Worthy words and banished words

Okay, so retro is cool, right? And retro is basically recycling old stuff and making it new again, often by those who missed it the first time around, right? Grand, so I’m totally retro in finally remembering on St Patty’s Day that I forgot to put up my annual posts in January about the word of the year and the banished word of the year. I’m so kewl it hurts.

Right then. Word of the year for 2008 from our friends at the American Dialect Society is “bailout”. Excellent choice, IMHO.

In its 19th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “bailout” as the word of the year. In the specific sense used most frequently in 2008, bailout refers to the rescue by the government of companies on the brink of failure, including large players in the banking industry.

The winner was selected by popular vote, following nominations from the public. Subcategories include Most Useful (Barack Obama)(!), Most Unnecessary (moofing), Most Euphemistic (scooping technician), Most and Least Likely to Succeed (shovel-ready and PUMA, respectively), and Most Creative:

WINNER: recombobulation area: An area at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee in which passengers that have just passed through security screening can get their clothes and belongings back in order.

long photo: A video of 90 seconds or less. Used by the photo-sharing web site Flickr.

skadoosh: A nonsense interjection popularized by Jack Black in the movie Kung Fu Panda.

rofflenui: A blended New Zealand English-Maori word that means “rolling on the floor laughing a lot.”

Ironically — or perhaps not so much — “bailout” was also on the list of words nominated for banishment by Lake Superior State University’s “34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.”

Bailout was defeated, however, and the banishment crown went to “the ubiquitous ‘Green’ and all of its variables, such as ‘going green,’ ‘building green,’ ‘greening,’ ‘green technology,’ ‘green solutions’ and more.”

Not a bad choice, even if I do support the movement in principle. What should really be banished is the use of “green” as a marketing term. THAT would make me happy!

If I were to banish any one word from the English language, it would be “utilize.” I can’t tell you how much it makes me cringe to see this word “utilized” when good old “used” would do just fine. Maybe that’s because it’s usually “utilized” by officious users who never pass over a five dollar word when a nickel word would do, and by people who think turning any prose from active to passive voice is a stroke of creative genius. ( /rant)

What say ye, bloggy peeps? What words or phrases would you banish, should you suddenly find yourself King or Queen of the Language?

(And, can I just add one more quick coda to say how proud — and, honestly, a little surprised — I was yesterday when Tristan correctly used the subjunctive tense in the phrase “if I were allowed to” as opposed to “if I was allowed to”. Yay for internalizing obscure grammar rules!!!)

Five ideas for March Break fun

We’re booked solid for March Break this year with my brother and his family in town, but these are some of our favourite ways to fill time when everyone is home from school.

1. Digital camera scavenger hunt

You don’t need to use a camera for this – the low-tech version is just as fun – but the kids love the added element of the camera. Make up a list of things outside like “blue car” or “tall tree” or “mail box” or whatever is in your neighbourhood, and then set the kids free to find the things as a team. It can be as short or long a list as you think they have the attention-span to complete, and by using the camera you don’t have the problem of what to do with the stuff they collect (a problem we’ve had with other scavenger hunts, and on a daily basis simply because my kids are natural scavengers!) Rainy day or freezing cold outside? Make it an indoor scavenger hunt with things like, “Daddy’s socks” and “blue shampoo bottle.” MommyClub.ca printed some great ideas for scavenger-hunt inspiration last fall if you’re stuck for ideas.

2. Beads

Last summer, in those long days of late August, I trundled the boys off to the bead store in desperation for something to do. I had no idea we’d stumbled upon one of our favourite craft ideas for the year. Don’t just buy bulk beads from the craft store, though; bring them to an actual bead store and let them pick four or five “special” beads from the bins, and then make up the difference with pony beads or other plain beads. Last year, Tristan loved one particular ceramic bead painted in a blue abstract and a musical note bead while Simon loved his soccer ball and yellow doggie bead. You can also get a mixed bag of discards… they loved the ones that looked like crystals in a bag I thought was rather uninspiring. Letter beads are also a hit if you don’t mind forking over a bit more cash.And make sure you don’t choose the cord that is plastic and stretchy – it’s impossible to knot. Get nice thready cord.

When they finished making necklaces for everyone in the house and bracelets for Granny and Papa Lou and the rest of the extended family, all the Webkinz got new collars and we made enough bookmarks to last a year. They LOVED the bead craft!

3. What’s in the bag?

You need a bag about the size of a shoe box for this. A fabric bag is best, like a shoe bag, and a recyclable shopping bag works well, too. You have to do a bit of advanced legwork for this one. Collect a bunch of stuff that has interesting shapes, sizes and textures. Dinky cars, a carrot, a bar of soap, a sock — whatever! One at a time, put an item in the bag and see if your child can guess what it is by feel alone. So simple, and surprisingly entertaining. We always end up laughing.

4. Treasure maps

This is similar to the scavenger hunt. Our nanny made up a treasure hunt for each of the boys for their birthday gift, with ten rhyming clues leading them throughout the house. If I didn’t love her before this, when I read the work that had gone into her clues I knew she was terrific. Sample: “Under the place you sit to dine, you will find clue number 9!” The treasure at the end can be something small, because it’s the hunt that makes up the fun. If you’re feeling less wordy, you can just draw a treasure map with a nice big X that marks the spot.

5. Magazine cut-out books

I could spend hours doing this when I was a kid. Find some old magazines and catalogues destined for the blue box, and some construction paper. Cut pictures, words and letters out of the magazines to create a little story book. So simple, but creative and entertaining.

That’s my top five. (I’m toying with this as a new category for the blog: “five things”. Stay tuned to see if anything comes of it!) Care to share with the class? Got any other ideas for March Break fun?

(If you’re in Ottawa, you might also want to check out my post from last summer, 40 fun family freebies.)

The end of an era; or, my breasts are not so evil after all

It’s been a good long time since I wrote about my breasts, hasn’t it? Vexatious things have been behaving themselves lately, but surely we’re overdue to complain about them. Ironically, I just glanced at the “one year ago today” widget down there in the sidebar, and one year ago today I was just finding out that my milk wasn’t enough to sustain Lucas on its own, and that we’d have to start supplementing. I wasn’t averse to supplementing, but I was worried that if there were problems with my milk to begin with that I wouldn’t be able to keep nursing for as long as I had wanted to. At the time, I really just wanted to make it to the twelve-month mark. I’d almost made it that far with Tristan, and went a little beyond it with Simon.

Guess what? One year later, and we’re still doing it! So I’m putting it out here on the interwebs for all future searchers to see: you can start supplementing your newborn with a bottle or two of formula and still keep nursing for a year or more! I so desperately wanted someone to reassure me of that a year ago. We started with one bottle of formula a day and that wasn’t enough so we moved to two when he was around six weeks old. I continued nursing Lucas three to four times a day in addition to the formula, dropping one feed in January and one in February. We switched the formula over to milk last month when he turned one year old, and I still nurse him just before he goes to bed.

I think, though, that it’s just about time for us to give that up. Sigh. He only nurses for a couple of minutes, usually not more than five. I’m sure he’s not getting much from it, but I’m so sad about ending this chapter in my life that I don’t want to stop. Poor Lucas, can’t even grow up without dealing with his mother’s emotional baggage!

Think maybe we can carry on this little five-minute interlude of babyness for another month or two? How did you know it was time to wean your wee one? Did circumstance dictate that you had to stop, or did you just drift slowly away from it? To be honest, I can’t even remember the final time I nursed either of the other boys, so it couldn’t have traumatized me too much. Tell me your weaning story, and pass the kleenex — he may be almost walking and have a vocabulary of six words already, but I’m just not ready to end this part of his babyness!

Ch-ch-ch-changes

So you know I hate change. Really, I do. It took me four years to finally change my gravatar photo, for goodness sake, and it pained me to do so. Even when I know I’m going to like the new thing better, I’m still reluctant to let go of the old thing. (I was going to make a cheeky comment here about my marriage, but maybe we shouldn’t go there! *smooches to Beloved*)

Ahem, anyway, about change. I’ve been wanting to update the blog for quite some time now. I’ve spent hours scouring the interwebs for new WordPress themes, and, well — meh. I’ve found some that I *almost* like. Design Disease has some good ones (Andrea has a great one on her blog) and BlogOhBlog comes pretty darn close to what I want with a few of their themes… but not quite. I’ve downloaded more than a dozen different themes to play with, but they either don’t work properly, or I can’t figure out how to customize them to suit my needs. I even downloaded a little DIY theme designer program, but after toying with it a bit I’ve figured out that I have exactly the wrong amount of knowledge — just enough to know exactly what I want, but not enough to make it so. Sigh.

So here’s what I’m hoping. Either you know this really great site with just the perfect theme for me that I can download and use out of the box with breathtaking results, or you have this friend who does sensational custom blog designs and is just itching for a new, low-cost/high-affection client to add to his portfolio. Not too much to hope for, eh?

Here’s what I want:

  • Three-column (two sidebar) non-fixed format (do they call that “fluid”?) I’m not sure what the terminology is, but I don’t want it the way it is now, with a box around the text and sidebar. I want it more open – but boxes around the sidebar widgets is okay.
  • The design should tend toward the minimalistic — not a lot of graphics.
  • Must be colourful: I like the idea of multicoloured tabs across the top, and multicoloured sidebar boxes with rounded corners (or, at least, multicoloured title boxes.)
  • If you haven’t noticed (ha!) I’m all about teh Flickr lately, so I’d like a design that showcases my pictures either in the banner or the sidebar – or both!
  • It has to be fully widgetized, because I like the stuff in the sidebar and would probably add even more stuff. (Thus the need for two sidebars.)

Talk to me about blog design. How did you pick yours? What should I do with mine? What do you love and hate about blog designs you’ve seen? What should I make sure to do and what should I avoid at all costs? And speaking of costs – premium themes are not out of the question, but they have to be pretty damn good to get me to fork out any cash, so if you know of a good site, do let me know!

Project 365: meta-pictures!

As promised, here’s the picture that accompanied the article in yesterday’s G&M. Conveniently, also Day 50 of my Project 365!

50:365 Look Ma, Wii're famous!

I had a much better week with the project this week. Some really fun shots and some neat opportunities. For Tristan’s birthday, we brought the kids bowling and I used the black-lighting to play with slow-sync flash, like these:

47:365 Fun with slow-sync flash

and

Slow-sync flash 5 (47b:365)

I liked the way this one turned out enough that I’ve finally replaced the five-year-old gravatar photo of me holding Tristan in a diaper and baby Simon:

46:365 Me

And I got out on Sunday and took some great pictures of the old fence I showed you the other day, and some of the ice on the Jock river breaking up. That and some old shoes gave me lots of photo fodder for the week:

Ice 1 of 2 (48b:365)Ice 2 of 2
Fence posts 1 of 248:365 Fence posts 2 of 249:365 Spring is fickle

Most of these have captions on Flickr, if you want to click through for a peek. There’s a perfectly good reason I took a picture of those old running shoes crusted in snow!

Hey, who’s that good-looking family on the cover of the Life section in today’s G&M?

Oh look, it’s us!

A couple of weeks ago, a writer from the Globe and Mail got in touch with me to ask about “Gaming Moms”. We chatted for a bit, and told her that while I’m not exactly a gaming mom, I have grown quite fond of our Wii after some initial reservations about bringing a video game system into the house. She asked if she could send a photographer over, and I said, “Hmm-let-me-think-about-it-okay-how’s-right-now?”

gm-10mar09

(Yeah, whatever, they juxtapositioned me playing video games with my family against Michelle Obama going to the gym. Thanks for THAT, G&M editors.)

The article itself is on page 2, and there’s a second picture that I like so much more. I’ll scan it tonight and put it up for you.

And yes, as a matter of fact a quarter after five on a weekday is perhaps the most inopportune possible time that one could invite a photographer from Canada’s National Newspaper over for a photo shoot. Hungry kids, tired parents, and the boys absolutely torqued with excitement: “We get to play Wii? Before dinner?? On a school night?!?”

Bit of a shame that she didn’t mention my other child, the blog, in the article. Ah well, one more clipping to add to the family therapy scrap book!

Sugar, sugar (maple, maple!)

Hey Ottawa peeps – got a question for you! Now that the snow is melting and the sun is bright, the sap is running and it’s maple syrup season again. Hooray for spring!!

My brother and his family are coming up to visit for the March Break, and I thought it would be fun to do Sunday morning breakfast at a sugar shack, so I’m collating a list of the best ones in the area. Bare necessities include family-friendly pancake breakfast and maple taffy on the snow, but bonus points for easy hiking trails, wagon rides, animals, and play structures or activities for the kids. I’d prefer something on the Ontario side of the river, but if you know of a really stellar cabane à sucre in la belle province, let me know! Charm also wins out over cafeteria-style folding chairs and stacking tables.

Mmmmm, maple sugar…

And, à propos of nothing, but possibly segueing on the theme of spring, can I show off this picture that I took yesterday that I think is one of my best so far?

48:365 Fence posts 2 of 2

Sort of captures the whole spring-melt-sunshine-on-snow feeling of maple season, doesn’t it?

A love letter to Tristan, age 7

My darling Tristan,

Today, you turn seven years old. Uncle Sean calls this your “champagne birthday”: seven years old on March 7. By coincidence, you’ve invited seven guests to your party, and the weather is even forecasting a high of 7 degrees! Remind me to go buy a Super 7 ticket for you, okay?

Tristan, this has been the year that you and I became friends as well as mother and son. This is the year you learned the fun of the inside joke, and the year you showed us a peek into what the future may hold with three big boys in our house.

DSC_2226

When I look back on the last year, the image I will remember most clearly is of you hunched over the kitchen table, markers and pencil crayons arrayed around your latest creation, be it book or drawing or comic. You are endlessly creative, my son, and you never fail to surprise me with your ideas and your ability. I’ve watched you turn a cereal box into a guitar and a packing crate into a rocket ship, with no prompting or suggestions from us. In fact, the problem now is what to do with your endless creations: before I can recycle that old tissue box it gets reinvented as a school bus for Webkinz. Endlessly charming, for sure, but we’re already a family that has clutter issues and now we’re swimming in random drawings and discarded art projects, too.

You are my adventurer, my athlete, my explorer. This summer, you astonished me by learning to jump off the diving board and cavort in the deep end of the pool long before I thought you’d be ready for it. You took skating lessons and went from barely able to stand to zooming around the rink with fearless abandon in just a few weeks. You love to climb, to leap, and to run. It’s nothing short of lovely, if not exhausting, to watch you move. And I’m constantly scolding you to stop using the furniture in your athletic endeavours!

DSC_1510

But you are a scholar, as well. You read well beyond your Grade 1 level, and because you are a renaissance child, you also do well in math. You have a sweet crush on your French teacher, and your accent is better at seven years old than mine is after 30 years of lessons. You want to please everyone so badly that sometimes you become overly anxious about performance and results, and you get that entirely from me. I’m so sorry!

You have yet to “discover” girls, but the girls have definitely discovered you. While I’ve long since become accustomed to sorting the love notes and heart-covered drawings from your school bag, I was left in open-mouthed shock just a week or so ago as one brazen little girl dashed over to kiss you goodbye on the cheek as we left the school yard. I think you are still generally nonplussed by the attention you get from the girls, and I think you’d be just as happy if they stopped their constant demands of “who are you going to marry,” but trust me: you’ll love it one of these days.

DSC_0644

You are a wonderful older brother to Simon and Lucas. Simon is both your best friend and, not surprisingly, your arch nemesis. I love to listen in as you provide sage and worldly advice to Simon on the rules of school; ironically, just a few weeks ago one such nugget exclaimed in horrified reaction was, “There is NO kissing at school!” You are unbelievably patient with Lucas, and you love to make him laugh. You are even responsible enough now that I can leave Lucas in your care for a few minutes and know that he will be safe and well entertained.

Brothers

At seven, your favourite things include Pokémon, Webkinz, Fairly Odd Parents and SpongeBob SquarePants. You have been working your way through the Warriors series of books at bedtime with Daddy for weeks now, and you all seem enthralled by them. You also love to play the Wii, including Star Wars Lego and Big Brain Academy. We see all of these interests come out in your drawings and in your imaginative play with Simon, and it’s fascinating to watch.

DSC_2460

This has been a fun and playful year with you, my sweet and handsome Tristan. Every single day with you is a joy, and I wish you the happiest of birthdays and a year brimming with love and adventure.

Project 365: Week 6 – where the going gets tough!

It’s official, I’m obsessed with my photo-a-day Project 365 now. In addition to carrying a camera with me everywhere, and I mean *everywhere* (you get weird looks coming out of a public washroom with a camera around your neck, that’s all I’m sayin’) and looking at everything in the world around me as if I were holding a camera up to my face, I’ve started dreaming about taking pictures. Yep, obsessed.

You wouldn’t know it to look at my pictures from the last week or so, though. I’ve hit one of those creative dry patches, pretty much summed up in day 43’s entry:

43:365 Missing my muse

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about photography, and spending a lot of time trying to deconstruct other people’s photographs to see what makes them work. In a way, it’s good because I’m getting ideas and learning how to go beyond simply capturing moments, but bad because I’m realizing that I’m not nearly as clever as I thought I was. As if that weren’t bad enough, I’ve also been endlessly frustrated this week that what I “see” and what the camera creates are not really the same — sometimes not even close. In other words, the theme this week is “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”!

One of the 365 themes suggested this week was toys, and I actually had a little while to set up this shot and play with it a bit. I liked it the best of all the ones I took, and it seemed to have a lot going for it: nice depth of field and colours, leading lines, more or less follows the ‘rule of thirds’, and a little bit clever because I *almost* managed to get a self-portrait in the shiny bit of the magnet.

44:365 Toy train self portrait

But the angle is just a little bit off, and now that’s all I can see. Plus, the self-portrait really isn’t clear enough. And although I played with a couple of different exposures on this one, it’s still not quite right — but I’m not sure why. I can’t figure out how to take my pictures from “okay” to “wow”, yanno?

This was also the week that I learned to love my discards. I was not originally happy with either of these pictures, but they’ve grown on me:

40:365 Will winter never end?

37:365 Happy Birthday Granny!

(as I captioned it on Flickr, nothing says “Happy Birthday Granny” like an armload of laughing grandsons!)

Here’s the rest of them from the past week or so:
38:365 A long way down39:365 Red sky in the morning....41:365 Jade and shadow42:365 The one where Lucas imitates Hitchcock45:365 Keyed up

I read somewhere that your first 10,000 pictures are your worst. Somehow, that makes me feel better! If the internal meter on my Nikon is to be believed, I’m more than half way there!

More thoughts on keeping kids safe online

Now that my boys are five and (almost) seven and are regular users of the computer and the Internet, I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about online safety. Conveniently, I’ve also been offered a couple of blog tours lately that touch on the same subject. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about NetSmartz efforts to keep kids safe online, including a list of tips for safe surfing. This week, I’m looking at a new tool called Norton Online Family, designed to help parents monitor and modify their kids’ online behaviour. (Disclosure: I’ll receive a $20 gift card from Amazon for being a part of the MomCentral blog tour supporting the launch of Norton Online Family.)

I wanted to be a part of this tour because I’ve been curious for some time about the “net nanny” tools that are available. Symantec’s Norton Online Family lets you set up a personalized family account with information about each member of your family, and offers the following services:

  • Check a child’s activity or modify a child’s profile, preferences, or time allotment anytime and anywhere using any Internet-connected device.
  • All online activities are reported in chronological order and only show the Web sites a child intended to visit – eliminating all the extra URLs, like ads, from Web sites.
  • Easily view what words and phrases a child uses to search and where those searches lead online.
  • Control the Web content that flows into the home by prohibiting more than 40 topic categories.
  • Track, report and prevent personal information that a child may purposely or accidentally try to send via e-mail, IM or social networking site.
  • Monitor activity on social networks like Facebook and MySpace with the ability to see how kids represent themselves, when they login and how often.
  • Built-in messaging allows parents to have real-time discussions with children about activities and better understand their intentions when visiting a Web site.
  • Children are able to view the “house rules” they established with parents at any time and are notified when Norton Online Family is active, so there is no “stealth” mode.
  • Parents can customize e-mail alerts to address urgent events so they know immediately when a child has reached a time limit or visited a blocked site, etc.
  • An easy-to-use time management feature that – if parents find it necessary – gives each child a “curfew” that will limit computer usage.

I have to be totally honest here: when I first signed up, I liked the idea of having some sort of filter to keep the scariest parts of the Internet at bay (we’ve been caught off guard with searches as simple as “Star Wars Lego”) but I stopped about half way into the process of setting up an account for this service. It’s a great service if you want this kind of monitoring and control — but I don’t think it’s right for us, at least not right now. I’d much rather set the kids up with a few favourites, and help them find new sites when they are looking for something. Maybe in a few years, we’ll need this kind of scrutiny and monitoring, but this seems a little bit too extensive for our needs right now.

If I had a little more time in the day, I’d’ve likely gone ahead and played around with the service a little bit more anyway, and with a sponsored review I would have liked to be more thorough. It’s not that I don’t think this is a good tool — I just question whether it’s the right tool for our family at this moment in time.

On other hand, I was totally impressed yesterday when I stumbled across this: Kid Rex, a safe-search engine from the people at Google. From their “info for parents” page:

KidRex is a fun and safe search for kids, by kids! KidRex searches emphasize kid-related webpages from across the entire web and are powered by Google Custom Search and use Google SafeSearch technology.

Google’s SafeSearch screens for sites that contain explicit sexual content and deletes them from your child’s search results. Google’s filter uses advanced technology to check keywords, phrases, and URLs. No filter is 100 percent accurate, but SafeSearch should eliminate most inappropriate material.

In addition to Google SafeSearch, KidRex maintains its own database of inappropriate websites and keywords. KidRex researchers test KidRex daily to insure that you and your child have the best web experience possible.

This is the tool that we need right now for our family. Love the idea, love the interface. If you want to keep a closer eye on what your kids are doing online when you aren’t able to be there, the Norton Family Online service looks like an excellent choice. But if you just want a kid-friendly search engine, I’m highly impressed with KidRex.

What do you think? Beloved and I have been debating our need for parental control software. He thinks the Norton Family Online service is an excellent and necessary tool. I think it’s our role as parents to provide this kind of filter, especially while the kids are very young. Then, again, he also says they’ll ‘never’ be allowed to have a Facebook or MySpace page, an argument I suspect he’ll lose sooner rather than later.

How do you balance trust, autonomy, and teaching your kids to make the right choices against the possibility of exposure to some of the undoubtedly ghastly stuff out there on the Interwebs?