Back That Thing Up

Sex and the City is one of my all-time favorite shows. While I love Carrie Bradshaw, she and I only have a few things in common: we both have big, curly hair, we both think Mr. Big is a dreamboat and that Aiden is a hotty, and we don’t back up our stuff.  Do you remember this scene?




While she was mourning her computer, I was mourning the loss of my iPhone. This all started with potty training. So in reality, it is potty training’s fault….not mine.

Potty training can be really difficult for some kids; however, Monkey was the easiest kid to potty train, and it had nothing to do with me or my amazing parenting expertise.  One day he marched his little tush into the bathroom, grabbed my iPhone, sat down and the diapers were history.

Monkey would take the phone into the bathroom to do “his business”, but would sit there playing games until I forced him to come out. Sometimes I would let him stay in the bathroom while I did the dishes, drank a cup of coffee, or read one of my smutty books. He was happy, I was happy and Mimi was so little at the time she was easily entertained with some random flashing toy. Life was good.

One of the worst sounds I ever heard was a splash followed by “Uh oh!”  The phone was swimming in the toilet.

I quickly scooped the phone out of the water and did everything you are not supposed to do: panic, turn the phone on and off, cry, turn it on again, curse, and cry more.  Just to throw salt on my iPhone wound, everyone I came in contact with asked me the same stupid question:

“Didn’t you back up your stuff?” 

Uhhhh no, I don’t do that.

What the hell is this iCloud? How does everyone know about this mysterious cloud but me? Am I really that deep in the child rearing trenches that I don’t  know about this technology? Really, if one more person asked me about backing up my stuff, they were getting a punch in the throat. I’m looking at you, snarky salesman at the cellphone store.

I really didn’t care that the phone was a goner, or  that I was going to shell out $$$ to get a new phone. What devastated me was the fact that all of the photos and videos were gone. Never mind the fact that we have an expensive camera and video camera sitting somewhere in this house; I was literally documenting the kids’ life on that phone. Well mostly just little Mimi (you know, second kid and all).

I wept over that stupid phone.  Losing videos of my sweet Mimi and her first few months of life just so I could get a few minutes of peace  while my kid sat on the john made me feel like the Worst. Mother. Ever.

Actually here is another thing that Carrie Bradshaw and I have in common: we have super, amazing friends that help us out in our time of need.

I passed the phone on to my bestie, a genius in computer forensics. If she could find obscure pieces of information on cell phones of bad guys, surely she could find my videos of Mimi cooing.  Apparently things didn’t look good, but she would keep trying.

This phone disaster actually happened about a year ago, so all hope had been lost, but sometimes you get super lucky and pick friends that not only have amazing shoe collections, a totally awesome dance to “Push It”, but also useful skills. This week my BFF handed me a DVD with everything she recovered from my phone! She explained how she did it, but I was too stunned that I blocked out all of her CSI type jargon in order to look at what once was lost.

There were gems like this:

So what did I learn from these Questionable Choices in Parenting?

• Back up your stuff, Y’all!
• Get a BFF with cellphone superpowers STAT
• Take some time for yourself to drink that coffee and read that smut. Just make sure your kid isn’t near water
• Watching the edited version of Sex and the City on stations like TBS is just wrong. This has nothing to do with the cellphone mess, but it is an important lesson none the less