My kids are two of the funniest people I've ever had the honor to know and live with. You may think am being biased because they're my children --and some parents may be shocked to hear this-- but I actually like my kids as people and not just as the fruit of my loins. As in, I can't wait to have a beer or two with them when they're all grown up.

Maybe that's because I've approached motherhood as one long-winded National Geographic special. I'd actually hide behind furniture and doors to observe them as an explorer would animals in the wild. Ok, so maybe I watched one too many nature specials, but the point is that I've always looked at kids not as things I mold into my own image but beings that I have the privilege to witness develop and grow.

Maybe that's why whenever am surprised by their insightful humor and wit, am left feeling childhood is an amazingly creative time of human life.

THING2 in particular has always had a play-talk that starts with "pretend that..." He sets the stage for the pretending together and THING1 goes along "writing" the story during the duration of their conversation. THING1 is the literalist, a kind of Mr. Spock in waiting bringing logic to their shared fantasies. So their exchanges can go from the wildly imaginative and dramatic to the plain matter-of-fact realist in a second; making me, in the end, laugh.

For years I was dying to record these --after all they are my own personal National Geographic nature special. But because cameras would kill the moment the minute I whipped them out, I've been in the habit of just writing whatever I can. I love chronicling those little moments that leave me giggling if not laughing out loud. And it's become an interesting creative challenge to fit those moments into 140 characters.

It's an honor and a privilege I can share in writing some of those moments with my readers; but I am fiercely protective of their privacy. At home we were already using the monikers of THING1 and THING2, as a hat tip to their favorite Dr. Seuss, whenever we weren't calling them Spawn of Satan (THING1) and Beast of the Apocalypse (THING2) 1. It was just natural to use the monikers as a rhetorical device.

In a day and age when the tech economy is being fueled by a boom of start-ups created for the sole purpose of mining public and social networking data about individuals, I believe it's important my kids identities remain off the social networking surveillance grid as long as possible. It is troubling to think we have a whole generation of children whose lives are already being exploited by the surveillance economy with identity profiles that not only assume who they are but are actually compiled to measure their social "worth".

So even though THING1 and THING2 are my very real kids, my children's lives are theirs to keep. I write about them not because I am writing their lives, but because the moments we share become a creative collaboration.

And they are ones that always make think, stand in awe of their greatness and, if nothing else, just laugh.

• 1. Yes, we've nicknamed our kids like that and all because of their crying styles as babies.