Techno-Baby

My baby has an email address.

Okay, there, I’ve said it.  Nice to have that off my chest.  Now… let me explain…

Megan is definitely a baby of a new generation. I have a handful of baby apps on my iPhone.  She’s learned to say Moo from PeekaBoo Barn.  She has flashcards for vocabulary.  Her very first app was a rattle by Baby Toi.  She actually has her own iPhone 2.0 at this point (she’s already getting our tech hand-me-downs).

She has a handful of photographs on paper in a scrapbook.  But she has hundreds of photos up on Flickr and quite a few on Facebook.  At that, there are more pictures of her taken with my iPhone than with a traditional DSLR camera.

She loves watching movies of herself.  Record her doing something cute, then let her watch it over and over, giggling every time the other “Gay-Gun” does.  I wonder if this will affect her view of her early childhood memories… Will she think that she remembers what it was like to be 6 months old because she’s seen the video of herself at that age so much?

So, as I’m sharing these pictures and videos with my friends, I feel badly because I can’t tag her in the photos, videos, notes, and posts.  I don’t feel like my name should be on them… it feels wrong to twine our identities up like that.  But I was resigned to let it be…

Then the holidays came up.  I’ve been managing a baby registry for Megan’s toys and a Amazon Wish List for myself.  But inevitably, my friends searched Amazon for Megan Rivers looking for presents for my Techno-Baby.  Unfortunately, there’s more than one Megan Rivers out there.  And while my friends are smart enough to know that she wouldn’t register for a book on sexual techniques in a Christian marriage, there is another child-Megan out there looking for Thomas the Train.  This broke the camel’s back…

And so, in order to establish a separate Amazon Wish List, a new email address needed to be created.  I heard of this idea as a way to make notes about your child’s development both as a method for scrapbooking and for sharing it with them when they are older.  So, to Gmail I went…  And now she is dis-ambiguated from the other ‘Megan Rivers’ of the world on Amazon.  And now she can be shopped for with the peace of mind all Megan-Lovers deserve.