A Modern Day Fairy Tale....

Once upon a time, not very long ago there were two little girls. One by one they went to preschool and had fun playing in the sandbox and making art projects to hang on their refrigerator. They loved to watch Sesame Street and Blues Clues, one of them played with her collection of toy unicorns, the other danced around the house in her dress up clothes.

One day their mommy blinked her eyes and what do you know, instead of putting them on the bus for kindergarten she was shoving them out the door because high school starts at 7.30am.

Okay so it wasn’t that fast, but sometimes it sure feels like it. Today I was reading North Branford Patch and saw the. It made me stop and think about when our girls were that young and clambering on the bus ready to .

Now they are both in ; the oldest a senior and the youngest a freshman. Even though it feels like no time since they were little, once I started thinking about all the changes in the world since then, you realize it was more than the blink of an eye.

Children that will graduate with my kids have grown up in an electronic age; they don’t remember what it was like before absolutely . Some of them might not even remember what a pay phone was or how to work a land line (and you can forget about a rotary phone!).

If my husband did not have an extensive CD collection leftover from the '90s, I daresay our kids would have no idea what they were. If they want to listen to music they take out their iPod or iPhone. As for buying music, they have never had that rush of taking your hard earned allowance and running down to the music store. They buy their music with a few clicks of the mouse. MTV is not the place to see a music video or even hear music anymore either.

they have grown up bombarded with reality TV, they have been exposed to all sorts of inappropriate behavior courtesy of network and cable. Most of today’s teens don’t even watch TV on the box. They watch it on their laptop or smart phone.

Where I spent hours in my bedroom talking on the phone with my friends, my daughter is . Call me old-fashioned, but it’s not really a conversation if it’s abbreviated or punctuated with smiley face emoticons. It’s not all bad though, she does use Skype to keep in touch with friends from overseas, that is at least a "face to face" conversation!

When it comes to doing homework, my girls have never had to crack open an encyclopedia or go to the library to do research. They merely turn on a computer to do their research. For teachers it has never been easier to find out if a student has plagiarized their work; there are free websites and software to check it for you. For students, spelling and grammar seems to be a lost art as they computer does a lot of it for you.

In my daughters’ lifetime there have always been female pilots and astronauts and hopefully one day soon a female president of the United States.  There are women holding important posts in office and industry. Their doctor is a woman and their dentist is, too.

I hope my kids will give us grandchildren, eventually, and I would like to be around long enough to see them at least start school. I really do wonder what the world will be like then? I have one request though, can it go a little slower than the past 17 years?