I don’t text.

Wait. Zip that.

I used to NOT text.  A lot.

As in, why? I have email on my phone, I can call you, voicemail you, Tweet you and send you a Facebook message.
Sometimes all at once.

Mainly I feel the need to keep my 12yrold away from the texting habit as long as I can. I never wanted to get her a cell phone in the first place. Then Jr. High came along and… well… she has a phone. We made it clear we don’t have a texting plan, don’t plan to get one. (My husband’s ‘company’ phone doesn’t allow texting anyway!)

She found out the hard way (ahem… $75 in texting costs on our non-texting plan!) Whoops. She worked that off in babysitting half the school year. Plus we put a block on her phone. When we asked her why she did it after she’d had the phone for months and never texted? Her answer: “Well, they texted me, so I had to return the text, right??” Um no.

Anywho… A few weeks back we were in Utah. First I headed to Park City for EvoConference.  I kept getting texts from my room-mate, and from the few bloggy pals I shared my phone number with. Turns out in 2010 everyone assumes you have a texting plan. Whoops on me this time eh?? Oh well.. it was maybe $3.20 total. I can deal.

Then.. get this.

We head to Eastern Utah for a big fat Mormon family reunion. (I know I know, I promised photos… they’re COMING!) And who should I witness texting a little here a little there? MY MOTHER. MY 65yrold mother. She was finding out and sharing where en route my sister-from-Wisconsin was, how much longer til she’d be in town. SHE was keeping up with her 10 kids.. wait, minus one, she was keeping up with the rest of my siblings… all but me!?

Talk about feeling left out.

Kind of like the time my older sister blurted out the fact that I was the only kid (of ten!) not breastfed. But that’s another story.

I thought real hard about it. And well. My mom barely uses Facebook. She will not be using Twitter, I’m quite certain. She does check her email – sort of, but sees no point in getting a data plan for her phone to check it every ten minutes…

Could I be keeping up with my family better with texting? Check in on my mom more often? How evil can that be?

I called Verizon. $5′s worth of evil.

$5 for the smallest plan. Keep my tween’s phone blocked… for now. And they turned it on retroactive to the previous two weeks covering those odd conference texts. How very nice of them.

Carissa joins the 21st Century.

I don’t text… very much.