Goodnight Blog?

This year Santa brought my son a digital e-reader, MP3 player, and laptop. Nana and Papa got him a tablet.

My son is18 months old. And now he has more gadgets than I do. Mind you, his gadgets feature Elmo, Thomas the Train, and that little Leapfrog dog.  But still, it's more than I have now, and certainly more than I had when I was his age.

Today's world is becoming increasingly digital. My son can't even say "See Spot run," and already he's got an e-reader.  I don't even have an e-reader yet.  Hmm. What's wrong with this picture?

Nothing. It's just the state of our world. Things change, and it seems now like they're changing at warp speed.  There are some classics that are timeless and will always be relevant, and there are others that are archaic and in need of a facelift.  And then there's Goodnight iPad.

Yep. I said Goodnight iPad.

Everyone remembers Goodnight Moon, right?  The classic children's book where the little kid says goodnight this, goodnight that, to all of the mundane objects in his room.  Problem is the book was written decades ago, when the glow emanating through our living room windows was more likely to be a fire than a laptop.  Which means that even though the kid is saying goodnight to things we probably still have, they're not the objects we spend time with. The objects we focus on.

These days, we spend all day at our computers, put in headphones for the commute home, crash on the couch with our Kindles by the cool glow of the TV, and then check our smartphones before heading to bed. So it makes sense that in Goodnight iPad (a parody of the classic children's book by a writer under the clever pseudonym of Ann Droyd), when the kid looks around his room to say goodnight, he focuses more on the Macbook than the moon.  With lines like "there were three little Nooks with 10,000 books," and "the bings, bongs, and beeps of e-mails and tweets," who can resist?

It just goes to show that even though we still love the classics--my son got Goodnight Moon as a gift before he was even born--there's always room to expand into the future. And Goodnight iPad, even though a parody, is on the right track.

See more about the book at Amazon.

TJ