A Simple Solution by Heather Bowles

Good Saturday morning, ladies (and gents, I’m sure there must be a few)!  You all post pics of your children on Facebook, don’t you? I certainly do. In fact, it’s one of my primary ways of keeping a photo record of my daughter. You may recall there was a series of incidents a few weeks ago that made me wary of sharing the album with others, but the album still exists. The few people who still have access to it are very trusted individuals, and as she is my first and likely will be my only child, I expect my friends and family share my happiness in her very existence, although on a less fervent level.

In fact, it has never occurred to me that my daughter’s pictures might be bothersome to anyone who sees them. To my knowledge, no one in my inner circle has tried unsuccessfully to have a child, or even necessarily wants one. All our family has had their children, and in my generation, I expect my daughter will be the last to be born to us. You can imagine my surprise then, to see this in my feed last week: http://unbaby.me/. This nasty little piece of work is a Google Chrome extension you can download to eliminate baby pics from your Facebook feed. How does it accomplish this, you ask? Get this: it replaces said pictures with “awesome stuff”, per the descriptor provided if you share it to your Facebook wall.

What kind of “awesome stuff”? Pictures of kittens and puppies, to start. Now, I don’t know about you, but my thought is, if you don’t like pics of babies, you might not like pics of baby animals. Not to fear though. You might get lucky and your friends’ babies’ pictures could be replaced with pictures of bacon. That’s right. I said bacon. Who was the person who posted this brilliant piece of troll fodder in my feed? None other than my younger sister. Gee, thank you. I really want to know that you’re replacing my daughter’s face with pictures of dead, processed animal flesh. The sentiment is overwhelming.

I have a better idea. How about people stop being scared of telling each other how they feel? If you’re one of blessed few who are allowed to see my daughter grow up in your feed, and it bothers you enough to download this program, just tell me the pictures bother you. I’ll fix it for you. In fact, I would hazard a guess that any parent, upon being told by a friend that they would rather see pictures of dead animal carcasses than their child’s face, once they’re over the hysterical laughter and realize it’s serious, will likely unfriend them and happily so. No one wants to share the most vulnerable part of their lives with people who can’t appreciate it and if you can’t share in the joy of a child born to a friend then you probably won’t care in the long run because you really aren’t a friend, are you? No more baby pics. Problem solved.

Tags: babies, bacon, browser addons, FaceBook, Google Chrome, honesty, kittens, puppies, trust