As I was sitting with a netbook in the middle of the park getting some work done while my younger son had his flag football practice, I looked up at some point and reflected for a moment how much things have changed in the 10 20 30 years since my own mom was shuttling me around to soccer and basketball. And boy, we’ve got it pretty good now, don’t we? Here are my five “must have” (relative to your budget) tech gadgets and inventions for today’s moms and dads:

• A 3G/4G Enabled Netbook
  As all parents know, especially ones with older kids, we do a LOT waiting around. Whether at the above mentioned sports practice or killing time until a rehearsal is over with, there’s a bunch of thumb twiddling time — which, for someone like me who works from home, leads to a severe eye twitch as I think about all the tasks piling up back at home. That is, until I scored a new netbook with internet anywhere capabilities. For under a couple hundred bucks and roughly $25 a month for light users, you can bring your baby laptop with you and make the most of that inevitable idle time.
• Smart Phone
  Same idea as the netbook, but obviously not as big and more for on the go. My wife utilizes hers to check out reviews and prices while shopping to make sure she’s getting the best item at the lowest cost — something I can get behind, and with all the shopping she does I’m sure the phone has more than paid for itself at this point.
• Induction Cooker
  For those of us not fortunate enough to have a commercial grade Wolf range pumping out mega high BTUs, a standalone induction cooker is an awesome addition to the kitchen. Forget waiting 15 minutes for my crummy burner to boil a big pot of water for pasta, the induction cooker boils the water in under two minutes saving lots of time at dinner prep, and they can be found nowadays for under a hundred dollars.
• MP3 Player
  Except for you OCD folks out there, cleaning the house is a boring, boring task. So is folding the laundry, gardening, and pretty much every other household chore. One way to help the monotony is to invest in an MP3 player — the time I spend doing the dishes since to go by a lot faster when I’m rocking out to Soundgarden. And you don’t have to get all fancy and spring for an iPod Touch, there are plenty of MP3 players on the market for under $50 that will easily fit the bill.
• GPS
  Before we decided three years ago to opt for the GPS navigation system in our then new SUV instead of a built-in DVD player, my wife had a bit less sophisticated method of a GPS system — calling me on her cell phone and having me walk her turn-by-turn from directions I pulled up on Mapquest. Yeah, that got old fast, and the GPS system may have actually saved our marriage. If your car doesn’t have one built in, there are standalone models on the market, which in some instances are better as they continuously update while the built-in models require a DVD upgrade, usually at a fairly high cost.

America’s first 4G phone is also the first to deliver download speeds up to 10x faster than 3G and be a mobile hotspot for up to eight Wi-Fi enabled devices. Not to mention front and rear-facing cameras and the ability to stream live video to the Web. And you get access to over 65,000 apps you’ve come to expect from an Android. So the only question is, what will you do first with EVO? sprint.com/firsts

Disclosure: Compensation was provided by Sprint via Glam Media

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are not indicative of the opinions or positions of Sprint

“How do I look?”

The question took me by surprise, as I think it may be the first time my son has asked it in his 12 years on the planet. But there he was, caring about his appearance as he was about to embark on a new school year.

I should have seen it coming — as that first day of school neared, there was a definite new trend in the way back-to-school shopping was conducted. Previously it involved fulfilling the supply list with whatever was on sale, buying jeans and t-shirts and socks in bulk, and calling it a day. Not this year. No, the shopping process stretched from its normal couple of days into a couple of weeks, as clothes were given a skeptical eye (and to my amazement we were now in the “Men’s” department instead of “Kids’”), the backpack down to the folders had to meet a specified “cool” quotient, and we found ourselves making an exchange when somehow a certain shirt became “out” between the time of purchase and its travel home.

Such is the right of passage midway through middle school (that I once heard referred to as the “puberty quarantine zone”), when the 6th graders at his particular school leave their isolated wing to join the masses of kids ranging in all sorts of shapes and sizes and levels of development, and now the morning routine takes a while longer as he makes sure his Justin Bieber-inspired shaggy haircut is perfectly in place and his clothes match, and I sit in dread of the day I click on his Facebook profile and see that he’s “in a relationship.”

“Well, how do I look?”

You look… older.

This post sponsored by Target

Because nothing says Happy Holidays like thinly veiled hostility and aggression:

Yesterday, at around 6:12 p.m. EST, Twitter user Shellie Ross (@Military_Mom) posted an ominous tweet:

Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool

Several hours later, she posted a link to a picture “remembering [her] million dollar baby,” indicating that her beautiful son, Bryson Drago Ross, had drowned. An immediate outpouring of sympathy went out on Twitter, with some relating stories of their own tragic loss. It was a tremendous display of how online social networks can be used for expressing grief and to receive virtual emotional support.

But then it got ugly. People started questioning the veracity of the story. They wanted “proof.” They lectured everyone to cast a cynical eye and hold off on donating, like we’re all a bunch of mindless rubes ready to have our pockets picked by the first con artist to come along. Others questioned Ross’ parenting skills, even going so far as to say maybe she was too busy with Twitter and ignoring her child, and wondered why she would be on Twitter while her son was being rushed to the hospital (even though it was only one short tweet asking for prayers, not a “play by play” as it was described). Some thought that the timeline of Ross’ tweets were off.

The most vocal skeptic was Madison McGraw, who even went so far as to make phone calls to the police station and local newspapers near the Ross home. She eventually found her verification of the accident (although she’s quick to point out that “no identities were revealed”). McGraw thinks that Ross’ choice to tweet about the event says something about what humankind has become:

And if we’ve become a society that responds to death in this manner: Have to call 911, have to call husband, have to call mother, have to call funeral home, have to Twitter this- then we are seriously failing as a society.

Now, being a pretty cynical guy myself, the part of people questioning a virtually anonymous person’s writing on the internet doesn’t shock me at all — you might want to reflect on how you got such a cold, jaded heart once in a while, but we certainly have a right to our opinion no matter how heinous some might think it may be. The real gall comes from expressing your opinion in public — and even worse directly to the grieving mother (I don’t care if you’re using the qualifier “possibly” or not), that’s just beyond rude, it’s downright sick. That people have the audacity to say “PROVE IT!” to a mom who said she just lost her toddler and is undoubtedly feeling more grief and guilt than any of us who have not gone through the experience could ever imagine, well that, Ms. McGraw, speaks infinitely more about our failure as a society than someone in their darkest moment typing 140 characters ever could.

You know what’s more annoying than the Annoying Orange? Having your kids play the Annoying Orange on their computer in a continuous loop! If you’ve never seen this before, be sure they’re out of the room before watching so you don’t find yourself in the same predicament.