Month: April 2007

Yay day

Back in the day, before I had all things bloggy (and Facebook-y) to satisfy my online urges, I spent a lot of time on bulletin boards – in particular, on IVF Connections.

One feature I always liked was the brag thread, where people would talk about how baby rolled over for the first time, or ate her first cheerio, or slept more than two hours in a row. Sometimes it was something major like ‘we just bought a new house’, or ‘I just earned my dream job’, but sometimes it was as simple as ‘I managed to take a shower and feed the kids breakfast before the schoolbus arrived this morning.’

We don’t do enough bragging, in my humble opinion. We need to speak up more often about the simple joys and subtle victories in our daily lives. Want to play along?

I’d like to know what’s going on in your life today that makes you happy. What’s worthy of commentary? What are you proud of? Why do you (or someone you know) deserve a pat on the back? Share an anecdote of how life is good in your little corner of the universe right about now.

Here’s a simple one for me: my pants are too big. I have had to give up many, many pairs of pants in my life because they were too small, but aside from maternity clothes I don’t think I’ve actually had to stop wearing a pair of pants because they were too large – and I’m not averse to wearing baggy, oversize clothes either! But the pants I bought just after Christmas to accomodate my burgeoning butt are no longer fit for public consumption. I knew they were getting looser, but I’ve been trying to keep them in circulation until the weather improved enough to transition into my spring pants. After two colleagues pointed out (with great kindness) that they were more than a wee bit saggy in the butt, I’ve had to face the truth. The pants are too big.

Yay me! I’ve only lost about 6 pounds in total, but I’m getting there.

Edited to add: another thing that makes me happy – I just found out that Loukia nominated me for one of the Blogger’s Choice Awards!

My site was nominated for Best Parenting Blog!

Thanks Loukia! And if you happen to feel like wandering over there and voting for me (you have to sign up to do it – what a pain!), then make sure you vote for Marla while you’re at it!

And now – what about you?

Fancy feets

You know that snowstorm that wallopped the Northeastern USA, Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces on Monday? Yah, sorry about that. Mea culpa. You see, I bought some new spring shoes on the weekend, thus condemning us to at least six more weeks of winter (I’m far more reliable than Wiarton Willie or Punxsutawney Phil!)

I’m not really a shoe person. Mostly, I buy shoes because it’s not socially acceptable to pad around in my socks all day. Not terribly comfortable in February, either. So shoes are a functional thing for me. I have some black ones, some brown ones. I have a couple of pairs for work, one of which is good for skirts. I have my winter boots (new and a steal from Globo this year) and a pair of Guess backless canvas tennis shoes that have come a long way from their original white. I have a pair of sandals for summer, of course, and a kicky little pair of cream coloured dress sandals with kitten heels I got last summer to wear to work. I have a pair of Timberland hikers that I have worn within an inch of their lives, and a pair of Saucony runners that I paid a comparatively small fortune for, but I love them. My single foray into the world of fashionable shoes has been this adorable pair of navy ballet flats with orange and cranberry and emerald embroidery and (gasp!) sequins that I bought last summer.

(Aren’t they cute? And I paid a stunning TWELVE dollars for them.)

So I own probably ten pairs in all, maybe a dozen. It seems to me an excess of shoes, shoes for every occassion. They’re all very nice, very functional, mostly comfortable and (with the exception of my fancy little ballet flats above) terribly uninteresting shoes.

My skirt shoes (I really have just one pair, a staid black pump with a two-inch heel and a square toe) had worn down considerably in the four years since I bought them to wear to work after my maternity leave with Tristan had ended. So this season, I found myself in need – okay, in want – of a new pair of skirt shoes.

I was in the mall on the weekend looking for new pants for Tristan (post for another day = what the holy hell do boys do to their pants that is so hard on the knees?) and I just happened to pop into Payless on my way by.

I started off looking for something in a staid black pump with a two-inch heel and a square toe. What I found was a sassy little patent leather(ish) slingback with kitten heels and a flirty little bow. LOVED them! I haven’t worn patent leather shoes since I was six years old, but I immediately and deeply loved them. I had to have them.

You’ll be shocked to hear that I was then mesmerized into buying a second pair by the buy-one-get-one-half-price devilry of Payless. As I mentioned, to date all my shoes have been variations on a safe neutral palette and conservative styling. But I’ve been studiously taking notes while watching Friday night episodes of What Not To Wear, and Clinton’s exhortation to punch it up with a bold splash of colour was rattling through my brain when I set my sights on a gorgeous pair of (he says red, she says coral) strappy summer shoes with a skinny wedge heel.

Aren’t they lovely? Red, strappy shoes. I feel so fancy! And so thrifty, too, because I paid only $40 for the lot, including tax.

(insert smug and fancy grin here)

But can I just take a minute to say that taking pictures of your own feet is not nearly so easy as it looks? Oh sure, the taking of the picture is easy enough, but the not making your legs look like sticks or amorphous blobs? Not so easy. Props to Marla, whose carefree feet photos seem as effortless as they are adorable. She is an unacknowledged master of the foot-photo, and of the foot family portrait.

So, bloggy friends, having just endured an entire post about my feet, do tell me about yours. Are you a shoe person? What are your favourite shoes?

How cool am I?

How cool am I? Why, thanks for asking. I am, in fact, way wicked cool. And terribly impressed with my sassy self at just this moment.

What’s got me so excited? Tickets to see Rush in concert, baby! The last great concert I need to see. I’ve been a Rush fan since I was ten years old and Moving Pictures came out – it was one of the first LP albums I ever owned. Geddy Lee is one of my personal heroes and Neil Peart is a demi-god. Rush!!

And not only am I cool enough to be going, but I’ve already got my tickets when they don’t even go on sale to the general public until Friday.

*pauses for ohs and ahs of befuddled wonderment and whispers of amazed curiousity*

I was futzing about on the ticketmaster.ca site, trying to figure out the prices, and I found something about advance fan-club sales. So I went on the Rush site, and followed the links on tour portion of the Web site. It gave me the secret code and I was in like Flynn! (And ya gotta know that only people who are so secure in their ultimate coolness are comfortable to use a phrase as hokey as “in like Flynn”, let me tell you.)

Rush! Me! In September! Squee!!

Post script – the conversation

I wanted to tell you that I finally managed to find enough courage to call our daycare provider and talk to her on the weekend, but I feel sad and melancholy about it now. It’s surprisingly hard to talk about it.

I had called her Sunday morning with the intention of meeting up with her later in the day, but she was getting ready to go out for the day and before I knew it I was spewing everything into the phone. While I managed to hit on all my salient points – she’s a great person and we were priviledged to have her caring for the boys for four years; it’s not about her so much as the circumstances of too many kids, one troublesome kid in particular and the fact that she’s geographically just a little bit too far away for easy convenience now that Beloved will be taking on more and more courses and working later more frequently – while I know I managed to say all of this eventually, it was with a complete lack of grace or eloquence.

She listened rather quietly while I rambled for a while, and said she wished we had brought up more of this earlier (which twisted a little knife of guilt in my heart – she’s right, of course, but I didn’t feel like I had a lot of right to be dictating her business to her and I am in the end a conflict-averse coward). She also said the key personality with whom I was having the trouble would be leaving at the end of June, and that made me feel really bad, too.

In the end, though, she was very graceful and told me that she would only consent to any of this if she could maintain contact with the boys and see them regularly – which is of course the point at which my chest and throat seized up and my eyes started to leak. Barely able to squeeze out any more words, I told her that I was near tears and had to go but that I was sorry, and grateful, and sorry again. I barely hung up the phone before bursting – surprise – into noisy, messy sobs.

My knee-jerk reaction was fear -again – that I was making a huge mistake. The fear of the unknown is a terrible, crippling monster. It took a long, hot shower and close to an hour before I could again remember all the things that brought me to this point in the first place. But I’m still a little numb with fear that we’ve made the wrong choice, that we’re being greedy and unrealistic in our expectations, that we’ve underestimated how good we have had it and that we’re in for a rude awakening. Time and only time will answer that question.

When Beloved dropped off the boys yesterday morning, she and he pretended blissful ignorace of my inelegant call the day before. When I picked them up, it seemed we too were going to follow that pattern. At the last minute, with both boys outside and one foot out the door myself, I turned briefly back to her and said, “I’m really sorry about yesterday, about all of this. I really meant it when I said we’ve been lucky to have you.” She replied by insisting that we stay in contact, because she’ll miss the boys. After a brief hug and more inane mutterings on my part about how much we like her, I managed to get out onto the porch before I started crying again.

They never tell you when you are glowing and blissfully round of belly, busy gestating your first baby, how many times your heart will be broken by this mothering thing. In the most unexpected of ways.

The one about Facebook

Back when I started blogging in January of 2005, a lot of my friends rolled their eyes. Half of them had no idea what the hell a blog was, and those that did (I’m looking at you, Ãœbergeek!) thought blogs were the domain of tech geeks and lovesick 14 year old diarists – not 30-something working mothers of preschoolers. Since then, a few more people have discovered blogging – like 30 or 40 million people – and blogging has become fairly mainstream.

In the same vein, try to keep an open mind when I told you that I am newly addicted to yet another social medium: Facebook.

*pauses to wait for gales of laughter and rolling of eyeballs and slapping of knees to subside*

Yes, I know. I know. There are multitudinous reasons that I should not be spending precious time and brain cells on Facebook. One of them is that I don’t have enough time for all the crap in my life as it is, without adding another time sink. Another is that I’m actually over the legal age of majority, unlike the vast majority of other people on Facebook. But, I’m hooked.

So what is Facebook? Well, I’m still a bit of a newbie, and I only this week realized I could do stuff like import my own blog feed to show up in my profile. But you have a profile, just like any other social media site, and you can sign yourself up for various networks like where you live, where you went to school and where you work. (Beloved is a college teacher, and at the beginning of the year, they had a community police officer speaking at a staff meeting who opined that Facebook is the single most dangerous tool young people are using, because of the huge amount of personal information they share and how naive they are about posting their full names, addresses, mobile numbers and whatnot. Ottawa tech blogger EngTech had a great article about modifying your privacy settings to protect yourself, if you’re interested.)

The addictive part, aside from the networks, is of course the interactivity. You can chat, or send messages to your friends. There are also ‘groups’ that you can join, which are basically bulletin boards with photo sharing capability. That’s the quick and dirty – I’m quite convinced there’s far more to it than I am aware, but that’s what I’ve figured out by playing around with it.

It took a while. I signed up for an account maybe six weeks ago out of sheer curiousity. I figured if I’m going to speak with any authority about this social media stuff, I ought to take a peek and see what it’s all about. So I signed up, created a bare-bones profile, and took a little tour. I checked my high school graduating class (Catholic Central Secondary in London, class of 1988) and not a single person was registered. I typed in the names of a few friends, old and new. Nothing. And I shrugged and said, whatever, and went back to catching up on bloglines.

Maybe a week or so later, I commented on one of Suze’s blog posts about Facebook, and she ‘friended’ me, and then so did a couple of other people. Pretty soon I had a dozen or so friends, most of them from the blogosphere but a few from work, too. Then a really old friend, one from grade school and high school and one of the last people I would ever expect to see online (Fryman – it was Gary! Remember Gary??) friended me just before Easter.

Right about that time, I discovered the weirdly addictive and voyeuristic habit of surfing my friends’ friend lists. I think that was the tipping point for me, where I started to actively check Facebook as part of my regular ‘check-comments-check-email-check-bloglines’ online routine. I’m still not wholly into it – yet. I signed up for a couple of groups, one for the KRZR bloggers, one for GTA bloggers and the people who read them, and one amusingly called “People who are too old for Facebook.” (And I’m even older than most of them! Yikes.)

Speaking of age, I don’t know whether it’s a coincidence of timing or something that just turned on in the collective DNA of my generation like the homing instinct of salmon, but it seems like my peers are suddenly flooding on to Facebook in massive numbers in the past month or so. My highschool graduating class suddenly has more than a dozen members (only one of which I’d be remotely interested in hearing from and most of whom I had never heard of.) My real-life and online friends are coalescing into cyber-existence at the rate of a new friend every day or two. This mad herding of the 30-something crowd, of course, is a sure sign that Facebook is no longer cool.

It’s not the cool factor that’s got me hooked, though. On the weekend, I discovered a new pastime, one that addicted me firmly and fully to Facebook: surfing the ‘friend list’ of minor celebrities. I’m not talking about A-listers here, not even B-listers. But I was fascinated by the friend list of David Akin, a political journalist who has ‘friended’ major Canadian politicians (Stephen Harper and Stephan Dion among them), celebrities like Rick Mercer, and writers like Paul Wells. (Props to Colin at Canuckflack.com, who got me stalking looking at David Akin’s profile in the first place.) And discovering them, I felt myself compelled to surf their friend lists, to see who else was cool and accessible. I’ve tried looking up a few favourite authors, for example, thinking maybe I’d be brave and send a note to say hello, but so far I haven’t found any of the ones I’ve tried.

Aside from the voyeuristic aspect of Facebook, which somehow seems even more personal than blogging, not to mention the ethics of stalking people I don’t actually know, there are social minefields to be navigated – especially for someone who considers a cocktail party unimaginably complex and fraught with potential peril. There is the issue, which has just happened to me, of what happens when someone you clearly don’t know tries to ‘friend’ you. I don’t want to be rude, especially since it’s entirely possible that I do somehow know this person perhaps somewhere in the distant recesses of my foggy memory (one more argument against the over-30 crowd being on Facebook – our social histories are just so much longer and more complex than the teenagers who can clearly remember the first grade when I can’t really dredge up clear memories of my early 20s.) At the same time, much like I struggle when asked to add a blog I don’t like to my blogroll, I don’t want to simply add friends willy-nilly. Call me old-fashioned, but stating someone is my friend means something to me.

Thank goodness I haven’t yet had to deal with the extreme awkwardness of having somebody I know but truly dislike trying to friend me. No, I’m not talking about you. But it is kind of ironic that even though I click every day to see who has signed up from my graduating class, with the exception of maybe half a dozen people, there is nobody from high school that I have the remotest earthly desire to hear from. Except maybe to puff up my chest and say ‘screw you, look how good my life turned out. Doesn’t it suck to be you in comparison?”

And I wonder why more people haven’t friended me.

So what do you think? Have you been on Facebook? Why or why not? Do you think Facebook is the new e-mail, and our grandparents will be doing it before long?

And, erm, if you’re on Facebook, feel free to look me up. If you can’t find me, send me an e-mail and I’ll tell you the secret clubhouse handshake to get in the door.

(Edited to add: one more reason to love Facebook – tonnes of Canadian content. From Kris Abel’s CTV blog today: “A recent explosion of new users has placed Toronto (Canada’s largest population centre) as the biggest group of users in the world (almost half a million), offering more members than both New York and Los Angeles combined.” I had no idea! I thought it was just a coincidence of geography that so many of the people I was stumbling upon were Canadian.)

Simon and the Incredibles

I’ve posted before about how Tristan’s increasing facility with the computer never fails to amaze me. Now, of course, Simon is hot on his heels.

Beloved has just set him up with his favourite Incredibles game, and he is clicking contentedly when suddenly he complains, “Mom! The game shut down!” This is a problem with our Cars game. It’s incompatible with our video card and tends to shut down randomly. We haven’t had the same problem with the Incredibles, though.

“What were you doing when it shut down?” troubleshoots Beloved.

“I clicked on exit and it shut down!” Simon replies indignantly.

Apparently there are nuances to the language that one has to acquire, at the tender age of three, before being completely successful with technology. The meaning of ‘exit’, for starters.

Dani’s day out in Toronto

After thirteen hours away and $150 in taxi fares, I’m back from my conference yesterday. I love traveling for business. I feel like such a grown-up. I’m a very infrequent flier, though, and I made a couple of rookie mistakes.

As I mentioned, I had to get up at four in the morning to catch my 6 am flight. I bought my coffee on the wrong side of the security barrier and of course coffee falls under the ban on liquids crossing the security checkpoint. By the time I made it through, the queue for the Tim Horton’s on the ‘safe’ side of the barrier was huge and I didn’t have time to wait for one. And then we lifted off into a giant storm of wind, snow and rain that was so turbulent that they cancelled the in-flight beverage service, so I didn’t actually get my first coffee of the day until I was in Pearson airport, nearly four hours after the alarm dragged me unwillingly to consciousness. (Note how I am far more disturbed by the lack of coffee than by the relentless and possibly life-threatening turbulence buffeting the plane. Who me, addicted?)

(Editorial aside: both my flights were late in leaving, but made up most of the delay in the air. Each way, terminal to terminal the 35 minute Ottawa-Toronto flight was actually shorter than my daily commute from Barrhaven to downtown on the bus. That just doesn’t seem right!)

But this conference – wow! It was the first ever Canadian word of mouth marketing conference, and I went wearning both my government-communicator-studying-social-media hat and my mommy-blogger hat. It was a great conference with some fantastic speakers. I met Janet Kestin, chief creative director at the agency behind the Dove Real Beauty campaign (including the Evolution video – you MUST click through if you haven’t seen it) and she was just so incredibly nice as I fawned at her. They had a raft of other top-drawer social media marketing types, including some truly excellent speakers. One of the funnier presentations was by Douglas Walker, the buy who founded the World Rock Paper Scisscors Society (talk about a grassroots word of mouth campaign!), and it was really interesting to hear how Lululemon runs their anti-marketing non-traditional campaigns (but I’m still annoyed at the company for not offering their clothes in sizes larger than 12.)

But what really blew me away was the presentation by Kyle MacDonald, better know to the world as the One Red Paperclip guy. I know I’ve blogged about him before – hasn’t everybody? – but damn if I can find the post. Anyway, he’s the guy who over 12 months in 2005/2006 traded – in a series of 14 trades that included a coleman camping stove, a cube van, and an afternoon with Alice Cooper – one red paperclip for a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan. It was a great story at the time, and I remember following it. But I had no idea of the full extent of the story until listening to his presentation yesterday. He’s a terrific and funny public speaker, and he tells his story with an endearling combination of aw-shucks modesty and wide-eyed optimism that I found truly irresistible (except that I’m probably almost old enough to be his mom. Sigh.) Sample: “If you ever get the chance to go on stage in Fargo with Alice Cooper, I highly recommend it.”

He talked about how each trade was meaningful for him, and had to be made in person with a handshake. When he had an offer for a recording contract that he knew he couldn’t ever use, he understood immediately that he could use it to make someone else’s lifelong dream come true. And he says he’ll never sell the house in Kipling, even though he doesn’t live there full time, because he feels people will ascribe a monetary value to his series of trades that he says would cheapen the whole experience. He’s got a book coming out this year, and I’ll have to pick it up now. What a great story!

Speaking of books, I was sitting at a table at the conference (completely by chance) with one woman from Random House, one woman from Simon and Schuster, and one woman who used to work for Harper Collins! Holy bookpublishing power table, Batman! You can bet I not-so-subtly started handing out my little bloggy Moo cards to anyone who would take one. I may be a long, long way to needing friends in the industry (heck, I already have one!) but it never hurts to make those connections. And besides, book publishers have books to share, and if I can’t be publishing my own stuff just yet, I’m more than happy to accept freebies of the people who have!

(Sorry, Marla. I made my flight last night and couldn’t stay over for the ticklefight and pocky buffet. Next time, I promise!)

Edited to add: it’s such a small world. I was kvetching with a guy over one of the coffee urns at the conference about the early start to my day as he drained the last of the coffee. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, turns out he is Ian from the Moto KRZR blog, the fellow who set me up with my fancy new phone. How funny is that?

My husband is a dumbass

I’m flying into Toronto for a marketing conference tomorrow – well, today by the time you’re reading this. My flight leaves Ottawa at 6 am, and I arrive in Toronto at 7:05. (In order to make my flight, I have to be at the airport at 5 am, which means getting up just after 4 am.)

Did I mention the 15 cm of snow in the forecast?

Then I leave Toronto at 6 pm and get back to Ottawa just after 7 pm.
No time for blogging – but think a kind thought for me as I hurry up and wait all day long!
(If you’re wondering, no the title of this post has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter. As I sat contemplating a title for this inauspicious post with my fingers poised over the keyboard, Beloved playfully suggested that maybe I should title it ‘my husband is a dumbass’ – so I did.)

On waste and waist management

I’ve been trudging along on my healthy-living / weight-loss campaign. I was doing okay in fits and starts – didn’t lose anything for the month of January, lost steadily a pound a week through February and into March and then it happened. The pepperoni arrived and blew my diet all to hell.

I was doing so well on watching what I was eating, until the week I ate FOUR ENTIRE PEPPERONI STICKS. And not just those little ones, either, but the ones as long as your forearm. What the hell causes a normal person to eat FOUR pepperoni sticks in a week (cough cough four days cough), you ask? My brother has this totally amazing butcher near his house, and he makes spicy pepperoni to die for. My folks visited one weekend and brought no less than six pepperoni sticks home for me.

I’m telling you, that stuff is meat mixed with crack. I’d cut myself a small piece and put it back in the fridge, intentionally hiding it behind other stuff so I couldn’t see it. I’d finish the bite I’d cut and start smacking my lips, salivating for more. Okay, I’d think, just another little piece, just a tiny bite. I’ll eat less at dinner. And after cutting off some more, I’d put the pepperoni away and the knife in the dishwasher and I’d still be back in the fridge five minutes later looking for more. And once it was half gone, well, there’s no sense in leaving it around for me to agonize over all night, right? Might as well polish it off. And at about the 3/4 mark, with my mouth tingling from the spiciness, I’d start to think that maybe I should stop now, but I wouldn’t be able to stop and so I’d just eat the whole damn thing. And then I’d have a righteous bellyache, because that’s really a disgusting amount of meat and fat(*) to consume as a snack. And yet, the next day I’d be right back at it, cutting myself just the tiniest sliver of the next one, just for a taste.

In the end, after four straight days of my pepperoni-stick-a-day habit, I threw the last two sticks in the garbage. I just couldn’t garner the willpower to resist them. I’m not kidding when I speculate that they are made with crack. Yummy, spicy, fatty crack. I gained two pounds that week.

Throwing food away is something new for me, and I’m very torn about it. I’ve been doing it since January, and I honestly think it’s one of the liberating concepts that have helped me actually lose weight this time. More than just leaving food on my plate, I’ve started to throw junk food away. I’ll eat a few chips and throw the rest of the bag away. Even more liberating, I’ll take a bite out of a cookie and throw the rest away. This works for me largely because I often only want a taste of something. Other than the crack-filled pepperoni, I’ve realized that I’m usually satisfied with most treats after a single bite or two.

The waste bothers me, of course. I’ve mentioned before that I have Scottish and Dutch roots, which combine to make me ruthlessly frugal when it suits my needs, and the idea of actually throwing away perfectly good food that I’ve spent perfectly good money to acquire disturbs me on a fundamental level. My grandmother on my father’s side would be rolling over in her grave right about now. Like so many people of her generation, she didn’t waste a scrap of food (or anything else for that matter) and the idea of taking a bite out of a cookie and simply tossing the rest of it in the garbage would have been horrifying to her.

But I remember reading a while back an article about controlling your eating that asked the question: are you a garbage can? When you are satisfied with something, you have two options: you can throw it away, or you can continue to eat it. When you continue to eat it, you become the garbage can, because the food has outlived it’s utility to you. I’ve really started to internalize this concept lately, and I try to find the point at which I’m satisfied and sacrifice the rest to the garbage can. It’s strangely empowering.

(Saving it for later is always an option, I suppose, but to me it defeats the purpose. Especially if something is a treat, like chips or a cookie, I will obsess about it if I know it is in the cupboard waiting for me. Throwing it away eliminates the temptation.)

And yes, I suppose simply not buying it in the first place is probably the most sensible option, but my willpower is a fearsome beast and if I can trick it into being placated with this simple sleight-of-hand, I’m willing to pay the price. Bottom line is, although the the pace has been glacial, the weight has been coming off. It took me three weeks to work off the two pounds of pepperoni weight, but I’m back on track.

(*) According to my favourite nutritional database, a single 10 inch (25 cm) pepperoni stick contains: 187% of your recommended daily sodium intake, 202% of your recommended daily saturated fat intake, more than half your daily calorie intake and a whopping 156% of your recommended daily fat intake. Yikes!

Breaking up is hard to do

It’s been a while since I talked about my daycare situation. The good news is we found someone we really like, close to home, with reasonable rates and summertime flexibility. I’m so so so happy with her, and can’t wait to move the boys over there. They will start on May 14, and she is willing to take them two days a week through the summer, just as I had originally hoped, and then move to full time care when Beloved’s summer ends in mid-August. All that searching, the anxiety and the frustration, seem to have been worthwhile. She is *exactly* the caregiver I was looking for, and I’ve only not mentioned it before now because the last two times I thought I had found ‘the one’ it fell through and I didn’t want to jinx this in any way.

That, of course, leads me to the bad news. I have to tell the boys’ current caregiver that I’m taking them out of her care. I’ve been dreading it for a month now, and I figure it’s only right to give her a month of notice before we end the relationship. It is a relationship – that’s what makes this so hard. It’s not like firing the cleaning lady, or going to a new hairdresser – both of which are painful experiences for me. Bobbie has been part of our extended family for almost four years, and I have no idea how to tell her that her services are no longer required.

I know what I want to tell her; it’s the how that’s tripping me up. I want to tell her that we decided to change care providers because of a few factors, very few of which have to do with her personally. I am very fond of her, as are the boys. But there are just so many kids at her place that I feel the boys are in danger of being lost in the shuffle. I want to tell her that my main concern is what they are picking up from the other kids, especially one in particular that has started attending the day care in the last few months. I want to tell her that it’s about the sheer quantity of kids, and that if we could go back to it just being her boys and my boys, like it was in the beginning (Tristan was the first child she took on) then I would happily leave the boys with her.

But I’m a coward. I don’t think I could tell her all this face-to-face without crying, and I especially don’t want to do it with a dozen kids crawling all over both of us, the way it usually is when we pick up or drop off the boys. I could call her on the phone, I suppose. Myself, I’m inclined to write a letter. I’ve always been a letter writer – when it’s really important, I like to have the time to organize my thoughts on paper and get everything out uninterrupted. But, I know it might seem cold to someone who doesn’t share that instinct, to get something as impersonal as a letter for something like this.

What do you think? How would you handle it, or how would you want to be informed if you were the caregiver? I’m terrible at confrontation, terrified of conflict. Am I making too much of this? It is, after all, a business relationship – just an excruciatingly painful one. Feels more like a breakup than a firing.

Is it wrong to just print out the relevant pages from blog and give give them to her? Okay, so maybe that’s not the best plan – but I’ve been worrying this for a month and still don’t have a plan. Have you been there? I’d appreciate your thoughts and insight – as always!