Quick Takes: Instagram, Twitter, Baby Names and More

—1—

All right, all you Instagram people. I've seen the photos. I get the appeal.

But it's owned by Facebook.

I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, influenced by privacy concerns, the commercialization of user data, and issues of content ownership. When I first considered Instagram, Facebook was what turned me off.

As it's grown, (read: as you people whom I read and who share your lives pictorially have increasingly kept it before me,) I did a little reading and am somewhat reassured. but I'd still like to hear from you. What are your experience and knowledge as Instagram users? Are you happy with the terms of use? And is it more than just another time eater—I mean, what are you getting from Instagram?

—2—

And you Twitter people following fifty or more: how do you do that? I can barely mark unread items in my Reader as "read" without feeling guilt or dread at what I'm missing. To miss hours of tweets by the people I follow gives me twitches. In real life, it is, heh, easy to understand that you can't catch every conversation in the building—to think otherwise would be insanity. Why can't social media be like that?

—3—

Expecting a baby gives me an excuse to indulge in one of my favorite interests: baby names! Not just baby names, really, just names in general. But unless I have a need for a name, I generally, for sanity's sake, I generally make myself stay away from the fascinating site called Nameberry.

Nameberry is the brainchild of the authors of some of my favorite baby name books, and was the inspiration for an article I wrote for Faith and Family Live last year. They just did a blog post about likely names for England's unborn baby royal. Oh, I love this stuff. I think a new Princess Charlotte, or Alice or Eleanor, or a Prince Arthur or Leopold would be fabulous. And of course this baby will have a string of monikers to marvel at. It will be interesting to see how many of the picks on this list will prove prescient. I have no doubt they'll have hit on at least one somewhere in there.

—4—

By the way, it's a bit early, especially for us, but...

I think we have a name!

One for a boy and one for a girl. Plenty of time to change our minds, but I'm pretty pleased right now.

No, I'm not telling.

—5—

I forget what 5 was for.

—6—

Melissa Wiley tweeted a cool article about storytelling and the brain, which reminded me of this Albert Einstein quote, If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales. I love reading out loud to my kids, but it's too easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle, get to the end of a day, and realize, sadly, that we didn't read anything except schoolwork. So I've been thinking about joining Sarah's Read Aloud Revival. She's been doing it for three months now; the next "meet" date is December 29. It looks like fun; if I manage to stay on task, I'll talk about a little activity our advisor recommended we do with the books we read.

—7—

Oh, and another Sarah is doing an Advent wreath link-up, so check it out. I love Advent wreaths, so this should be good. I'm off to check out her link-up from last year. All the pretty pictures!

Go see Jen for more Quick Takes!