Category: It IS all about me

Thank you Canadian Family Magazine!

I‘ve been a fan of Canadian Family magazine online for quite a while now, so when the boys were selling magazines to raise funds for their school, I bought a subscription to Canadian Family (and one to Popular Photography, too!) I’ve been consistently impressed with it — articles worth reading, shopping tips for real families, and excellent recipes. (If I weren’t so pressed for time, I’d link to a few of the articles I enjoyed — stay tuned, I’ll try to remember to come back and do that!)

All that to say, I was honoured to get an e-mail last week letting me know that Canadian Family had chosen Postcards from the Mothership as one of its Top 53 Mommy Blogs. Here’s my little page in their slideshow, and here’s a link to all the awesome blogs they featured, by category. (Scroll down, past the graphic at the top. The content is in the middle of the page.)

Thank you so much for including me, Canadian Family. I’m honoured to be in such good company!

Edited to add: And look, there’s badges!!

canadianfamily.ca

If there’s badges, it *must* be cool! 😉

The 100 Push-ups Challenge — Week 3 Revisited

Oops. I kind of dropped the ball on the 100 push-up challenge last week. First, the exhaustion test tired me out so efficiently on Monday that I didn’t do Day 1 until Tuesday — and after that, I was so off kilter that I completely forgot to do Day 2 until Saturday at the gym, and by then I’d pretty much given up on Week 3 entirely.

I call for a do-over!

Besides, is it me or is the jump from Week 2 intensity to Week 3 intensity a little harsh? From the end of Week 2 to the beginning of Week 3 the darn thing demands an extra ten or a dozen push-ups. Yeesh!

And hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you — what exactly is the definition of “rest time” between sets? I can sit and stare at my iPod counting down the 60 seconds between sets on Day 1, but the 120 seconds on Day 3 seems like an awfully long pause. Am I allowed to do anything except wish I were naturally muscular doing the rest period? I’ve taken to tidying between sets. Five sets with two minutes between each = 10 minutes of cleaning, which is more than I do on most days. (Not really. But every little bit helps!)

Or am I allowed to do some other exercise that doesn’t tax my already shaky arms? Leg lifts, maybe? What do you think? Or should I just lie on the floor in the child position and wait for the universe to send me more energy so I can get through the next set?

Week 3, here I come! Again.

The 100 Push-ups Challenge – Week 3

Okay, bloggy peeps — time to check in with your push-up progress! I’m so tickled to see another handful of brave souls have joined the challenge. *waves to Liisa and Shannon and Ingrid and Andrea and Brenda and maybe Lynn, too*

So here’s my confession for the week: I only barely made it to Week 3. I didn’t realize until this week that there’s a test (a test!) every two weeks, and if you can’t make the minimum threshold then you are supposed to go back and re-do the previous week or two. I’ve been using the iPod app to track my progress, and when I switched it on to begin Week 3 last night, it told me I should do an exhaustion test — that is, do as many push-ups in a row as I could.

On the one hand, I was pretty pleased that I could do 16 good-form push-ups in a row. (Remember, less than a month ago I could do only one!) On the other hand, I only barely made it into Week 3 — the app and the web site both suggest that you progress with Week 3 only if you can do more than 15 push-ups in your exhaustion test.

And exhausted is right! As soon as I finished the exhaustion test and figured out where I was supposed to be, I tried to go ahead with the Week 3 Day 1 program of 10, 12, 7, 7 and 9 push-ups and could barely squeak out a set of 8 before collapsing in a quivering heap on the carpet. So I’m officially starting Week 3 tonight with a fresh run at it.

How are y’all doing? Making progress? I took a peek ahead, and I may be stuck in Weeks 3 and 4 for quite some time — you’re supposed to be able to do a minimum of 30 in a row (!!) before you progress to Week 5. This may be a longer six weeks than I thought!!

The 100 Push-ups Challenge – Week 2

Well, this push-up thing has taken on a life of its own — as seems to be the case in an alarming number of things in my life! What started out as a poorly formed idea to be able to do *some* proper, full-body push-ups, with perhaps the capability to do some unspecified amount of *more* push-ups by some date three or four months in the future has now migrated into a formal challenge where a bunch of us are going to try to do 100 push-ups. In SIX WEEKS!

Yeesh, that peer pressure thing never really does go away, does it? So far, I know Finola and Nat and Christy and Barbi are playing along — did I miss anyone?

And you know what the really funny part is? I’m already a quarter of the way to the goal! Yep, yesterday, for Day 1 of Week 2, I managed to do 26 push-ups. Remember, it’s only been three weeks since I first tried and could not do a single push-up, and now I can do 26. Yay!

Here’s the secret — it’s not 26 all in a row. This hundredpushups.com site has an amazing program where you start out doing two push-ups, then rest for 60 seconds, then churn out three, then rest — it’s almost too easy that way. And it increases incrementally, so yesterday I did five sets of 4, 6, 4, 4 and 8 push-ups with 60 second rest-periods in between — 26 push-ups in five minutes. On the site, they have a tracker so you can log your progress, and if you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, there’s an app for that!

So I knew that I’d probably improve the muscle tone and shape of my arms and shoulders (hello sleeveless season!) but what I didn’t expect is that between the push-ups and the rowing machine I’m suddenly starting to see a lot of definition in my abs. Mind you, it’s definition with about 3/4 of an inch of belly fat, but definition none-the-less. After five pregnancies and three 10 lbs babies, I’m now working on my first-ever six pack — who would have guessed it!!

So there you go, I’m officially more than 1/4 of the way to the ludicrous and accidental goal of being able to to 100 push-ups. Ain’t serendipity grand?

The push-up challenge

I like to think of myself as strong. Not just emotionally, but physically strong, too. I’ve got a pretty good constitution, and I know my legs are strong because I regularly set the weight machines at the gym to about double where I find them at. I can easily do a dozen or more leg extensions and curls at 100 lbs, and I’m finding the lower back extension thingee a little too easy at 160 lbs lately.

What I lack, though, is upper body strength. It drove me crazy that even after carrying around my ginormous babies who turned into ginormous toddlers, and even after religiously following a weekly strength-training routine at the gym for at least the past five years, I still couldn’t do a single proper from-the-toes push-up. I’d been doing a dozen push-ups from my knees for a while now, but each time I tried to push up from my toes with my body straight, I’d collapse in a quivering heap.

Last weekend, with sleeveless season on the horizon and my 41st birthday not far behind, I decided I needed to challenge myself. I was going to learn how to do a proper push-up once and for all. I’d start with one, if that’s all I could achieve, and add one or two more each week during my sacred Saturday morning visit to the gym.

Because it was a long weekend, I managed three trips to the gym last week instead of the usual one. My first visit, on the Friday, I managed one whole push-up. I doubled that on Saturday, and made it all the way to five push-ups on the Monday. (And then, I couldn’t raise my arms above my head on Tuesday or Wednesday.)

This past Saturday, I was actually looking forward all through my workout to the matwork I usually save for the end. I figured I’d squeeze out six, maybe even seven push-ups, and I was absolutely delighted with myself when I quavered out a tremulous TEN of them. Never mind the fact that I could barely work my arms enough to drive the car on the way home.

So proud of myself was I, and so in need of an explanation as to why my arms wavered in the breeze like overcooked spaghetti, that I bragged to Beloved about my accomplishment. Tristan, listening from the kitchen, scoffed, “Ten? Sheesh, that’s nothing, I could do ten push-ups.”

Without thinking about his easy prowess on the monkey bars, I told him to go ahead, showoff, and show me your stuff. Which he did. Easily. I figure he might have gotten to 20 or more before he broke a sweat, but I stopped him before he could show me up too badly. And then to add insult to injury, Beloved, who is let us say not as fond of the gym as me, also dropped and showed me 10 in fine form.

Lesson learned: it’s good to be strong, but sometimes strong and silent is a harder skill to learn!

Okay, bloggy peeps, ‘fess up. Can you do push-ups the hard way, with your back straight from your shoulders to your heels? I’m aiming for 25 by my birthday, but I may have to cut down on my blog posts because a day and a half after achieving those glorious 10 I can still barely move my arms to type this!

On anniversaries and introspection

Beyond Tristan’s birthday, March is a month full of anniversaries. Things that happen in March have a funny way of becoming milestones in my life!

Fifteen years ago last week, Beloved and I met in a bar in London, Ontario. I was in town from Ottawa for the baptism of a friend’s new baby, and was hanging out at a restaurant where a friend of mine was bar-tending, largely because I didn’t have anything better to do. Beloved and the bartender were friends, and he introduced us. Eventually, after spending most of the evening talking about the art project he had been working on at home and his other paintings and sketches, he invited me back to his apartment to see his etchings, and I went. The rest, as they say, is history!

Seven years ago this month, we saw our house for the first time. We weren’t actively looking for a new house, but enjoyed browsing. We happened to be driving home from my parents’ place by a circuitous route, and followed the “Open House” signs. As soon as we walked in the door, I knew. I looked at Beloved and said, “Uh oh.” We moved in a couple of months later, and it’s been the longest either of us has lived in a house since our childhoods. I still love it, even if we’re starting to burst at the seams! Maybe when Lucas is in school full time and daycare is less of a burden, we’ll look at a four-bedroom place, but I have a hard time imagining a place as perfect for us as this house is. Except for a bigger kitchen, maybe. And an extra bedroom. But really, that’s all I’d need!

And, last but certainly not least, 20 years ago this month I started working for the government. (Twenty years! Who would have ever guessed I’d have enough of an attention span for 20 years of anything?!?) I started, way back in March of 1990, at what was then called Revenue Canada Taxation, Customs and Excise. I was a CR03 tax assessor, following arcane algorithms on a flow chart to see if credits and deductions were correctly claimed on personal income tax returns using a red pen and post-it notes.

From there I went on to resolving complex tax cases, and to answering public inquiries. I moved up to program management about the time Revenue Canada became the Canada Revenue Agency, and made the jump into communications a little less than ten years ago. And, as most of you know, made the jump to my current job just a few months ago.

It astonishes me (frankly, it scares me a little bit!) to look back and see how so many of the fundamentally important changes in my life — meeting Beloved, finding our home, starting a career, starting a blog, finding this job — have all been predicated on nothing more than whim and chance. No doubt, the circumstances around those whimsical moments were padded with preparation and hard work and more than a little luck, but to think of how different my life might be if I chose to stay home with my folks that night back in March of 1995, instead of hanging out and mooching free drinks from my bartender friend!

Almost equally astonishing is to realize that my current job — Web manager — did not exist as an occupation 20 years ago. Was there even an Internet in 1990? Surely not one as we know it now. And to think that social media barely came into existence in the middle of the last decade — and now it’s such an integral part not only of my job but of my life that I simply can’t imagine a day without it.

Looking back on the milestones of March makes me feel a dizzy sort of vertigo. I’m more than half way through my career, if I stay on track to retire when I’m eligible at 55, and yet I still have a toddler at home. I’m 40 years old, but I still feel 17 inside.

I’m still more than a little amazed by all the things happened to that oblivious little girl who sat down at a down at a desk 20 years ago, wide-eyed and ignorant. She never would have guessed any of this — but I know for sure she would have been relieved that it all turns out so well!

In which she is crushed by the fact that she is not, in fact, uniquely named

Curse you, Facebook!

For my whole life, I have believed that I was unique in the world. To begin with, Danielle was a very unusual name in London, Ontario where I grew up. There were no other Danielles in my classes as I moved through school, and I didn’t meet another Dani until I moved here. Back in London, there were three listings for “Donders” in the phone book: my dad, his dad, and his uncle. Now that we’ve moved to Ottawa, Dad and I have cornered the Donders market in the phone book.

Oh, I know there are other Donderses out there in the world. In fact, I have a whole book written in inscrutable Dutch, following the various Donders lineages. But never, ever have I imagined there could be another Danielle Donders.

Until now.

I found the other Danielle Donders on Facebook when Beloved set up his account last month, and not too long after found this profile from a social media hub called Hyves. We don’t seem to have too much in common, based on this limited profile information. She lives in the Netherlands, and likes Armani, Bacardi, Diesel, G-star, Hyves, Jean Paul Gaultier, Opel, Replay, Samsung, T-Mobile, Vero Moda, and Zwitsal. I’ve once visited the Netherlands and heard of a few of those things — but not most of them.

It’s weighing heavily on me, this sudden challenge to my uniqueness of nomenclature. I suppose it’s still a relatively unique name — my cousin Mike Smith would certainly argue that it is! But for 40 years I’ve been comfortable in the knowledge that I was the *only* Danielle Donders in the world and find myself surprisingly unsettled to be disabused of the notion.

I wonder if she googles her own name and is annoyed by the first three or four pages dominated by references to an obscure Canadian blogger with an addiction to the Web? (And, yes, it was this post that I was writing a couple of weeks ago when I stumbled upon the infamous “creepy thesis.”)

Are you uniquely named? How would or do you feel about sharing your name with a stranger?

In which the Internet finally freaks her out once and for all

For those of you not on Twitter at 10:00 pm on a Saturday night (what, you have a life?) you might have missed the latest gossip. Turns out some woman at SFU wrote a masters thesis about called “Works in Progress: An Analysis of Canadian Mommyblogs.” In it, she examines in minute detail the writings of eight Canadian bloggers, and uses that fodder to make egregious assumptions and inferences about their income, their marriages, and their children, among other things.

Mine was one of them.

In fact, it was me who stumbled on the thesis yesterday afternoon. I was googling my own name of all things, for an upcoming post that I’ll get around to finishing once all this settles down. I was bemused at first: “Oh look, someone referenced my blog in an academic paper.” But the more I read, the more it creeped me out. This woman spent what must have been days poking around in my archives, copying and eventually analyzing several months’ worth of writing. Analyzing several month of my life. And then she starts making assumptions, and that’s where I’m no longer impressed. She makes inferences and assumptions about my marriage, the division of labour in our house, my income, my job aspirations — about my life.

By the time I’d finished reading, I felt — violated. It’s a strong word, used intentionally. I felt that someone had taken what I put out into the Internet and used it for a purpose I neither intended nor approved. It’s not even the real me, it’s an unauthorized repackaging of the avatar of me that I slip into whenever I sit down at the keyboard.

Now, I have never been shy about sharing the most intimate details of my life online. Back in 2007, Chatelaine magazine (who has a much larger readership than this thesis ever will) wrote a feature piece about Beloved and me that looked at our reproductive history — infertility, miscarriages and all — in intimate detail. We’ve been on CBC TV discussing infertility twice. Neither one of those bothered me in the least, because there’s two key differences here. The first is that the MSM took the time to contact me and ask my permission first. The second is that the MSM seem to understand the fact that what’s on the screen is only part of the story, and doesn’t assume otherwise. They ask questions to get to the real truth, not the one that gets packaged for Internet consumption.

For the first time ever, I felt embarrassed and ashamed of myself and the blog when I finished reading this woman’s thesis. I thought, “Is that what I’m putting out there? Is that how people really see me?” And then I realized that that’s exactly my problem with what she did — she stripped my words and thoughts and ideas of their context and used them for her own purposes. (For example, she seems fixated on posts where I comment about potty training and take out, cross-referencing them extensively.) She treats my writing as a factual rendering of my daily life and completely ignores the fact that I am writing to entertain, so of course I am exaggerating some details and omitting others.

As I mentioned, there was a good little twitterstorm going last night, and most people seemed to agree that not contacting the bloggers in question was a significant ethical violation. (You can scan the conversation by clicking on the #creepythesis hash tag.) If she had, I think she would have had a much more interesting and well-rounded thesis. And she would have had my permission to quote me, something that she didn’t bother to acquire. By the way, the other blogs in question are Cheaty Monkey (Haley-O and I discussed this issue at length yesterday), The Writing Mother, Cheaper than Therapy, Adventures in Motherhood, Hypergraffiti, Chaos Theory, and Momcast. There’s also quotes from a lot of the other players in the Canadian momosphere, from Mad Hatter and Veronica Mitchell to Her Bad Mother. Go ahead, use the search feature and see if she quoted you without permission, too!

Now, I haven’t totally lost my perspective on this. I do realize that there are inherent risks in putting so much of my personal life out onto the Interwebs, and I realize that the “wrong” that has been done here is relatively minor. But I am offended by this, and I do intend to follow up with both the writer and SFU. In fact, my first impulse was to include her name along with a long list of accusations of ethical wrong-doings, because while I may soon forget how violated I felt in this moment, Google never will. (Figures. Now is a hell of a time to develop a sense of discretion!)

So, bloggy peeps, I’m willing to bet you have thoughts on this. Am I being overly sensitive, feeling as I do like a bug on a microscope slide? Or should I be flattered that anyone paid that much attention to my writing? Would you be creeped out? Would you act on it?

Me, I gotta go to church. *sigh*

Did I forget to touch wood or something?

It seems somehow both painfully ironic and sublimely fitting that in the days since I posted a meandering article rife with smugness about leisure time and how zen I am about the pace of my life that I have been too busy to pee, let alone consider writing another blog post.

Universe 1, DaniGirl 0.

Blog is five years old today!

Wow, can you believe it? Five years ago today, I dipped my toe in the Internet Ocean and have been dog-paddling madly across the sea ever since!

Five years! Wowza. And to celebrate, I dust off an old favourite meme that I’ve done at least two or three times before: the Time Traveler meme. Because that’s what anniversaries for, right? Taking a moment to look back down the path you’ve trod and shaking your head in wonder that you ever made it through at all.

15 years ago today I would have been:

  • about a month away from meeting the man of my dreams.
  • living in a rented room in a house on Holland Avenue. (It was supposed to be a shared house, but I never really felt like any space except the bedroom was mine.)
  • scrambling to find a way for the government to transfer me back to London so I could be near my family.

10 years ago today I would have been:

  • starting the first in a series of medical appointments that would result, in about two months, with our official “infertility” diagnosis.
  • making arrangements to buy our tiny garden home off Uplands from the landlord we’d been renting from for a year.
  • about to start an assignment with Industry Canada, my first official communications position and the first fork in the road that led to my current job.

5 years ago today I would have been:

  • starting back to work after a one-year maternity leave with Simon.
  • getting organized for Tristan’s first out-of-house birthday party at Cosmic Adventures, at age three.
  • sending my very first blog post guilelessly off into the Internet!

1 year ago today I would have been:

  • starting back to work after a one-year maternity leave with Lucas.
  • coming back to a new job in an area of communications I hadn’t worked in before, in a newly-reduced four-day work week.
  • publicly revealing my two-week-old 365 project!

This year I am:

  • absolutely delighted with my new job as Web manager for the Army. (Didn’t see that one coming last year!!)
  • still searching for that elusive balance between work outside and inside the home, but making progress.
  • very, very busy but very, very happy.

Today I:

  • am feeling like I’ve got the world by the tail.
  • am preparing for a meeting downtown tomorrow with Google. Yes, that Google!
  • am wearing a spectacular new purple (!) bra that I acquired this weekend from Bra Chic. 😉

Next year I hope:

  • to be a permanent member of the Army team (just waiting for the paperwork to get resolved) and stop feeling like a deer in the headlights every time an issue comes up.
  • to continue having fun with my social media, blogging and photography addictions.
  • to be doing more or less exactly what I’m doing now — but better!

(You like the vagueness here? Goal-setting was never one of my strengths!)

In five years I hope:

  • to be thinking about looking for a four-bedroom house.
  • to be more comfortable in a management role.
  • to have all three boys in school full-time and finally be free of the trials and tribulations of daycare once and for all!

It’s fun to have a record of these year after year, and see the amazing twists and turns in my own life over the last decade or so. Let me know if you play along!