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? 

Keeping in Touch: Thank you Steve Jobs!

Yesterday we witnessed our own small Christmas miracle when we video chatted (through FaceTime) with my husband's family in China.  Small potatoes?  Not to us.

We've tried to video chat with my mother-in-law and her family since before my son was born--three years--with no success. We've tried AOL, Skype, and AIM, Chinese computers and computers purchased in the United States, but each time faced a breakdown of technology, insurmountable user error, or just plain bad luck:  no internet connection.

Enter the iPad.  When my mother-in-law visited this year we gave her a refurbished iPad. To my surprise, she was sending email and chatting with her relatives in Germany via FaceTime within two hours of receiving the gift.  Soon after, she returned to China, and we tried to video chat, but could not connect due to a poor internet connection.  Sigh.

I thought all was lost until yesterday morning when we were able to connect for the first time with my mother-in-law, her sister, and her sister's family.  Yeah!  We had not seen many of these people for more than two years. Children had grown, and elders had aged.  We spoke Chinese and English, and laughed with each other.

I have big hopes for this little piece of technology in 2012. I hope that it will help my kids stay connected with their Nainai for as long as she stays in China, and that it will help them build relationships with their other Chinese family members who we only see every three years.  Little piece of technology...big hopes!

Merry Christmas!

(This is not a shameless promo for Apple or any of their products, but an honest-to-goodness story of how the iPad helped a family in the United States connect with their relatives in China on Christmas Day.)