So my son, who has been obsessed with scarecrows lately, just spent a while outside playing his “stand by the tree and pretend to kick hats” game.  Only this time he did it with the straw hat we’re using as part of his Halloween costume on.

I thought it was cute.  I took a picture of it.  And then, after making sure that certain identifying details like my house number weren’t exposed in the picture, and after thinking about it a bit, I posted it on the blog.

There aren’t that many pictures of my son on here.  There are a couple of posts specifically dedicated to parenting that include pictures, but in general I try to err on the side of not posting pictures of him here unless I have a reasonably good reason.  I felt like this picture was cute and funny enough that it was worth it.

And then, an hour or so later, I got a Twitter notification that an online newspaper website was sharing some of my content.  “Oh, cool!” I thought, going to look, wondering which of my recent posts they were sharing and sort of hoping it was the series on school clothes.

It was the picture of my son that I’d shared.

It was listed under “Adult.”

Now, I’m willing to believe that the category was a mistake of some sort, or even possibly auto-generated based on some sort of ‘bot trolling the site– I do use an awful lot of profanity around here, right?  But it was a picture of a three-year-old in a silly hat standing next to a scarecrow.  And I understand how the Internet works, too, and how once you put something out there what people do with it isn’t really up to you.  Hell, once I tag this post it will probably auto-populate something with a picture of him in the links at the bottom of the page.  And in some way I actually sort of appreciate whoever it was that shared the picture– these sites don’t pull their content out of nowhere; someone had to submit the picture for inclusion, and then an editor thought it was cute or funny or something and slotted it in.  And I appreciate both of those things.

But still.  No thanks.  Even without the “Adult” issue, there are nearly nine hundred damn posts on this blog– I think #900 will come tomorrow, and this may well be it if I’m wrong– and I think I’d prefer it if any posts that get shared out off of my own little corner of the internet not be pictures of my kid.

The password is my real name, by the way.  No caps, shortened form, no spaces.

This may be another idiot parent moment; I dunno.  But nonetheless: