My apologies, YouTube.

I feel like I may have given an inaccurate impression in my post a few days ago. My point with that one was that because we had the information we needed so readily available, it was hard to deal with not being able to fix everything ourselves. (But since we didn't have the necessary equipment to deal with the "if this has happened" situation that we ran into, and the tool would have cost as much as the repair call, we just saved ourselves any more hassle and called a plumber.)

I did not mean to imply that the information YouTube gave us was faulty. And I definitely didn't mean to imply that my husband and I weren't smart enough or capable enough to fix the problem. My point was simply to appreciate the irony of the situation. We were so frustrated at having to call a plumber (because YouTube gave us everything that we thought we should have needed) when not long ago we wouldn't have had a second thought about having to make that call. I just think it's an amusing side effect of having such awesome technology at our fingertips.

I was reminded of the whole YouTube thing earlier today, because I once again turned to it for help (and that made me think of several other recent occasions when I have done the same.) We were riding in the car, listening to one of the kids' CDs, and one of the songs said something about a horse that "jumped real high." In the back seat my daughter just started laughing, and said "Mommy, horses can't jump really high. That's so silly!"

I tried to tell her that some horses really did, but she just didn't buy it. So when we got home I pulled up a video on YouTube and showed her that it really was true. It was the same thing I did last week when my son asked me if robots were real. We found a video of a robot playing the violin, and he was very impressed. And we did the same thing a few months ago when he said he wondered what it looked like when an egg hatched. I found a very cool video of baby chicks hatching, so he got to see it for himself.

I'm not saying that everything broadcasting on YouTube is genius. I've seen some videos on there that I could have completely lived without. But there are some great ones, and some wonderful learning opportunities to be found. Just remember to not get too frustrated if you can't find exactly what you're looking for, or if what you do find doesn't completely fix your problem. The technology is great, but it's not the only tool you have.