I can't remember where I was, but I vividly remember being bored. We were in the car, waiting for something or someone. It was hot, even with the windows down. There was nothing to do.
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Whinging commenced.
Dad reached into his top pocket for his pad and pen and swept some warm coins from the dashboard tray into his hands. He took a twenty-cent piece, sandwiched it between two pages and told me to shade over the top.
"I wonder what will appear," he said. "The Queen or a platypus?"
Twenty minutes later, it didn't matter where we were. It didn't matter that we were sitting sweaty in a stationary sedan. We were too busy conjuring Her Majesty with $1.75 and a biro on the lined, perforated pages of Dad's notebook to notice.
That moment came back to me when on Friday I self-consciously pulled out the iPad at a swanky restaurant for my nap-resistant kid.
It was a lunch I wanted to be at - part social, part business - so I had structured my day around it.
I had planned to get up in the morning, play, give her lunch, take her for a walk in the pram and arrive with a snoozing, reclining cherub.
It wasn't to be. And so I defaulted to old faithful (the Play School app) so that I could eat for a minute and complete a sentence or two.
There's nothing quite like an iPad in a restaurant to make you feel like a parental pariah - unless, of course, you add headphones to the equation. Then you may as well stand in the corner in a dunce cap.
A little screen time isn't a bad thing, but has it become so ubiquitous that we've forgotten how to be imaginative, resourceful parents?
Some of my favourite memories are of long car trips with nothing but a cassette tape of stories, a packet of Shapes and a game of I Spy. Of rainy Sundays spent building pillow forts and of summer holidays (pre-water restrictions) spent in togs with a sprinkler under the trampoline.
Bank queues were a place to draw on deposit slips. Shopping trollies were for Twenty Questions. Traffic jams were for round-robin stories. We'd go to family dinner parties at a friend's house and all the kids would work to choreograph a dance or put on a play.
There was no choice, no trusty touchscreen in Mum and Dad's back pocket. It was all about preparedness (a pack of cards or some chalk for the footpath) and resourcefulness (like maracas made from gravel and empty water bottles).
There's a time and place for the easy option. Apps and TVs aren't evil or harmful in moderation, as the judgmental stares of onlookers impute. But we should remember that for generations, parents and kids coped with simple ideas, like a handful of a coins, a biro and some paper.
