Tag: blogging

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Best ever chain of distractions

Seriously, you can’t beat this.

It was around 1:30am on Sunday night and I was curled up with my laptop on the living room couch writing this post about New Year’s resolutions. I got a low battery warning on my laptop, so I went down to the basement office to get the power cord. I stopped in to use the bathroom on my way back.

When I was in the bathroom, I decided to remove my Diva Cup. (You can’t make this kind of thing up.) Remembering that I keep some pantyliners in this bathroom, I thought I might as well wash the Diva Cup and put it away until next month. I washed it thoroughly with soap and water, dried it with a paper towel and thought I’d better bring it right up to the second floor bathroom cabinet before I forget.

Returning to the main floor of the house I wandered into the kitchen and put on the kettle for tea. But I really wanted some orange juice. I had a bad cold and I wasn’t the only one. It would be a good idea to have some juice and fresh fruit in the house anyway. I looked at the car key hanging on its hook. Screw it. I was going out for juice.

I went upstairs and nudged Ed awake to tell him I was running out to the store. Then I grabbed my purse and drove to the nearest all-night supermarket. I picked up some juice, milk, a package of fresh croissants, a bagged kale salad, one cucumber, a tray of cut-up fruit and some mandarin oranges. I drove back home and put it all away.

I poured myself a glass of juice, finished making my tea and returned to my laptop.

Oh, right. The cord. It’s still downstairs.

And then I wrote this post.

I guess I’d better go finish the other one now.

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Putting up stories

Snow painting

I’ve got it down now. I crack the egg into the small stainless steel frying pan that’s been warming up over low heat. It takes a bit longer to cook this way but it makes for a superior over-easy egg. There’s nobody else here so I have the time.

Funny how after shunning breakfast for nearly my entire adult life, here I am making a sacred ritual out of frying an egg in the morning. It’s also kind of funny to have the house to myself most mornings after seven years of having small children under foot almost all the time. But I do, every morning for about two hours, barring illness which has been nearly constant around here for the past couple of weeks. And then, once my two hours are up, I’m back to juggling emails, lunches, potty training accidents, homework, housework, and assorted other never-ending tasks.

I looked at that egg this morning, egg whites nearly firm, quite ready to flip. I nudged an edge loose with the spatula and watched it slide around effortlessly. It would be the easiest thing to ease it over with the spatula and slide it onto a piece of toast a minute later, the perfect just-barely-oozing egg. Instead, I put down the spatula and picked up the frying pan. One, two, three, I moved the pan in small circles getting the egg to turn so the yolk was closest to me.  Then I jerked it forward, the egg flipping up ever so slightly and landing in a mangled mess in the pan.

“Oh for fuck’s sake.”

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The Life Cycle of A Blogger

1. Why not become a blogger, right? Why not?! I have stories to tell. I have opinions. I have important things to tell the world. I know I’m not going to become the next Dooce or anything (but maybe I’ll be the next Amalah?). This is going to be good. I’ll start with a 2500-word introduction to my life story, just the self-involved parts.

2. You see? There’s so much creative satisfaction in the writing alone. I don’t even care if many people actually read it. *Refresh. Refresh. Refresh refresh refresh refresh refresh.* Why isn’t anyone reading this?! I posted the link on Facebook. I support everyone else, dammit!

3. I got a comment! This is amazing. People are really into my stories. All my family and friends say I’m hilarious. Well, not all of them, but, like, at least 30 of them. And I even have a couple readers who I only know through the internet, other bloggers. This is how shit starts to go viral.

4. Man, I really should blog something. Has it already been two months since my last post? People must be so disappointed. I’d better start with an apology. What I really need is a blogging schedule. That’s it, I’ll write a post about how I haven’t been blogging enough but I will definitely start blogging more now. That will be good.

5. Jen says I need to get a Twitter if I want my blog to go anywhere. I don’t really understand how it works, but I’m trying it out. Oh, wow, this is awesome. There are so many bloggers right here in my city I didn’t even know. They even get together at events and tweet ups and stuff. More people are reading my blog which means I have to write better posts which means even more people read it. Twitter has saved my blogging career!

6. Twitter has ruined my blog. It takes up so much time and I tweet out all the funny stuff that happens and then I don’t have anything left to blog about. Between work and the kids and the in-laws, I don’t even have the energy to put out more than 140 characters at a time. And nobody comments anymore either, so what’s the point?

7. I miss my blog. As soon as this next mat leave starts I’m going to really start blogging in earnest again. You just have to treat it like a job, really. You can’t wait to feel inspired. This could be my last chance to get my blog noticed. I think I’ll start a Facebook page for it.

8. Holy smokes. My depth of blogging experience, established Twitter network and all this fresh, new material is really paying off. Or maybe it’s just the magic SEO that comes with having paid hosting fees on some half-assed attempt at a blog for several years. Either way! My stats are up. I’m popular!

9. Oh no, do you know how many people are going to read my next post? Now I really need to make it good. Okay, I did it. That last post lit the internet on fire. I’m amazing. I’m awash in ephemeral internet glory.

10. This next post is brought to you by the Bank of West Toronto but that’s totally fine because I was wanting to write about savings accounts anyway. I just need these sponsored posts to subsidize the writing I really want to do. You can’t fault me for that. Yes, important writing like that family resort review I posted right after the kitchen appliance round up. Oh god, I’m a sell out, aren’t I?

11. Remember when blogging didn’t used to be about hashtags and PR campaigns? Remember that sense of community? That’s it, I’m bringing it back to basics. I’m going to write about whatever I want to write about, brand-friendly or not. This is my space and I’m going rogue. RAWR.

12. I didn’t mean it! I do care about sponsors, I do! Why doesn’t anyone want to work with me now? Maybe I can’t run a business based on my stories and opinions, but can I at least earn what the guy handing out the free newspapers makes?

13. Don’t tell me that’s a parking ticket on my windshield. I know I’m a few minutes late but all the kids suddenly had to use the bathroom and I already paid for $8 worth of parking. So parking is going to cost me almost $40 which is more than I’ve made all week on my freaking blog because there is no value in providing content that is not a dressed-up marketing vehicle and why do I even bother with this stupid vanity project anymore when I should just be working on actual, paying jobs but how can I let it go after all these years and who am I and what does it all mean???

14. I feel like the cold and empty shell of an inspired blogger, but I have a fresh pot of coffee, a blank page and two solid hours to myself. There’s got to be a joke in here somewhere.

PUBLISH

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Mom Blogging 2.0, The School-age Years

Man, do I have some funny stories. Real zingers, I tell you. But I think I have to keep these to myself.

There is no better fodder for a parenting blog than the exploits of babies and toddlers. (Except of course for public breastfeeding scandal. That’ll drive your numbers up better than any laundry detergent giveaway.) Babies are funny and tragic all at once. They are cute!  The first couple years are really all about parents trying to keep sane and support each other.

And that is why I keeping having babies.

Okay, no, not really. But it’s getting harder and harder to write about my almost-six year old. Even if the anecdotes don’t embarrass him today, they might later, after some Google name searching unearths my entire archive. In fact, I think using my kids’ real names helps to keep me honest in that regard. As long as I’m writing under my own real name (which my ego keeps insisting on) then pseudonyms are a pretty thin veil.

And while nobody love self-deprecating humour more than me — really, it’s almost all I do — it only extends to your kids up to a certain point. I could totally dig a funny story about a giant-sized 12 month old who just sits in one place while his peers run circles around him, for example. A story about a 12 year old who places last in every athletic competition can’t really be funny, however, without also sounding kind of mean. I think.

So I write about the baby and about my own ineptitude and it’s all well and good. But Colum and Irene are such a huge part of my experience of parenting. Dudes, the job doesn’t end when they start kindergarten. I know! Why don’t they tell you that in the starter guide?! There’s so much more to talk about beyond breastfeeding and babyproofing, but I’m having a really hard time figuring out how.

Help? Any and all ideas would be more than welcome.

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‘Tis the Season to Give a Crap

The holidays are here again, so brace yourself for the inevitable tug of war between charity and commercialism. The Christmas season should be about giving to others, we all know that, but we also want to give to our own family. This Christmas Colum is old enough to really look forward to the loot, to write a letter to Santa and to be wowed by the presents on Christmas morning. And I really want to wow him. So I think, sure I’ll give to others after I have taken care of my own family. I think, I support giving and charity, I do, and it’s really great that other people are so into that kind of thing. They must have more money and time and fewer responsibilities than I do.

But then I think of my mother and my mother-in-law. These are two women who have raised four children each and worked full-time jobs and balanced budgets and somehow managed to put food on the table and shoes on our feet no matter how scarce money was. They also managed to be everywhere at once: the skating rink and ballet classes and school plays and baseball games. From the PTA and Boy Scouts (Donna) to nursing relatives on their death beds and sitting on the floor of a Greyhound bus while eight months pregnant (Mom), there is nothing these women wouldn’t do. Their entire lives have been guided by a sense of giving and self-sacrifice. They volunteer their time and energy and money as a matter of course, never stopping to wonder if they have enough to spare. Whenever and wherever a need arises, these women automatically ask themselves, “How can I help?” (Not “Should I help?” or “I wish I could help.”) And then, swiftly and quietly, they do.

So when I started seeing initiatives that encourage bloggers to use their corporate and social networking connections to pay their good fortune forward I thought, good. I mean, after the recent scourge of name calling and finger pointing that has been dominating mommy-blogging circles in the lead up to and the wake of the new FTC regulations (the assumption that we are all corporate whores, essentially, willing to give it up for free crap), this is a breath of fresh air. Initiatives like Her Bad Mother’s Give Good Blog or Mamanista’s Bloganthropy encourage bloggers to champion a cause and to exploit any corporate contacts in doing so.

Yeah, bloggers should totally do that, I thought. I would too if only I were more widely read and had more companies knocking at my door. But wait. I did use my blog to host an online raffle for breast cancer research at the Princess Margaret Hospital. And I did reach out to family-oriented businesses, many run by moms who are friendly with the blogging community for awesome donations. And they did come through. I actually used my blog to raise over $2000 in personal donations to the Weekend To End Breast Cancer. When my good friend Gillian lost her baby, I blogged about that and made up a button that links to the Sick Kids Foundation’s donation page and stuck it at the bottom of that post and in my sidebar. Huh.

Maybe I can do something after all. So then I emailed Kathryn Easter from Mom Central Canada and said, Hey. You know that giveaway we’re doing for Disney on Ice? What are the chances we can get another set of tickets to give to a family that is spending the holidays at Interval House, a safe haven for abused women and children? And Kathryn said, Let’s do it up. (I’m totally paraphrasing, you know.) And so we are.

I tell you all this not to toot my own horn. (Although I guess that is the biggest effect, isn’t it?) Mostly I tell you all this because if I can actually do some good with this blog and its regular readership of my family and friends and the hundreds of porn-bot followers I have on Twitter, then imagine what you can do. You don’t need a hugely successful blog to make a difference. You don’t even need a blog at all.

My mother and mother-in-law didn’t have blogs, after all. Hell, they didn’t even have Facebook. (I know!) And they still managed to find a way to do good things for people in need. So if we all just try to be a little more like them, then we don’t even need a formal declaration. We just need to act.

On that note, let the holiday season begin.

(Image courtesy of saxon on Flickr.)

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Growing Up in Public: Michael Jackson and Us

By the time I was old enough to start listening to Top 40 radio and to buy records (er, tapes), Michael Jackson was already becoming a punch line. “Black or White” topped the charts when I was in Grade Seven and Jacko was more of a freak show draw than music icon throughout my high school years. Then there were the child molestation charges and it looked like the King of Pop would end up irreparably tarnished. He was acquitted of those charges, though, and people started to give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, if there is one person who was so completely divorced from the standard norms of behaviour and so completely outside our collective realm of comprehension that he might innocently share a bedroom with a young boy and be surprised at the outrage, it was Michael Jackson.

A few years ago, though, I started to hear it: the odd M.J. song. We played Billie Jean at the bar where I worked when I was pregnant with Young C and some of the first fetal movements I felt were in time with this pop classic. Many of those early songs are good. They hold up. There was a bit of a Michael Jackson resurgence going on and people wondered if he had anything more. People were talking about the music, not the bizzaro personal circumstances surrounding the man.

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Mission Statement

Lest my readers mistake my fast and flippant tone for serious criticism, I think it may be time to lay forth some basic Playground principles. One is that this is not a blog about how to parent well or properly. I don’t pretend the circumstances of my life have somehow landed me at the pinnacle of parenting know-how or that I have any universal knowledge on the topic at all. Most of my understanding of children and child-rearing is drawn from my own personal experience as a mother of two, big sister to three, first cousin to twenty-some-odd, and very brief foray into the world of professional nannies. This is augmented by countless books, articles, websites, and blog posts about pregnancy and childbirth and childrearing. So I speak the language; but put me at the corner of Pacific and Dundas with my own screaming toddler and newborn baby and I have no idea what to do.

This is a blog about how it feels to be at that corner. About what I’ve tried and what works and what doesn’t. About what’s going on in the wider world that might impact our lives as parents. About what kinds of stuff might be worth getting and what’s garbage. I’ll complain about my kids and I’ll brag about them. I’ll bitch and whine and gossip. Blogs are of a transient nature and what’s bugging me one day might not bother me in the least the next.

Still, insofar as all the content is filtered through my perspective it might behoove me to make clear any biases I have. I am not interested in any stay-at-home versus working mom arguments. (Though I thought I might be for a short while; it is all so stupid. Here’s the best rant I could find on the internet on the subject and it’s not even written by a mother.) I think any suggestion that women should participate less vigorously in the workforce than men, for whatever reason, is complete nonsense. But choosing to work at home caring for the children is just as admirable as working anywhere else. I do not have a fulfilling and promising career to return to. I probably wouldn’t even be able to get a job (especially in this market) that pays much more than full-time childcare for two kids costs. I enjoy taking care of the kids and I generally dislike work. But I cannot, simply cannot, bring myself to identify as a stay-at-home mom. For one, I’m almost always working some part-time gig or another to make ends meet. (I even worked full-time throughout the last half of my pregnancy; note the complete lack of blog posts during that period.) But it’s mostly because I want to work. Not full-time for now while the kids are young, and not doing menial tasks for someone else. But I need some external validation and a role to fill when the kids begin to need me less. I am jealous of both worlds: the moms who tuck their children in and fold the rest of the laundry and go to sleep satisfied that their day’s work is done, and the moms who love their children just as well all while contributing to the working world and the family’s finances. There is no right way.

Other biases include a procrastinating perfectionist’s attitude to housework. If it’s not going to be done right, then don’t do it at all, I say. That isn’t working around here so well these days as nothing is really getting done. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then I’m on the highway to hell. There is absolutely no moral rectitude involved in scrubbing your bathtub; if you can afford to have someone else do it, by all means. I tend to be fiscally left-wing, but a social libertarian. I think I might be agnostic, but still identify as Catholic. I have no ethnic identity, though, beyond my Canadian-ness. I drink a lot, a lot, of tea. And I have lately started to wonder if I shouldn’t have kept with the Latin and become the definitive modern voice of the classics. Puer puellae rosas dat. The boy gives the girl the roses. A boy is giving roses to a girl. You see? There’s so much room for interpretation … this will undoubtedly cast the longest shadow across my blog.

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Cradle Safety: It starts at home

The hardest thing about breaking a months-long blogging hiatus is finding the time and energy to write the all-encompassing, profound post that will leave your readers in both tears and gales of laughter and praising your blogging muse. The kind of post that will instantly make up for the weeks of nothingness and leave instead a readership sated on a gratitude and fulfillment never before found within the confines of a mommy-blog.

Let me instead, then, dear reader, tell you about the mesh bumper pads I bought for Irene’s cradle today. This cradle was made for my husband by his grandfather at the time of his birth. It is truly beautiful and nowhere close to meeting today’s safety standards. My primary concern is the space between the bars is probably big enough to trap a baby’s head. (Particularly a head so tiny and round as my dear Irene’s.) The easy solution — and what we did when Colum was using the cradle — is to use bumper pads to protect the baby from the bars. Alas, those are also not recommended anymore (and haven’t been since well before Colum was born) as they are suffocation hazards and have been linked to SIDS. Still, the SIDS-inducing bumper pads lined her cradle for the first ten nights of her life as I weighed the risks of bumper pad vs. bare bars vs. the less beautiful and seemingly more wobbly bassinet we aren’t using vs. co-sleeping because she wasn’t having any of this sleep-on-your-back-in-your-own-bed business anyway. And then I thought why not just line the cradle with some sort of mesh netting that would both protect baby’s head and be unlikely to smother baby. Why, I could probably fashion such a thing myself out of the right material. Wait. I can barely make it to the shower every ( … other …) day. (Why it is that having a newborn makes me want to do things — crafty things — that I have neither the time nor ability for, I’ll never know.) Instead, I Googled “mesh baby bumpers”, or some such thing, and found that I could just buy one ready made, which I did. There are two layers of meshing, which I worry might make the product somewhat less “breathable” than it claims, and I’m not convinced that this bumper would be strictly recommended by the safety powers that be either. It is lacking the pretty eyelet lace and satin ribbons of the other bumper pads. “Don’t take off the ribbons, Mommy!” Colum pleaded. Nonetheless, I will be able to sleep easier with this bumper pad in place — even if Irene would rather sleep cradled on my forearms as I type than spend one sleeping minute in her cradle.

I am still on a babymoon of sorts since I have my husband home until next Monday. In preparation for the upcoming week I am lowering expectations on what I might hope to accomplish on all fronts. In that spirit, then, you might look forward to blog posts on such topics as “how I spent my pregnancy”, midwifery and natural childbirth, Irene’s birth story (and Colum’s for that matter), and breastfeeding: dos and don’ts. But, really, I wouldn’t bank on it.

Let me also throw to another Junction mommy-blog, one that actually delivers on it’s promise of regular posts, and is both informative and entertaining: Junction Parents. And who knows? Maybe I’ll also get around to making up a proper blog roll and resource list, too.

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Kanye Inspires

It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve posted and I want to apologize to both my devoted readers for the delay. I’ve been busy and haven’t had the time to draft well-thought out opinions on black-focused schools or Bisphenol-A.

I’ve been inspired tonight, though, by Kanye West. What most of us would do in silent prayer, or at a gravesite or while lighting a candle in church, Kanye does in an acceptance speech at the Grammys. He expresses his love for his recently departed mother and vows to become as great as she would want. And that, my two dear readers, is truly the essence of blogging. My innermost thoughts and desires should be published here in real time without benefit of censor or editrix. That’s what the people want. So, I will develop some mature thoughts about books and current events and issues of especial concern to parents. But I’ll try to keep posting during the drawn-out gestational periods those thoughts seem to need.

Picture this: My 21 month old son has never had a haircut and he’s sporting a sort of natural mullet. His fine strawberry blonde hair has grown slowly in the front and falls neatly halfway down his forehead. It then wisps and curls out in all directions in the back, snaking down his neck and sticking straight out. He has, in other words, hockey hair. Appropriately, then, he was decked out in a sweater depicting hockey sticks, skates, a helmet and a net, and jogging pants when a Guns N’ Roses CD started playing. As soon as the first chords of “Welcome to the Jungle” sounded, Colum launched into a frantic dance consisting of countless quick steps and crazy spinning. Before long he was lurching around the room like a drunk and desperately trying to regain enough balance to keep dancing. I guess you can take the rusted-out and broken-down cars off the front lawn, but you can’t beat genetics.

One last thing. The Grammy Awards were not only a source of inspiration thanks to Kanye West. They also featured performances by both Leslie Feist and Amy Winehouse which is a boon for both real artists and real-looking women. That makes me happy.

(Photo courtesy the New York Daily News.)