Month: March 2006

It’s a quarter to seven on Sunday morning, and we’ve been up for about an hour now. I’ve read the best bits out of the Sunday paper and had a cup of coffee. It’s an ordinary Sunday morning in most respects, except…

…the TV is off. Every single morning, whatever parent is on call (we take turns on the weekend, and it’s Beloved during the week while I get ready for work) comes downstairs, makes a cup of chocolate milk and a little bowl of raisins and dried cereal for each boy to snack on, and turns on the TV.

Sadly, many mornings we are awake even before TVO (the Ontario version of PBS, with commercial-free kids programming) starts its broadcast day, so usually the boys pick from among their collection of DVDs and video tapes. We have a lot, from Thomas the Tank Engine to Blues Clues to Pingu to Baby Einstein. And the TV will be on from the time the first child wakes up until breakfast, and sometimes beyond. The TV often gets left on for hours as background noise, especially on the mornings Beloved is in charge. I am conflicted on the TV issue, but Beloved is not.

And yet this morning, we have been up for more than an hour, and the boys have not yet asked me to turn it on. These boys, creatures of habit to an even greater degree than their routine-obsessed mother, have yet to notice the absence of the noise from the corner.

You know what the really weird part is? They’re playing nicely – together. That alone is remarkable. Could it be coincidence?

I’m not sure if I have the intestinal fortitude to draw any battle lines in the house on when the idiot box can be on and when it must be turned off, especially if the lion’s share of maintenance will fall on Beloved’s shoulders, when Beloved doesn’t buy in to the theory that there is such a thing as too much TV.

Well, there you go. We’ve been up for about 80 minutes, and as I type Tristan is requesting Mighty Machines. I’m not sure whether I want to take a stand on this one or not…

The calendar was mistaken. TODAY was the first day of glorious, rain-sprinkled, sun-dappled, dirt-smelling spring.

And what better way to celebrate than with a family breakfast out and a trip Ottawa’s agricultural museum, the Experimental Farm?

Wow, you say, what a great day. How could you improve on a day like that? Why, you turn it into a bloggy playdate, that’s how! Andrea and her family joined us on our lovely spring morning excursion – and between the two of us, you had to know somebody was going to blog about it. Since we both had cameras but only I had juice in my batteries, I won.

Here’s Emma entertaining Tristan at the restaurant. I may have to steal her:

It was sprinkling a little bit when we got to the farm, but the sun was out after we went through a few of the barns.

Plenty of puddles remained for Simon’s enjoyment.

It’s springtime, and there were lots of baby animals to admire. (The tiny lamb curled in the hay near the ewe’s head is my favourite.)

Tristan favoured the week-old piglets that you can’t quite see behind the glass.

I loved this moment of sisterly cooperation. My boys are not quite there yet, but I’m hopeful now.

The kids were as curious about the kids as the kids were curious about the kids.

Here’s Andrea’s family, if they had been farmers back in the day. It’s a good look for them, don’t you think?

I like the farm because of the animals…

… but also because they have fun places for the kids to play. Emma, Sarah and Simon are having a little tea party in the barn.

To continue in our celebration of spring, I’ve topped up the propane tank and bought all the fixins for barbequed hamburgers for dinner tonight. Almost makes dinnertime something to look forward to!

Hope your day was filled with springy thoughts, too!

I have been playing in the referral logs again. (I suppose this is an unintentional segue from my last post on guilty online pleasures.) It continues to amaze me the questions that people ask the Internet.

A lot of the hits I get are on infertility, low morphology, IUI and IVF. Searchers came by this month on “why iui failed” and “why pineapple IVF” (I get a lot of variations on the pineapple-IVF search. I guess that one is still hot in infertility circles.) And some people I suspect have not struggled with infertility have found me, too, via “my wee smells is it pregnancy hormone” and ” im three days late not sure“.

We do have a few pet topics around here, like “striped turtlenecks“. Weight Watchers has usurped me from first place, but I am still the second search return for “weight watcher points for Tim Hortons“, and I’ve had more than one searcher drop by on “industrial strength bras“. And I have to smile every time I see a variation on one of my favourite rants, “why americans say zee“.

I get a lot of book review hits, too. Some of them make me wish I had the Internet when I was writing essays in high school, like “what do you think is the feeling of an ounce of cure by alice munro” or even, “how do you pronounce penelopiad“?

Some stuff I have no answers for. “Where’s the Coronation of Napoleon located?” I’m guessing France, but beyond that I’m not too sure. And I get a whole lot of conspiracy theorists asking a variation on “what mothership theories“… don’t even get me started on the weird types of postcards people want.

Ugh, you know what? This whole post was centred around one search hit I got last week, and now when I key it back into Google to get the search returns – I’m not there! Either someone had a lot more patience than me and searched into the double-digit pages, or the Internet is messing with my head.

Ah well, you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that my favourite hit recently was someone searching for “very very very very very very scary mummy.”

I’m not sure I even want to know!

Aside from all I’ve said this week about blogging being about community, and connection, and empowerment through information sharing, and giving people a voice, there’s this whole other aspect to blogging that I love.

Blogging is a hell of a great way to waste time. Link surfing has to be one of my favourite guilty pastimes. Most of the time I have no idea how I ended up where I ended up, but getting there is half the fun.

Some of my favourite recent discoveries came from the Salon article I blogged on earlier this week, about the changes to Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. From the Salon article, I clicked through to Book A Day, an incredibly ambitious project to read and post a review about a great work of literature every single weekday.

She takes her definition of “great work of literature” from the next click on our tour, Robert Teeter’s list of Great Books. It’s an amazing series of indices and lists that correlate the greatest works of Western, Eastern and World, and Contemporary literature.

And although I found that a little too much to digest all in one go, I found Time Magazine’s list of 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present much more accessible. And within that, I found that they have reproduced the original Time reviews to many of the 100 novels, which I found extremely cool. There’s the 1925 review of The Great Gatsby, and the 1962 review of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (but you have to subscribe to read the entire review.)

I mean, no wonder I can’t get any housework done!

And speaking of housework, here’s the latest update of the Housework Challenge 2006 (it sounds more important with a fancy title, no?)

On Tuesday, Beloved spent the usual half hour doing morning clean-up and meal prep for the boys. We both worked all day, and then went out for dinner with my folks (woo hoo!) When we got home, I spent half an hour pretending to play trains with Tristan while I actually tidied the playroom formerly known as the dining room, and Beloved spent the same half hour doing the cat litter and taking out the trash. Can I count bath time as a household chore? If so, and I’m guessing you won’t let me get away with it, I scored an extra 20 minutes there.

Yesterday was pretty much a write-off. I didn’t go to work before the TV thing, so Beloved and I shared the morning wrangle at the usual 30 minutes or so for breakfast, clean-up and general disaster-recovery. Since I had the car, after work I picked up the boys and drove over to Quebec to pick up Beloved at work, and by the time we got back into town and stopped for a hamburger and picked up a few groceries (30 minutes!), it was bedtime for the boys and we were all too tired to do anything but a cursory pick-up.

Tuesday/Wednesday totals:
Beloved: 1h 45 mins
Me: 1h 15 mins

Phew! We did it!

(Edited to add: now you can see it on Andrea’s blog! Go watch it, and tell me what you think!!)

I have to start out by telling you that the people who work at CJOH TV are the nicest. people. ever. I would so quit my day job and work with them if they asked me. And not even because I am a media junkie, but just because they are all so unbelievably NICE!

I got to the studio and Andrea was already there, with a coupon for a well-appreciated complimentary coffee. Coffee, as you will see if you read any of my archives, is my beverage of choice for mental lubrication – and me on wine (or any other alcoholic beverage, for that matter) is probably not for public consumption. And I met Kristina for the first time. Okay, you’re probably going to think that I really am drunk, because I have to tell you that Andrea and Kristina are also two of the nicest, plus clever and witty and likeable, people I’ve been lucky enough to meet, through blogging or otherwise.

Leanne (we’re buds now, so we’re on a first-name basis) brought us from the cafeteria to the studio, where I was appropriately humbled by it’s vastness. I watch the news at noon whenever I’m at home, and I was really surprised by how cavernous the studio is – I was expecting something much more compartmentalized, and much more intimate.

Leanne abandoned left us to our own devices briefly while she took care of some last-minute TV person business, and I couldn’t help but be a little bit alarmed as the clock ticked past 11:55 with no sign of the on-air talent. With barely minutes to spare (I guess it’s not as nerve-wracking when it’s your day job) anchor Michael O’Byrne breezed in and said hello. (Is this an inappropriate time to mention I’ve always had a kind of star-struck crush on him? Just be glad I restrained myself at the time!)

We got settled on our stools (sidebar: stools!! What’s the one position you LEAST want to be in while being filmed? How about sitting on a stool with nothing in front of you to hide the unsightly bulges? Although at least I didn’t almost fall off my stool, like a certain TV news co-host who shall remain unnamed) and were wired for sound. Those earpieces, for the record, are terribly disconcerting. I have a hard enough time processing once source of information, let alone two or more in simulcast.

Before I had a chance to work up a good lather of fear, we were rolling. Leanne is so charming and easy to talk to that I have no idea what I actually said, and since it went live, I still haven’t seen it. I know Andrea and Kristina sounded brilliant and pithy and well-informed, so I only hope I could soak up some of their glow.

The part I was most anxious about, the taking of calls from the viewing audience, never happened. There was some sort of technical glitch that prevented any callers from getting through (a small voice in my head insists we were so uninteresting that nobody in the viewership of 60,000 people found us compelling enough to bother dialling the phone) to which I was blissfully oblivious until all of a sudden Leanne was wrapping up the segment and apologizing for the glitch.

“Fame” is more fleeting than I thought!! Although the segment was apparently nine minutes long, it seemed more like three. There is so. much. more. that I wanted to say. Then again, I guess that’s what blog is for, right?

So if you happen to be here for the first time as a result of the CJOH news, welcome! Pour yourself a complimentary beverage and stay a while. There are some amazing blog in the links on the left-hand side of your screen ——-> over there, including a few of my own favourite posts. (Ahem, edited to correct, I mean the RIGHT side of my screen. I say left, because it’s on MY left as I peer out of the screen at you. Yah, that’s it. Ugh. Thanks, Nancy, for catching that!)

I had a whole big thing written on blogs and the blogosphere, but then I saw that Kristina has posted a great primer on her blog. Here’s a piece I wrote a while back on the wonderful world of weblogs, which you might find interesting if you’re not too familiar with blogs. And since the whole point of blogging is about opening conversations, feel free to leave a comment or drop me a note at danicanada (at) gmail (dot) com.

Whew! Even though we didn’t get the chance to interact with the viewers, this was more fun than anybody should have on a random Wednesday. If you missed it, I should be able to score a digital copy, or Andrea will post it even if I can’t. I’ll let you know.

I had this great big post half-written about blogs – biz blogs, political blogs, personal blogs, every kind of blog you can think of. I had links and stats from Technorati, I even had tables and charts. It was a thing of beauty.

But it was boring. Yawn. Maybe I’ll post it some day. But it’s not what I wanted to say. Not today, not right now.

Here’s blogging in a nutshell for me.

You know how when you read something in the paper, or you see a great bit on TV, and you turn to someone and say, “Did you see (whatever)?” That’s what blogging is to me. Turning to the Interweb and saying, “Did you hear about that? Can you believe it? What do you think about it?” And “it” can be just about whatever floats your boat – knitting, hockey, firefox, Brangelina, potty training, abortion, coffee – you name it.

And the other thing about blogging: it’s addictive. Something will happen, and Beloved will look at me and say, “You’re blogging this in your head, aren’t you?” And he’ll be right. Something about blogging gets under your skin, and whether you post every single day or just once a week or even if you just read them, they’re more addictive than Lays barbeque chips. You can’t read just one.

Gotta run – there’s this TV thing I’m thinking about doing today.

Tomorrow marks our triumphant (hey, you had to know I’d milk it) return to local daytime television, as Andrea, Kristina and I will be the featured bloggers on CJOH’s News at Noon with the endearing Leanne Cusack.

Aside from the usual panic on Important Topics like the potential for a bad hair day or wardrobe malfunction, I’m worried about what to say. (Substance over style – can you imagine?) I’d like to spend a little less time talking about mom blogging and a little bit more time on the impact of blogs on communication, interpersonal connection and the MSM – but we’re at the mercy of the viewing audience and the questions they might ask. (New panic – what if they ask a question we can’t answer? Oh, the pressure!)

If you had five minutes and a captive audience, what would you say about blogs, blogging and being a blogger?

Elizabeth over at Half Changed World has a neat idea. She and her husband, who seem to share a similar domestic arrangment to Beloved and I as far as working / staying home with the kids, are keeping track of how many hours they spend on housework in a week.

I think this is an interesting experiment for a couple of reasons. First, she raises the point that it’s useful to have an idea of the cost (in time) to get the place ‘company clean’ versus just ‘random weekday clean’. And my standards on both of those have been slipping recently!

Second, I am cautiously curious about the division of labour around our place. I have to admit, since Beloved picked up an extra couple of hours of teaching this semester, the house has been a lot more untidy during the week. Could there be a correlation?

Third, I have been toying with the idea of hiring a cleaning service again. We let ours lapse last year when Beloved was home for the summer, and never got rolling with her again once he was back at work. We now spend so much time dealing with clutter that we’re having a hard time getting around to actual cleaning. The kitchen is usually pretty good, but the bathrooms – well, let’s just say they’re rarely next to godliness.

Finally, the latent geek in me loves to quantify things. I loved Weight Watchers points. I like to count things. I often find myself counting my steps, particuarly when I’m stressed. It’s soothing, in a way you are probably mocking right about now.

So I decided to take up Elizabeth’s offer to play along. When I proposed it to Beloved last night, he looked at me with the same patient look he gives to most of my schemes – somewhere between perplexed and indulgent. And while he doesn’t quite get the ‘why’, he’s willing to go along – just like, as a matter of fact, the way he does with most of my schemes.

So here’s what we did on Monday. Beloved did 15 minutes of meal prep and cleanup for breakfast, and the boys spent the day at daycare. He then spent another 30 minutes on toy clutter-busting and early meal prep because I was late getting home from work (dinner is usually my task) and I spent another 20 minutes on meal-prep when I got home. We shared the 15 minute clean-up of the kitchen, and he spent 30 minutes vacuuming and tidying while I took the kids to the pet store to get dog food. (What has my life become that I envy my husband 30 minutes of peaceful, uninterrupted housecleaning?)

Monday tally:
Beloved – 1h 10 mins;
Me – 25 mins;
Total – 1 h 35 mins

Want to play along?

If you are a woman born anywhere between 1960 and 1990, chances are you’ve read Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (Bonus points if you’re a guy and you’ve read it!) It’s easily one of the most important, influential books I read as a young woman. It was the first time I remember reading a book and thinking, “Oh wow, it’s not just me.”

Did you know, though, that in the late 1990s, the text was updated to reflect the modern state of feminine hygiene products?

Whereas in the original novel, published in 1970, Margaret “attached a Teenage Softie to the little hooks on my pink belt”, in the 21st century version Margaret “peeled the paper off the bottom of the pad” and “pressed the sticky strip against my underpants.”

When I was in elementary school and reading this book for the first time, circa 1979 or 1980, the sanitary napkin belt had been banished, but the maxi-pad dispenser in the school washroom still stocked those diaperish inch-thick pads you clipped to your underpants with safety pins. The revolution to microthin protection and ‘wings’ had yet to occur.

When I first read that the publisher had updated Are You There God, my immediate response was that it was a nice idea, making the story more relevant and accessible to modern readers. But then I started to really think about it, aided in part by a reading of Rebecca Traister’s recent article in Salon (also excerpted in my weekend Ottawa Citizen which, once again, I would link to if the Web site would load).

The more I think about it, the more I wish the publishers had left the original version to stand. For one thing, how often to we go quietly mucking about with literature to ‘update’ it? Should we apply the same reasoning to rewrite Catcher in the Rye and substitute Holden Caufield’s hunting hat for a baseball cap while we’re at it?

More importantly, though, is that by updating some of the seemingly inconsequential details in the novel, we’re cutting tiny threads that tie us to our past. It’s good to know that even though some of the mechanics of the turbulent transition that is puberty might have changed, the underlying hopes, desires and expectations are the same, generation after generation.

Traister, born in 1975, writes:

And while it may seem minor – so very minor, such a few small sentences in a 150-page book that’s just about as much as God and making your boobs grow as it is about periods – I’m actually glad for the sense it gave me that as recently as five years before I was born, girls had very different hassles during puberty. I’m glad I know a bit about what they were. I’m glad other young women know about some of the technology they can be grateful for (wings!) even if they, like me and many others, don’t share Margaret’s undiluted enthusiasm for the onset of monthly bleeding.

I said earlier that Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was one of the first times I thought to myself, “Oh wow, you mean it’s not just me?” And here we are, these many years later, discussing this wonderful, compact and timeless little book on the forum where I now turn to be reminded that no, it’s not just me.

I’ve long intended to stock our bookshelves with Judy Blume’s books for the boys – I think they’d like SuperFudge, and Ramona. I’ll make sure to pick up this one too, if I can find a second-hand copy. They might never read it, but I know I will.

What do you think? Was it a good idea to make the book more relevant to generations who grew up with ‘wings’, or should we have left well enough alone?