For the July 4th holiday weekend, my family took a trip down to Myrtle Beach, SC to hit the beach.  The trip was only 4 days long, but it felt like much longer than that. Why?

I was unplugged.

I intentionally left my laptop at home (even though I knew the hotel would have – gasp! – FREE wifi).  Of course we used the Google Maps Navigation app on our Droid smartphones for driving directions (hey, I’m human), but once we got to our destination, I barely even glanced at my phone.  In fact, I made a habit of leaving the room without it for the entire time we were there.  I will say that it did come back to bite me once: we went to a huge waterfront shopping attraction and my youngest daughter and I got separated from the rest of the family. I ended up having to ask the saleswoman in Build-A-Bear if I could use their phone to call my husband. But hey! I survived.

On one of the nights, we came back to our room and my husband had downloaded some of the photos we’d taken to his laptop (which he did bring), and he told me to take a look…Well, about 20 minutes later, I had long viewed the photos, then decided to “quickly” glance at my blog, then my Facebook newsfeed, then my Twitter account – you know the story. It was amazing how fast I got sucked back into cyberspace.  My kids noticed it too, no doubt. They were throwing themselves off of the hotel bed and making tons of noise; probably to regain the undivided attention I’d been giving them all weekend. I quickly logged off and swore off the Internet for the remainder of the trip.

Once we got back home, I found it really hard to “plug back in.”  Keeping up with Twitter seemed exhausting.  My email inbox was insane. Reading all those tweets? And responding? Checking my replies and DMs? Facebook was even more overwhelming. And I haven’t posted on my blog since.  I’m finding it really remarkable at how easy it is to fall off the social media bandwagon and how hard it is to get back on.

So I’m slowly easing into it. I think the break was definitely needed. My kids haven’t thrown themselves off the bed all week.