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!

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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.

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A couple years ago, my grandparents gave my daughter a copy of the book “We Help Mommy.” You know, the one from 1959 starring darling little Martha and Bobby as mommy’s biggest helpers?

I was thrilled! I loved “We Help Mommy” as a little girl, and as a newish mom I was so excited to share it with her. I was giddy with excitement about the bonding in store for the two of us.

And then we read it.

How had I managed to forget what this book was about? Martha and Bobby “help” mommy all day as she makes the beds, cleans the house, does the laundry, buys the groceries and prepares the food. Roll, pat. Roll, pat. Making a treat for daddy.

No kidding, my husband was laughing out loud watching my wheels turn as I turned each page. Was this really one of my favorite books as a child? Me, who married daddy because he gets right in there and makes the beds, cleans the house, does the laundry, buys the groceries and prepares the food next to me? How did this happen?

My daughter loved it – “Again!” she said, over and over.

And you know what? I loved it too. Ok, so it’s not quite the way things run around here, but I figure I can start to teach her to be an independent thinker by letting her choose her own books. I love that this thoughtful gift came from her great grandparents, I love that it’s 50 years old, and most of all I love having her crawl in my lap to read a book that I used to read with my mom.

The next time we visited my parents, she pulled open the drawer full of books and out spilled my copy – old, worn and frayed on the corners. Just like the rest of my favorite books.

I was talking with a new friend last week, and during the conversation, she asked me how I tell Nicholas about his Daddy Mark. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, pretty much since the moment that Mark died.

Right after Mark died, I was a little manic about memory. I was so afraid I was going to forget everything. Everything about Mark, about our lives together, about his childhood stories, about the few months that he got to have with Nicholas. These thoughts calmed down after a while, but they were really intense in the first several months after Mark’s death.

To answer her question, I told her that I’m scrapbooking about Mark for Nicholas; but mostly, I’m telling him stories about his Daddy Mark.

I don’t want these talks with Nicholas about Mark to be artificial. I want them to be natural and meaningful, I don’t want to sit down to dinner every night and have “story time” about Mark. Instead, I tell him stories about Mark when one of Mark’s favorite songs come on the radio. When Mark’s favorite television show comes on. My favorite stories are when Nicholas makes a face or a gesture that looks like his Daddy Mark. I jump on those moments to tell Nicholas about his Daddy Mark.

I know too, that Nicholas is getting a lot of stories about Mark through his grandpa and his aunt and uncle.

So, how do you keep memories alive? How do you tell your kids or your spouses about friends, family, loved ones who have passed on (or even just have passed out of your life)? What do you do to try to help them know those people?

My wonderful, beautiful, wicked smart son has a great imagination. And he uses it. Often. As a parent, how do *you* differentiate between exaggeration/story telling/imagination and plain ol’ lying?

N is starting to tell stories, and when I try to get to the truth, I try as hard as I can not to lead the witness. For instance, the other day, his Daddy told me that a little boy in N’s daycare had been hitting N in the head. William was really worried because N said he’d told his teacher and she didn’t stop the hitting. As William and I talked about it some more, and tried to figure out what was going on (his class is really small and highly supervised, but hitting is a fact of life at school); it came out that it was “Jacob” who was hitting N. Umm, there isn’t a boy named Jacob in his class…or even in his school. When we told N that there isn’t a boy named Jacob in his class, he looked at us like we were nut jobs and said, “Nobody is hitting me at school.” Apparently, *we* had made the whole thing up.

Sometimes the stories are a little easier to identify. He came home with a pretty good bruise Wednesday. When I asked where it came from, he said he’d been hit by a car. Yep, hit by a car. I got to hear this fantastic story about how he’d been in his classroom when a giant car came flying into the building and smashed into his leg. On Thursday, when his Aunt was babysitting him, N changed the story to one where I had hit him with a car.

Obviously, I can discern the really outrageous ones, but how do you figure out which ones are real and which ones are Memorex? [Does anyone younger than 30 know that tag line?]

I would love to know what you guys do. How do you interrogate your kids without making them suspicious or worried or any of the other 457 emotions you can feel when someone is questioning you?

Sherry Carr Deer is a Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, the widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here.

Kymberli Mulford is the proud mom of a grade-schooler and high-schooler in the Chicago suburbs, and the proud grandmother of her now-grown stepson’s four children. When she’s not shuttling her sons from one activity to another, she works in the world of educational technology – as a district administrator, a learning facilitator, a consultant, and as a blogger at Onionskin. For more of Kymberli’s “mom” posts click here!

I love reading.

Even more, I really love reading to my sons. Somehow, no matter how busy I was when they were too young to read on their own, I just couldn’t say no when they came around the corner with a picture book.

Lucky for me, they have both become great readers. But I still love reading to them, and I’m looking forward to having more time to do that this summer. I can’t wait to get out all of my favorites and go through them again.

Equally interesting to my budding readers, though, were the wonderful websites that provided this same service on the screen. Once Flash animation entered the world of children’s literature online, new voices emanated from the computer and patiently read to my boys (over and over if they wished), expanding their world of narrators to include male voices and dialects and accents that were much more interesting than mine.

Here are a few of my favorites, done with such quality and attention to detail that they are almost as good as sitting on a mother’s lap…

• Tumblebooks
• Storyline Online
• Story Place
• Reading is Fundamental

Another great website for pre-readers is Starfall. This can be used as soon as your little one is able to use the mouse on his or her own. There’s no reading required, and the “sparkles” show your child where to click next. Very entertaining, very cute — and a great way to sneak in some letter/sound teaching in a refreshingly fun way!

Photo Credit: Bedtime story by Vonus on Flickr