I let the rest of the holiday horses out of the stall today–you know, the ones I hold back late October because a full stud of merry, merry sometimes just rubs people the wrong way. Get back in there, ya festive little stallions. The world isn’t ready for you yet.  But it’s October 30th, there’s no school tomorrow and Halloween marks the opening bell of our home’s Celebrate All Y’all season, a November/December mash-up that weaves fall cornucopia and twinkle, twinkle with a common denominator of happy–whatever makes you happy. It includes hay bales and pinecones, and has no prerequisite date for Andy Williams. All that to say, I hit play on my Classic Christmas station today, okay? I folded. I folded before Halloween, and I’m not proud of it. It was just for one song and then I switched it. It’s just…Andy Williams is so suave.

So I call Heidi because she gets it. We never say hi when we answer; we just start talking.

“So I think it must be a gene, this holiday thing. I was born with it, and I can’t control it. I want to pitch a tent in Target’s Halloween aisle and watch it transform overnight to what’s coming, because we all know it’s coming next…twinkle.”

“Oh my God, I know,” she says.

“It’s just a happy place, those holiday aisles.”

“And we’re not the only ones who think that, Kelle. We have justification for our craziness. I was in the pre-Christmas aisle the other day looking at wreaths, and this other lady next to me? She was smiling too. We both knew it. We looked at each other and, I swear, we held our gaze a little longer because we were in the frickin’ Christmas aisle.”

“You should have got her number. We could have had a cookie party.”

Okay, I’ll reign it in. Back to October. HORSES! Back in the barn, In you go.

It’s pretty here right now. Cool and calm and promising, a taste of Florida’s best months to come.

Enjoying…

New Spaces
My girl lost her first top tooth last week, the most image-altering milestone since that same tooth broke through her gummy smile almost seven years ago. It catches me off guard when she smiles. I see what’s happening here–a little wiggle here, a twist there and tiny pieces of babyhood and toddlerhood and childhood fall out of the way, making room for all the beauty to come. Three kids, and I’ve learned to balance a little better the sentimentality of their growth. Less boo-hooing over what’s gone and more appreciation for what’s here. I love this new smile so much.

Pumpkin Patch Parking Lot
The horses that have plenty good reason to be out of the barn–our annual trip to the church up a few roads. I so appreciate the work they put into creating such a special place for our Florida kids.

They upped the ante this year with a kettle corn truck. Oh, I’m sorry. Korn with a K. Which is very much like Anne with an E, I supppose.

There were a billion moms with a billion cameras and lots of babies in pumpkin shirts and orange tutus. I smiled and loved watching them, remembering exactly what it was like, that first Halloween, that first trip to the pumpkin patch. These are rites of passage.

Big boy goes for the biggest pumpkin. And don’t think he couldn’t carry it. He did just fine, thank you.

I like the little ones.

Her Jams.
Currently Mary Lambert’s “Secrets” and back to Katy Perry’s “Firework” again. All day, ‘err day.

Sheep Herder.
She keeps him in line, on the sidewalk, out of trouble. Except for when she’s getting into trouble with him which is very often.

The Delayed Bottle.
No comment. Just no comment.

Cornsilk Halo.
It’s for catching fairies.

Lots to enjoy. Even without all the horses.
Happy Almost Weekend, Almost November and Almost a Full Horse Stampede.

My eHow editor threw some article ideas at me last week, gauging my interest for a few topics she wanted to highlight, one of them being how to maintain your voice in social media and how to deal with what the Internet has labeled as trolls. I obliged (tips coming to a website near you), and then laughed at the simple answer to which I finally arrived earlier this year: hire someone to monitor it for you. After years of allowing people to anonymously leave snarky comments—because “you put yourself out there, you should be able to take it”—I now adhere to the same rules I have in my home: if the dog shits on the carpet, I clean it up. I took it a step further this spring and hired someone else to approve blog comments and exercise the delete and block feature on my social media accounts, suggesting the if-it-walks-like-a-duck rule for weeding out trolls. I now rarely deal with the following:

A: None-of-your-business demands
Summarized as: “You owe it to your readers to tell us why you wear a size 9 shoe! I wear a 7 and sincerely don’t understand why you wear a 9! Please! I’m so confused. Explain to your loyal readers why!”

B: Unoriginal passive aggressive snark
Summarized as: “Cute picture. Too bad you’re stealing the limelight from your kids and making it about you again. But adorable family! Love your blog! (kissy emoticon, hand clap emoticon)”

C: Flat out cut-downs
My personal favorite: “You used to be hot, but you’re not anymore.”

…and…

D: Ridiculous conclusions
Summarized as: “You never show pictures or talk about having sex with your husband, so that must mean you never have it. Nice marriage.”

But I still see enough of it (snark, not sex) to remind myself why not allowing it in my space was a good choice to make. While we can’t always control the input in our lives (like the woman who flicked me off in traffic yesterday), we can control our engagement with that input. Snarky comments not only sometimes triggered my own engagement (which, I’ll admit, periodically included “%#$@ off” over breathe-love-and-kindness-to-someone-who-obviously-just-wants-to-be-seen because, well–I’m human.), but it triggered the engagement of a whole lot of other commenters—a distraction from content, a free-for-all place for people to be seen for their negativity, hooking anyone who begs to differ and coming back for a fight because, let’s face it—we all have tons of free time and engaging strangers on the Internet in argument is a grand way to make your mark on the world.

Defining the spirit of comments is a subjective job, one I’ve given to someone else now, and unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how you look at it—skimming off provoking, passive aggressive or ill-intended comments is pretty easy beginning with anonymity equals goodbye.

I’ve talked to a lot of other writers and bloggers and have read numerous articles about managing feedback, an Atlantic article from this summer reporting that the National Journal (barely comparable to a mom blog, I know) opted to exclude comments on most stories altogether as a way to control the flood of abuse that appeared on the site. Blogging has definitely changed over the past seven years since I started, and navigating through all of it is a continued learning process. But right now, that’s where we are.

I suppose it might seem that what’s left in the comments is all praise. I mean, I’m not going to kick you out of my house for saying you like my curtains. Inside and outside of the Internet and throughout our entire lives, we deal with feedback and learn to filter both the good and bad. The seatbelt you must buckle before you begin that ride is the “know thyself” principle: you can’t think you’re amazing because someone says “You’re amazing!” just as you can’t think you’re worthless because someone says, “You suck!”

I appreciate meaningful conversations and differing opinions about everything from religion and politics to parenting, but personal attacks, demands and general “you’re doing it wrong, you suck!” comments simply aren’t tolerated here. No shirt, no shoes, no service. Kissy emoticon. Handclap emoticon.

And coming to eHow later this week…how do you maintain your own voice in the overstimulating world of social media?

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of OneDay.

I take pictures. I’ve been doing it for years and because of that hobby, my family doesn’t lack in the special moment preservation department. Our still photos are saved in folders, in albums and showcased in frames on our wall, and I love it. The photo of Lainey at the beach, framed on my dresser? I remember that moment. Thin wisps of blond hair dancing in the wind, eyes squinting from the sun, shoulders dusted with sand. It’s all wrapped up in that photo, a memory frozen in time. I love my kids’ baby photos, the ones that really capture the things I loved most about their littleness–folds in their chubby hands, Cheerio crumbs glued to their cheeks.

I’m diligent in taking photos of my children not only because I want to remember everything about these days, but because I love the art of photo taking–the challenge of capturing who they are, their spark, their relationships, their timidness, their curiosity–in a single photo. I’ve realized over the years though that because I’m good about picking up my camera, I’ve forgotten to capture video moments of my kids. Recently while digging through the archives, I found a few videos of Lainey when she was a toddler, particularly one where she was dictating a letter to Santa, making present requests for herself and Nella who was just a baby. I had completely forgotten how precious her little voice was, how her tongue awkwardly attempted words against her pacifier teeth. As soon as I began playing the video, the whole family joined me around the computer. The girls were mesmerized, and Lainey didn’t believe the little girl on the screen was her. We watched as teeny little Lainey looked over my shoulder and bossed me through the letter writing process.

“Write Maywee Kissmiss, Tanta,” said three-year-old Lainey. And with that, seven-year-old Lainey fell to the floor in a giggle fit.

“I said Tanta!” she laughed. “I said Tanta! Play it again! Play it again!”

And if that was funny, you should have heard her when I asked in the video, “Do you love Santa?” and three-year-old Lainey snapped back “NO.” Lainey done lost her mind, laughing so hard, she got the whole family going. We’ve since watched that video–oh, about three hundred times and “Maywee Kissmiss, Tanta” has become a frequently dropped phrase in conversation.

I’ll always love still photos. But I’m challenging myself more to make quick videos to preserve the things photographs can’t capture–their voice, their laughter, their humor, their hilarious answers to questions that tell so much about how seven-year-olds view the world. I have a voice memo saved on my phone of Dash’s two-day-old cry and his suck-and-swallow noises, and those clips are just as precious as our photographs.

So it makes perfect sense that I’d love what OneDay has created to help families tell their stories. OneDay’s app allows parents to make short movies of their children like a pro in seconds, doing all the think-ahead work for you so that you get your child’s favorite things, funny sayings and thoughtful answers to questions preserved in little clips that the app stitches together for a short movie showcasing unique personality. The app not only preserves your children’s stories, but it makes it easy for you to tell your own story to share with your family with a whole list of themes for parents–what you believe, your influences, your inspiration, about your childhood, your wedding, etc.

My favorite thing about this app that makes it great for me to use is that it’s set up for quick video capture–simple, not editing, not thinking required. I can open any story, ask some questions that take just a few seconds, tuck my phone away and pull it out again later to finish a complete story. And the questions are all written for you. You know those priceless kindergarten projects that come home with all the funny answers to questions you wouldn’t have thought to ask your kid–things like “my dad’s favorite thing to do is...read magazines on the toilet in the bathroom“? You can find these things out for yourself now and lock them up in sweet videos to be watched for years to come.

The app also has story themes for babies who might not be quite as prolific with words as older siblings.

And once you create a library of these stories, your kids will love rewatching them, especially when their voice has changed and they’ve gained a bit of a filter for outlandish childishness.

In one minute, we created a cute video with OneDay’s Halloween theme yesterday:

Top tooth gone! 

Videos can also be easily shared with family and friends right from the app if you choose.
You can download the free OneDay app here!

And to think only 20 years ago, I hadn’t even used a cell phone yet. I love the way technology enriches our families in good ways–storytelling just one of them.

Thank you OneDay for sponsoring this post, and thank you readers for checking out the sponsors that make great products and services our family enjoys and also help make supporting this blog a little easier.