We, the contributors to and consumers of social media, show different sides of ourselves on the various platforms. Let’s take, for example, my reporting of tonight’s parent-teacher conference with Olivia’s second-grade teacher.
If I were on Facebook, I’d go the proud/brag-gy/self-deprecating route, offering something like, “Just got back from our parent-teacher conference with Olivia’s teacher. Glad to learn she’s as wonderful, kind, and intellectually curious at school as she is at home. Don’t know from where she got those traits! :)”
Twitter, given its character limitations, requires an economy of thought, and is ripe for sarcastic expression. On it, I might write something along the lines of, “Olivia’s teacher reports our boisterous child is quiet in class. Need to run this claim by PolitiFact. #pantsonfire #mistakenidentity”
On this blog, I’d go where the whims of inspiration take me, but I’d most definitely incorporate some wordplay and puns along the way. Unless, of course, I’m suffering from writer’s block, at which point I’d just throw up some photos of Olivia’s contributions—flora and fauna—to her classroom. (Pictures that should have been edited in Instagram, and then shared in Facebook and Twitter, of course.)
You can wait until the cows come home, but a calf who’s tired from a long evening of trick-or-treating is not coming home any time soon. In fact, it’s darn near impossible to physically remove him once he’s decided he’s had enough and would rather roll around in someone’s lawn than ring that homeowner’s doorbell.
The manor where Beni and I held our wedding reception nearly a decade ago was the site of tonight’s matrimony of trick and (or?) treat. The estate’s owners opened their gates to the little cows and vampire hula girls of our community.
The funny thing about this post—besides the playful title, of course—is how spookily similar the kids’ smiles are to the ones they carved out of their respective pumpkins.
Because elephants are Reed’s favorite animal at this time, Beni picked up a pachydermous getup for him for this year’s Halloween. However, he’s refused to take the thing out of the trunk, if you will, having repeatedly told us that he won’t wear it today, tomorrow, or any day. I’d like to think that this means that he’s already rejected the Republican Party, but I’ll admit that this thinking is wishful fantasy. In fact, his favorite float from the recent parade we attended was the one that featured a giant elephant, which was sponsored by—you guessed it—the local Republican headquarters.
My parents laugh about all the non-motorized vehicles we have in the back of our garage. We have bicycles, wagons, Razor scooters, strollers, roller skates, tricycles, and push carts. We threw a bunch of them in the back of our car this evening, and the kids gave them a spin at a local school. When Reed got tired of riding his three-wheeler, he headed for the playground—where he went first to the tire swing, of course. 
To our kids, homecoming is about one thing: the parade. Every year, we make our way downtown to see the participants and the floats, but also—and this may be reason number one—to collect the candy raining down from said participants and floats. I kid you not: the kids will risk being run over by a tractor wheel to get another lousy Tootsie Roll. The two got their fill of pre-Halloween candy, and Reed didn’t freak out this time when he saw the school mascot. It was a good morning for all of us.
