But, you know what happened? Everyone had the best day of the whole vacation. My cousins, who are really cool, and all my relatives had the best day! And supper that night was hilarious. No one wanted to leave the table. My stomach actually hurt from laughing at all the great stories.

(The next day was fun too, but then we were leaving to come home, so everyone was bummed. Hey, we can’t help it if we’re popular!!)

I hope you’re having an awesome September! Don’t forget to put your phone down and experience it:-)

Bye for now!

Finn