What My Daughter Taught Me About Facebook

Arabella is over a week old now. I can still remember dressing her in her first outfit to bring her home from the hospital. We had picked out a cute gender neutral onesie with a sailboat on the front. We bought a bow to match just in case we had a little girl. Lucky for us we needed it 🙂

We snapped a few photos at the hospital and added a hello my name is tag so we could announce her name to the world. The world to me was close friends and family. My husband thought it would be clever if we added a line from a song and sent it to the musician. The photo was similar to the one below.

The next day a friend called me to tell me that she saw Arabella’s photo on facebook and that it had over 83000 likes. The photo was also on twitter and instagram. I told myself not to panic but there was something unsettling about my baby girl being plastered all over the internet. By the end of the day there was over 100k likes. Thousands of comments (some negative and some positive) were listed below my tiny newborns photo. In no time at all my baby girl had been all over the internet. It goes to show how quickly one photo can spread. I went on Matthew West’s facebook today and saw that as of today her photo has been liked more than 103,000 times and shared by more than 6,000 people. Isn’t it weird… would you send out your child’s photo to that many strangers? I wouldn’t. Well not intentionally. This only confirmed my desire to no longer paste photos on facebook. It’s hard because I want to share them but not at the cost of literally plastering my daughters image all over the internet. It’s an odd feeling. I love celebrating her. She’s pretty amazing but sometimes I feel like I want to keep her to myself too. She’s so precious.  I know that she’s touched a lot of lives but I can’t imagine what other peoples intentions are. There are a lot of creepers out there. And I feel a lot like a big mamma bear who just wants to cushion her from the world until I absolutely can’t anymore. This first week flew by way too quickly. Not quite as quickly as her photo spread across the internet but too quickly for my liking. I think we made the right choice trying to keep photos on the blog and off facebook. And I think we’re making even better choices from now on. I think we’ll stick to sharing photos with family and friends. Things just spread way too quickly.