Do You Remember Completing the 2000 Census?

I wrote a post over at my Baltimore Parenting Tweens Examiner site on the 2010 Census. I listed tips on how to explain the U.S. census to your tween. It got me thinking…

I don’t remember completing the 2000 Census. I know I completed it, but I don’t have any recollection of the form. Was I in the fog of toddlers and preschoolers? Why yes!

While our house is the same house as back in 2000, there have been changes since then. Here’s what we were doing in spring 2000.

• Our girls were 4 and almost 2. Our son was not born until 2003.
• I drove a Ford Windstar. My first minivan.
• My husband was a high school English teacher, part-time volleyball coach, and part-time PhD student.
• I was a freelance editor.
• Our yard had only one tree…our lowly, still hasn’t grown much Charlie Brown tree.
• We had a deck, but were starting to think about finishing our basement.
• Our yard had a swingset…a wooden structure with 2 swings, a baby swing, a family swing, and rings. We thought it was immovable until a huge hailstorm in 2008 flattened it.
• We still had a Little Tikes Playhouse until Hurricane Katrina blew it through our kitchen window.
• Our old basketball net was still standing. (After being knocked down time and again, my in laws bought my son an in ground basketball net.)
• We had not yet visited Disney, Great Wolf Lodge, Niagara Falls, Sesame Place, New York City, and England.
• I had no idea what blogging was.
• I had an AOL e-mail account. It was dial up. I could not use the phone and the internet.
• Caller ID was an extra charge. So was Call Waiting and Call Forwarding.
• Only my work colleagues used e-mail. Most of the authors I worked for insisted on giving me the changes to their galleys over the phone. I would beg for my authors to fax the galleys to me, but no. My kids would be cooperative (not!) by pushing the Fisher Price Corn Popper toy back and forth as I would write down the author’s changes.
• My office was my unborn son’s bedroom. It’s funny to think of the desks, computers, printers, and bookshelves in what is now his room.

I did not know about the following in 2000:

• Bouncy house places like PumpItUp and Bounce U
• Great Wolf Lodge
• Animal Kingdom
• high-speed internet
• DVD players
• PS2, or 3, or wii, or XBOX
• high-definition TV

What were you doing for Census 2000?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 9:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.