Living Out Loud volume 4: Don't tell me. Show me.

I'd like you to tell me a story. Tell me about your childhood home. Show me your favorite place to spend a sunny afternoon. Explain to me how you get your hair to do that awesome thing that it does. Teach me how to draw a turtle. Interview someone or have someone interview you. Show me your signature move. But I don't just want you to tell me, I want you to show me. And the best way to show me is through the magic of moving pictures. It's time for our fourth Living Out Loud Project, and as promised this one is going to be a little different. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so wouldn't moving pictures be worth even more than that?

Let's talk about the rules for this project.

• Your submission must be in video form. It can be hosted on any video sharing site such as YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo or any other site you prefer.

• There is no minimum or maximum length, but you obviously have to tell a decent story.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org.

• The due date for entries is Sunday, May 3rd at 5pm Eastern. This gives us one more weekend for those of us who wait until the last minute.

• You must either be in the video or narrate a significant portion of the video. This is a project on living out loud, after all.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner.

If you're looking for inspiration, check out the 90-second Stories Group on Flickr.

The prize for this project is a little different too. First, I'm telling you about the prize up front, perhaps to help entice you to participate. Second, I've kicked the prize up a bit. On the condition that there are at least ten (10) participants, one entry will win a prize of a Flip Mino HD camera. If there are only nine participants, though, I reserve the right to offer a much more lame prize, so tell your friends and encourage them to play along!

If you are concerned that you are clueless in the ways of video recording and sharing, never fear. I'll be posting some tutorials and information in the coming week or so. Your job in the short term is to think up what story you want to tell. The rest will be easy.

So dust off your video camera in whatever form it may take or borrow one from a friend. Ponder what you'd like to talk about and I'll help you with the rest. If you have questions about the parameters of the project feel free to comment or email me. I look forward to seeing what you all produce!

Proud to be a part of this village

Earlier this week there was an Oprah show about mothers that featured some bloggers. Several of them I know and respect and I was curious how Oprah would handle it. My bloggers (Yes. My people. My bloggers.) were great and most everyone did well given the circumstances. The show itself, however, was mostly fluff. Really, when you only have 40 minutes, there isn't a lot of time for much more than plugging a new TV series, some books, playing with Skype and telling all the ladies in the audience to LOOK UNDER YOUR CHAIR for a new Flip video camera. Rich seemed annoyed that the show even existed because he said it just trivialized things and oversimplified a lot of what goes on for parents. We get it. You don't shower, your baby ran out of diapers two days ago and you haven't slept more than four hours straight in years. But we all knew that before the show even started. Rich and I had a bit of a heated discussion about the whole thing because I think that Oprah does a service for sparking people's interest in blogs and communities of parents even if it's all fluff while he was saying if they can't do it right they shouldn't have done it at all. Oprah didn't get to the root of why people blog.

On that same day on the other side of the country from us, a sweet little girl named Madeline passed away. Previous to this week, I had only heard of Heather Spohr from a few other bloggers and she hadn't made it into my RSS reader rotation. But she always seemed like a sweet woman and the people who call her a friend I consider to be a high caliber of folks. This week I have been simply blown away by the support that has gone out to the Spohr family. I can't imagine the heart ache of losing a child at only 17 months, particularly when there was little to no warning other than the same complications they have dealt with over and over from her premature birth.

The Spohrs had already intended on walking in the March for Babies walk this month for Maddie but since Tuesday alone the donations for March of Dimes in Maddie's name have gone from a goal of $3000 to over $22,000 (and still climbing). Because of the incredible amount of traffic, you can't actually get to Heather's blog. But other bloggers have linked to the March of Dimes page for donations, created heartfelt tributes to the family, setup PayPal accounts and mailboxes to help offset funeral costs and even organized volunteers to bring dinner to the Spohr family for the next several weeks. There have been YouTube video tributes and Blogher articles about it. The Today Show blog sent condolences to the family after hearing that Maddie (who loved her some Matt Lauer) had passed.

Maddie's death breaks my heart, but the community that has rallied around her family simply amazes me. How could you do that without the Internet? It's more than one church could do. It's more than one SCA baronial fundraiser could accomplish. It is the manifestation of how technology is used for good, to truly create a global village of people who don't even know you but care about you and are worried about you and want you to be okay.

If you'd like to get to know Heather a little, you can visit her Twitter page or her Flickr photostream until her blog is back up. And in the meantime, be sure to reach out to someone you love, either in person or through the magic of technology. For Maddie.

2nd trimester dance party!

Today was our second ultrasound appointment and I'm pleased to say we still have an active little fetus with an active little heartbeat, giant alien head and spindly limbs flipping about inside my belly. Even in utero, this child has decided to be obstinate in that it took us a good 45 minutes of moving around, coughing, lifting one hip and nearly doing jumping jacks to get the baby to move to the right position to measure whatever they were messing with. I was just happy to get 45 minutes of BabyCam while we waited.

I'm at 13 weeks 1 day, so the baby is still too small to really see a gender. I keep thinking of Robin Williams exclaiming "my God our kid is hung like a bear!" and the nurse saying "that's the umbilical cord, Mr. Williams." Feel free to peruse the photos by clicking on the image below. (And yeah, they do like space aliens at this stage.)

In other news I finally have back some of the energy that has been sapped out of me the last few months. I'm staying up past 9pm and I might even log onto World of Warcraft to run around with my woefully neglected hunter.

In commemoration of making it this far, I've created a playlist for us all. I figure since I finally have some energy back we should at least use it by gettin' our boogie on. I hope you enjoy it.

2nd Trimester Dance Party (created using OpenTape)