Just because you carried Baby in your womb for 9 months doesn’t mean you will magically understand why, in 16 years, she will like the strange clothes or listen to the unfamiliar music that she does. This age gap between you two is going to cause a pretty interesting difference in childhood experiences. In the same way that Baby won’t be able to understand what it was like using a flip phone, you won’t totally really understand different things are for her, no matter how closely you keep up on current trends. Here are a few things that will be different for Baby growing up.
- Baby will never have “I couldn’t find a phone to use” as an excuse not to call you as a teenager
Instead, she may say “I forgot to charge my phone,” but by then, who knows? You’ll probably have the ability to track her battery life, too, if you want. - Every science class she ever has will debate whether or not Pluto is a planet
Pluto might be a planet again now (or has it changed back again already?) but you can bet that Pluto’s changing status has been a source of stress for every science teacher Baby will ever have. Curious what stance she will take on the subject? Give it a few years, and you’ll probably find out! - The phrase ‘turn of the century’ will mean something totally different
Remember when your history classes talked about the turn of the century and meant the industrial revolution? When Baby talks about it, she will mean your adolescence, or young adult years. Now there’s a happy thought. - Baby and her friends will have to find a new “apocalypse” prediction to live through
You had Y2K and the end of the Mayan calendar – what will Baby have to fill the time with before the heat-death of the universe comes in a few hundred thousand millennia? - She will be endlessly google-able
Sure, googling you might bring up a few mentions in the local paper during your childhood, some embarrassing pictures from college, and every social media account you’ve ever put together and abandoned, but your online footprint has nothing on what Baby’s will be because her internet presence won’t start with her social interaction, it’ll start with yours – which means her online presence could have started before she was even born. And even if you’re being relatively conservative about posting to Instagram every time she does something even moderately adorable, there’s no guarantee that the parents of her future friends, or even boyfriends or girlfriends, are doing the same.
