FACEBOOK STATUS UPDATE, MON, MAR 16, 2009:
3:49pm Christian reports: Berkeley (7lbs, 7oz - 20 in - 9.9 Apgar Scale) sends her love to all. She’s now feeding for the 1st time like she’s been doing it her whole life!
***
BACKSTORY:
Two and a half years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting my son, Beckett, for the first time.
As a first time father, Beckett’s arrival in our Ft. Worth, TX hospital delivery room — and his mother, Karla, who did all the heroic work that life-changing day — truly humbled me. Trying to convey to my own mother on my cell phone a minutes later what it like to see him born and to hold him in my own arms was nearly impossible. I simply lacked the words. Tears replaced them as I fumbled to express myself. Luckily, she understood and let me go back to my wife and son, telling me to give her a call later that night when time allowed me to fill her in more fully.
While photographs have allowed me to ‘remember’ those first few minutes/hours of Beckett’s young life, so much of what took place that afternoon has faded into the funky contours of the human brain, lost to the natural passing of time. Even the entries I posted on our family blog only hit a few highlights, often written long after they took place. The sense of the in-the-moment immediacy and wunderlust, however, was impossible to translate…
…until now.
FAST FORWARD:
Two and a half years later, my wife and I returned to the same hospital delivery unit to meet our first daughter, Berkeley.
Since Beckett’s birth, our family blog has magnified significantly from a tepid attempt to semi-privately ‘journal’ a few family moments here and there to the development of a robust hub of digital stories, photos, and videos that are now regularly shared with hundreds of family, friends, colleagues, and strangers around the world. At last count, we’ve crossed the 2,250 blog post mark…and that was before our daughter’s birth. We suspect a ‘few’ more will be added, too.
Additionally, we’ve added an iPhone to our tool set, not to mention dualing Facebook accounts for both parents. This means that just-in-time storytelling options have been magnified far beyond the boundaries of what a family blog can pull off. Seems that blogging is so last status update.
It was only a matter of time before we’d put it all together, letting our family and friends grab a virtual real-time seat with us as we prepared to deliver our daughter via type-n-post Facebook status updates. something that would have been inconceivable not that long ago.
- Ever wondered how you’d tell the story of your child’s birth through the lens of 140-character Facebook status updates?
- Ever wondered what it’d be like to Facebook status update every step leading to, during, and after your child’s birth?
- Ever wonder how such a story would read, one status update at a time?
This is our story, told 140-characters (or less) at at time.
