Ironically, I will post this on Facebook.

I had a conversation with some girls at work last week about why we can't get ourselves together to make dinner for our families, or we make the same things over and over, or we forget to grocery shop and 6pm rolls around and the "meal planning" starts by logging in to GrubHub (that one was me. Sigh). We all had the same memories of our moms making dinner every single night and we were bemoaning the fact that this lost art of feeding our families well had not been passed down to us when someone jokingly said, "Well, they didn't have the internet to distract them."

I felt like all the bells and lightbulbs started ringing and blinking in my absolutely-internet-addicted brain. I've blamed a lot of my inability to pull it together with cleaning and grocery shopping and cooking over the fact that I am a working mom, and that night shift is pretty brutal on my schedule and my body. This is all true, but realistically I do have time to be organizing my life better. It's the time I spend scrolling through the Kardashians' Instagrams (I know! I know) and the time I spend mindlessly refreshing Facebook and the time I spend curating Pinterest boards as if organizing food I don't even make into savory and sweet categories is a noble pursuit. I started thinking about how Joshua and I barely watch TV without also reading the news or blogs or something on our phones, about how we frequently say we have "no time", about how in the fifteen minutes that I've been writing this, I've refreshed instagram about 3 times and clicked over to the Facebook tab in my browser at least once.

One of the girls' patients had coded earlier that night, and we spent a fairly dramatic few minutes together reviving him and then a long while settling him back down. This is a normal night in the NICU, but it made me laugh that a few hours later we were lamenting how exhausting social media is and how Facebook frequently makes us feel bad and inadequate. Because shouldn't we be writing suck it, Facebook envy! You people are graduating/engaged/married/pregnant/ on a tropical vacation/buying a new house but I just stayed up for 26 hours and brought a critically ill child back to life with my own two hands! (There are so many reasons why that is a bad idea, but intensifying your sense of self-esteem is not one of them).

I am really not writing some sort of anti-social media manifesto. I keep in touch with people through those avenues that I really never would see or hear from otherwise. I'm not quitting Instagram; that's part of how my far-away family is watching Matilda grow up. But there is certainly something to be said for how I personally need to manage it better - it is all so distracting and time-wasting and reinforces starkly that comparison is the thief of joy. And it really is an addiction.  We have made a great effort to not be buried in our phones or laptops when Matilda is around, but she still sleeps a lot (amen, so thankful, never change) and I could be doing a hundred other things during that time. I will consciously plan to do xyz and then end up doing a totally different xyz where x = fall decor on Pinterest, y = someone's travel photos on Facebook, z = fashion week photos on Instagram. I'm not more informed or better educated or better organized after that kind of an evening, and no one got any closer to eating healthy, well-balanced meals in my home.

I made almost everything in this picture. All the pillow covers, the beloved airplane blanket. I'll also take 50% of the credit for the toddler herself. I know that part of what has made my own internet/social media bingeing so much of a problem is that it's endlessly distracting, and we are in a season of life that warrants some distractions. It's easier to just not think sometimes, but I think I'm writing this to remind myself that I can distract myself with productive and beautiful things as well, and the end result is far more gratifying. I really don't have any advice as to how to put down the Pinterest and back up slowly, but I am trying, I really am.