Keeping in Touch: Sharing Milestones through Facebook

This week we celebrated two milestones in our family:  my son turned three and my daughter donated 12 inches of her shiny, brown hair to Wigs4Kids (a small non-profit in Michigan that provides wigs for kids with hair loss).  

            

We celebrated both events in our family of four (cake and presents for my son, hugs and pictures for my daughter), but longed to share the milestones with our extended family spread across the United States and China.

Thanks to iChat, we were able to connect with one grandparent (aka “Momish”) and one aunt and uncle.  In December, I posted about how iChat connected us with our family in China on Christmas Day.  Since then, we’ve discovered that this mode of communication is wonderful, when my mother-in-law has access to a good network connection in China (which isn’t often) and when we find the magic hour of the day when we are both awake (there is a thirteen-hour time difference).

This week, we summoned the power of Facebook to share highlights of my kids’ big days with several of our English-speaking extended family in Europe and Asia.  Although Facebook irks me (and others, I’m sure) on a regular basis due it’s frequent format changes, we are discovering it is a wonderful tool for keeping in touch with my husband’s English-speaking cousins. Prior to becoming Facebook “friends,” we kept in touch with my husband’s cousins pretty infrequently, whenever we made trips to China or through an occasional phone call. All of this changed minutes after I accepted their “friend” requests.

Now, they keep up-to-date with the latest goings-on in our household. They “like” my daughter’s new haircut and comment on my postings of my son’s latest antics. Cynics (or at least the cynical voice in my head) may say that this is only shallow communication, and that we're not connecting on a deep, meaningful level. Perhaps.  But we are communicating! And in a multi-lingual, multi-cultural family like ours (German, Japanese, Chinese, and American), communication on any level is remarkable and a step in the right direction.

How do you use Facebook to keep in touch with family who live in other countries?