I was born in the ?80s, and my parents did their best to document my young life. They stood around flapping Polaroids in the air, waiting to see if I?d actually looked at the camera when they?d asked me to. They dropped rolls of film at the drugstore and hoped for the best. Sometimes they even ordered doubles and got twice the number of out-of-focus photos to place in boxes in the basement.
But today?s children are products of the social age. A world where baby albums have been replaced by Facebook albums. A world where every wedding hashtag is followed by a baby hashtag.
Ours was #Ralphiegrams, and it was born just after my first son, Ralph. His amazing nerd of a father, my husband, Aaron, had an idea: A hashtag to track his life that would use IFTTT.com to automatically send any photo of Ralph posted by anyone on Instagram to a Tumblr blog we set up. It would be a digital baby book, passively populated by his lazy parents and all the people who love him. It worked brilliantly because our friends and family used it religiously. When Ralph was a baby, I had a few hundred Instagram followers, and Aaron had brain cancer. Yes, this story is going to take a major bummer turn in just a few moments. I was writing about our life?as a family of three with a side of cancer?and my social media following grew along with my blog?s readership. 
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