I got a bit nervous recently when a former colleague told me that her 16-month-old daughter was counting to 15 and could recite the alphabet.

My son, a month older, knew the letter A and the number 5. He had to know five – his grandmother counts to five with him every time she sees him and I taught him how to High Five months ago. Couldn’t really explain though why he hadn’t picked up the first four numbers.

But with a bit of prompting, once we say 1 now, or 1 and 2, he usually follows up with the next few numbers. Curiously, though, he always knows 4 now and also 6 but sometimes skips 5. When we read him Sandra Boynton’s ‘Hippos Go Berserk’, in addition to screaming out ‘Bus’ as several of the hippos leave the party on a bus, he always stops and yells ‘Four’ when 4 hippos arrive. We aren’t sure why he knows 6, other than it comes after 5 and 7 isn’t far behind. We think 4 is on his mind because that’s the floor he lives on so he’s always pushing that number on the elevator (although by that logic, he should also know the letter L because he’s always pushing it for lobby).

Anyway, he’s getting there.

I was 7 when the first moon walk took place. When the second one came around, I was in the second grade, and we all sat down in the hallway at school to watch the grainy image on a black-and-white TV.

It was fascinating stuff for a kid.

How do you put that in perspective for today’s kids?

In an age where space shuttles are launched regularly, it’s incredibly obvious that kids today don’t understand the significance of that moment. My son even wonders why we would ever want to be on the moon. Saturn, now that would be cool.

The truth is that the technological generation gap between my generation and my son’s generation is remarkably vast. When I started college I took a computer class — for what that was worth relative to today.

We were using this massive mainframe, and my professor predicted that one day every home would have a computer.

We thought it was the funniest thing we’d ever heard. Well, there you have it. He must be sitting back in retirement now repeating the professorial version of “I told you so.”

Either way, events like the moon walk were hallmark events in my childhood, as was each new development in the space program. At one point we all kind of became jaded, and kids my son’s age just take it for granted that we can launch people into space with pretty good regularity.

So, where are the hallmark events for our kids?

Follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jfitzgibbon

There’s always a unique kind of dynamic with these situations — in our case two parents, each with their own child. That’s our blended family.

Last week we all hauled ourselves upstate and settled into a lakeside cabin, and I came away with some observations.

The interesting dynamic is how a blended family operates in these situations. We did all of the family activities you would expect: Canoeing, swimming, toasting marshmallows, taking a hike to a waterfall, etc.

But, in the end, there’s always a bit of a division that happens at the end of the day. That’s not to say it’s in a bad way, necessarily. But, ultimately, I gravitate toward my son and my girlfriend towards hers. The inescapable fact is that I am ultimately responsible for my son and she for hers, much as we do generally function as a family.

Is that bad? As I said, not necessarily.

But it’s certainly a different component that you don’t find in your traditional family. The hope is that, with time, those divisions are minimized. But I suspect they’ll always be there in some capacity.

My question is does this happen in traditonal families also?