the price of modernity, or just another 1st world problem

I’m so confused. 

We recently gifted an iPhone5 to the 15 yr old son. And an iPhone4S to the 13 yr old daughter. Still feeling guilty for these; like I’m spoiling them, but it turned out to be the best choice for what we needed as a family. Move along.

So, yeah now we have four iPhones for four people. All with the same carrier. 

The carrier also supplies us with our internets, cable TV, and home phone. Do we need a home phone now...?  Ummm, yeah. The grandparents... not to mention telemarketers... but we hardly answer it anymore! My criterion: if I don’t recognize the number or name, I don’t pick up. 

I have never liked picking it up. I am the oldest of three girls born close together and yet 

“THREE teenaged girls in the house; why can NONE of you pick up the phone??!” was heard frequently during those teen years.

Jan 2011 I called and upped our internet bandwidth from whatever measly amount it was to 60 GB. Buddy on the phone says “did you just get Netflix?” yeah: it came to Canada, was free for the first month, and I gorged on MadMen. 

As of Sept 2012 - count with me, that’s... 21 months - we’re up to 250GB. And that my friends is the highest tier, the mostest bandwidth they offer.

Now, in Nov, and the daughter’s phone has blown through the 1GB data plan on our family plan. So that needs to be addressed...

Then there’s the TV. We increasingly feel like we don’t watch it that much, but I’ve grown up watching TV shows on, umm, the TV. And my husband still watches the nightly news. I frequently join him. He also still reads a morning paper too...

I do now watch some shows on the computer, and YouTube plays more in the house than the TV. But if we bailed on cable and went the AppleTV route, I can’t imagine the re-organization it would take. Not to mention the maintenance. As it is I don’t keep up with the IT demands of the various individuals in this home organization what with an iMac, two MacBooks, two iPads, and the aforementioned iPhones. There’s a couple of PCs thrown in for balance too...

This is changing so fast, my head is spinning. Will someone please figure this all out - cable or streaming, Beta or VHS, BluRay or HD - and then let me know? Because this arrangement has to change. If it continues like this much longer our monthly technology bill will approach our mortgage payment.

Shocking, no? I'll wait while you finish gaping. That's what my husband did with me when he made this comparison recently.

And for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to find answers to these problems... my other Mummy friends with kids the same age haven't 'spoiled' their kids like this. Or they're not online as much as me so their needs lie elsewhere. 

Anybody else confused??