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!

Easter weekend in pictures

We spent Easter weekend with Beloved’s family north of Huntsville. But first, we decorated some eggs.

Mimi and Pipi (a French coloquiallism for Grandmaman and Grandpapa) live on the other side of a gorgeous four and a half hour drive through Algonquin Provincial Park. The boys were so good that I now have no residual concerns about doing this for two days in a row to get to Bar Harbour.

The menfolk agreed that Mimi makes a specacular trifle for dessert.

And slept well on a full belly.

The next day, we tried to make it to an Easter Egg and candy hunt in a neighbouring town. We hadn’t anticipated the snow that fell during our visit, and we were underdressed for the unexpectedly outdoor egg hunt. To add insult to injury, we were maybe 10 minutes late in arriving, and by the time we wandered the arena field, trudging with chattering teeth and woefully underdressed for the 10 cm of fresh snow, we couldn’t find a single piece of candy. The boys were surprisingly good-natured about it, placated by my promise of more candy later in the weekend and anxious simply to get back into the still-warm car.

Cranky, cold and muttering unpleasantries under my breath, we loaded the boys into the car. My mother-in-law had entered their names into a draw, and as I stepped over to the draw table to keep her company, two young girls – maybe eight or nine years old – came up to the car and asked if they could give the boys some candy. They had lots, they said, and noticed that the boys had none. And when one of the girls’ names was drawn, she selected a small prize of a magnetic drawing board (dollar store variety) and brought it directly to Tristan in the car. And then Simon’s name was drawn and I scooped up a Wiggles story book for him.

I was so moved by the kindness of these young girls that I blinked away tears of gratitude as we drove away.

And while a snowy day is not the best for an outdoor Easter Egg hunt when you are dressed for spring rain, it’s great for maple syrup – so we made our next stop a pancake (and sausage and egg and homefries) breakfast at the local sugar shack.


Lest you think I exaggerated the bit about the snow, this is Mimi’s “Easter Tree” dusted in the 15 cm (6″) of snow that fell during the weekend. We had a green Christmas this year and a snowy Easter. Go figure.

Ironically, while we were heading east across the province, my brother and his family made a comparable, but more southerly, drive from Toronto to spend the weekend in Ottawa for Easter. Luckily, we came home in time to spend a day with them.

Simon with his four-month old cousin, Brooke:

Tristan, Simon and Noah playing Cars, doing laps around my mother’s patio table:

So while I’m officially sick of my relatives and turkey (had turkey dinner with Mimi and Pipi on Friday, turkey sandwiches for dinner on Saturday and another full turkey dinner with the rest of my family on Sunday)I couldn’t imagine a more lovely weekend. Well, 15 degrees warmer and a winning lottery ticket would have been nice, but why quibble?

Friday miscellany

APL always manages to find these funky little things!

You Are a Chimera

You are very outgoing and well connected to many people.

Incredibly devoted to your family and friends, you find purpose in nurturing others.

You are rarely alone, and you do best in the company of others.

You are incredibly expressive, and people are sometimes overwhelmed by your strong emotions.

It’s all quite true, isn’t it? Mythologically, the Chimera was part lion (I’m a Leo, after all!), part goat (stubborn as the day is long) and part dragon (especially after the spicy Thai for lunch!)

From the same site:

You Will Be a Cool Parent

You seem to naturally know a lot about parenting, and you know what kids need.

You can tell when it’s time to let kids off the hook, and when it’s time to lay down the law.

While your parenting is modern and hip, it’s not over the top.

You know that there’s nothing cool about a parent who acts like a teenager… or a drill sergeant!

Well, thank goodness I have this confirmed in writing. Note to self: print off and keep multiple copies for future use with disbelieving children.

***

Have you seen the Alanis Morisette cover of My Humps? Props to Kerry for finding it. I was reading somewhere that Alanis hasn’t yet said what her intent was, whether it’s a parody or an April Fools Joke or a criticism or what. I hope it was intended to demonstrate how truly inane and stupid the song’s lyrics are, despite the catchy beat. I have to say, I like it!

***

For a truly disturbing YouTube experience, make sure the kiddies aren’t looking over your shoulder and then watch Kermit on Crank, where Kermit the Frog covers the NIN song hurt while rather graphically shooting up. I’m not sure I needed to see this one.

***

Yesterday, after I posted the interview questions and answers it occured to me that it would have been a fun time to play the cocktail party comment game and have y’all interview each other. Since it’s a long weekend, let’s do it now. It’s a cocktail party, and you all have to make small talk. Pay attention, cuz if you play there’s TWO parts to each comment. Each person who comments will answer the question in the comment directly above theirs, and then pose a question of their own for the next person. Got it? Each comment has the answer to the previous question, and the question for the next person.

The questions can be on whatever topic you like, and you can take as long or as little to answer as you like. The questions should be about personal preferences, attitudes and opinions, along the lines of the ones you see in those e-mail memes: what’s the last book you read? What’s your favourite movie? What’s under your bed? Vanilla or chocolate? What’s the best vacation you ever took? What are your pets’ names and why? (Yes, I know, these are lame questions. But I trust that you can do oh so much better.)

Okay, so my question for the first commenter is: What superhero did you want to be when you were a kid?

The interview meme

I think the success of any interview gives much more weight to the questions than the answers. That’s why I jumped on the chance to play along with the interview meme that’s sweeping through the Momosphere right now when Bub and Pie asked if anyone wanted to be an interviewee. She’s always thoughtful and clever and I was curious to see what questions she’d come up with for me. I wasn’t disappointed – they’re great questions. Now let’s see if I can do them justice with my answers! (And don’t forget to go back and read B&P’s answers to the questions posed to her by Mouse.)

1. You’re very open on your blog – it’s one of the things that draws readers in, makes us feel we know you. Experiencing your pregnancy alongside you and then the tragedy of your miscarriage was an intense experience for me as a reader. Do you ever regret the permanent record you’ve left here of your pregnancy in posts that now have a different meaning in light of your miscarriage?

There’s one post in particular I wrote maybe a week before the miscarriage when I was around 15 weeks or so, talking about how I thought maybe I could feel the baby moving. In retrospect, that was pretty unlikely, as given what we found out, the baby had likely died by that point. I called it “The Quickening” and I still get a lot of google traffic on that word (sigh, probably more now that I’ve highlighted it again. Darn spider-bots.) and it always made me cringe. I almost took it down, just because I was feeling a little bit bitter about it showing up in the referral logs, but I never did. That’s as close as I come to regret over any of it.

All of that stuff I wrote while I was pregnant was true as it was happening, and was a completely honest representation of what I was going through at the time, so no, I don’t regret any of it. It’s still hard for me to go back and read some of it, but I can’t say that I wish I didn’t write it, or that I wish I had thought differently at the time. I’ve always believed in sharing my joy while it lasts, which is why I could never wait to announce a pregnancy. Sad times may come, so live your moments of joy with enthusiastic abandon while you can.

2. Like me, you were married unhappily once, and are married much more happily now. Do you feel that your first experience in marriage helped shape your second?

Funny, my answer to this question after thinking about it was not my knee-jerk, first-blush response. I don’t write a lot about my ex because he’s not around to defend himself, and frankly, I’m done giving him any power over me, even all these years later. Suffice to say, he didn’t always treat me as well as he should have. He cheated on me, for one. Told his best friend that the best way to ‘train’ his new wife was to keep putting her down until she stopped fighting back, for another (and he practiced what he preached). And he was, in the most clinical sense of the definition, a pathological liar. He would lie even when the truth was a perfectly acceptable answer. He would lie for the sake of lying, even when there was no doubt whatsoever he’d get caught in his lie. And he lied to me about a lot of stuff – everything from “I took the movies back to the video store today” when he didn’t, to “I didn’t take your bank card out of your wallet and use it to take money out of your account” when he did, to “I didn’t sleep with her” when he did.

So yes, living with that for my most formative years (started ‘steady’ dating when I was 16, got married when I was 20, got divorced at 24) definitely affected the relationships that followed. When Beloved and I had been living together for a couple of years but not yet married, I went to see a psychologist for a while, and we worked through a lot of the crap I was still carrying around with me. She helped me understand that it was not okay for him to force sex through guilt and withholding of affection, which he did too often, and that I was not at ‘fault’ for his lies, his adultery, his difficulty in holding a job, and so many other things. Truly, the dozen or so sessions I had with that psychologist were one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.

All this to say that I was carrying a lot of emotional baggage by the time Beloved and I moved in together – but not in the ways I might have expected. I’ve never had trust issues with Beloved, for example. I trust him blindly, with my whole heart, and always have. It’s a kind of triumph of naivety and love over experience. But I do have residual control issues. For example, because I could never trust my ex to pay the bills, I must be in charge of the family finances now – I can’t cede control of that over to Beloved.

I was ready to answer this question with the many ways that the practice marriage has affected my marriage with Beloved, but I’m pleased to see that in the analysis, maybe I overestimated them. I’m sure there are a thousand other ways, large and small, that have left a residual imprint, but it’s surprisingly difficult to analyze what comes as a result of the ‘practice’ marriage and what was inherently me in the first place.

3. Who do you consider to be the sexiest Canadian politician?

I have three answers for this question, with varying degrees of qualifiers. To answer the question straight up, the sexiest current politician is Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison, which I conveniently happened to decide not that long ago when I saw him on the Rick Mercer Report.

Now, if we can expand the parameters a bit, as he hasn’t yet run for his seat in Papineau, but when he officially becomes a politician, I’m going to have to switch my allegiance to Justin Trudeau as the sexiest politician. I’ve had a crush on him since long before the moving eulogy he delivered for his father.

And if we can extend the definition of politics to include speechwriters and communicators for national leaders, my vote goes to former Liberal campaign blogger Scott Feschuk. I have a wicked literary crush on him.

4. Severus Snape: friend or foe?

Ugh. I don’t know!! I’ve been re-reading the books to refresh my memory of the details of the stories in anticipation of the July arrival of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. As I read, I’ve been trying to glean any little bit of meaning or insight to this very question in all the scenes where Snape appears.

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!! If you have not yet read to the end of Half Blood Prince, STOP READING and skip to the next question!

I’ve been pondering for two years now whether Snape was simply fulfilling his destiny, or some sort of obligation to Dumbledore, or whether he was truly evil all along, or whether he was possessed by Voldemort. I don’t know! I’m too Pollyanna to think that Snape is a truly evil character who willfully killed Dumbledore, and Rowling is after all writing what are in essence children’s books.

My bet is that he was under some sort of spell or obligation. I’m itching to read the next book, though. Conveniently, it arrives the first day of my two-week summer vacation. Coincidence or excellent planning on my part? I’ll be torn the whole way through, racing to the end to find out once and for all what happens, but slowing myself down because there won’t be another helping of Harry Potter after this one is consumed. Peanut gallery, what say you?

5. How do you think birth order affects the personalities of your children?

Another good question! I can definitely see that my boys seem to fit into their birth-order personality stereotypes, for lack of a better word.

Tristan, the first born, is a people-pleaser, and a little high strung. He’s keen and tends to be serious more often than not, and plays happily by himself. Simon, on the other hand, is mellower. He’s much more social and outgoing, and much more flexible.

This has been great fun to answer. If you’d like me to interview you, let me know in the comments. I don’t promise to be as prompt, let alone as insightful, as Bub and Pie was in sending her questions off to me, but I’ll do my best.

My 15 minutes in Chatelaine

Thanks to my colleague Rebecca, who was the first to realize that the Chatelaine article I mentioned is already posted online! No more skulking around the magazine racks at every grocery store and news stand in town, waiting for the paper copy to arrive. Er, not that I was doing that, of course.

Anyway, it’s with great pleasure and excitement (and a certain lack of subtlety) that I happily point you toward the article in the online May edition of Chatelaine magazine, In vitro we trust – coming soon to a paper edition near you! In my humble opinion, even past the bits that feature me, it’s a well balanced and informative article about the state of reproductive technologies in Canada. It’s quite long, though – nine screens’ worth – so grab a cup of your beverage of choice before you settle in if you want to read the whole thing.

There’s nothing about our story that you haven’t already read here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here (shameless, aren’t I?) but it still tickles me to see it all laid out like that in somebody else’s words. I was pleased to see that the article manages to shout out both boys and blog by name (sadly, without a direct link. Oh well.)

Even though we knew it was coming and discussed it in advance, I still cringed just a bit when I saw the bit outing Beloved’s low sperm count. We’ve come a long way from the days immediately after our diagnosis, when we could barely discuss it between ourselves. By now, of course, he has become rather acclimatized to me discussing our most intimate moments with the widest possible audience – in blog, on national TV (not once, but twice!) and now in a national magazine as well. He took it in stride, and in fact insists I correct the record by clarifying that it’s not so much that his sperm are not copious, but that (in his words, not mine) they are “stupid”. The fertility doctors used the slightly more clinical term, “of impaired morphology”, but you get the point.

All this to say, in my usual belaboured and roundabout way, that I’m terribly proud to be featured in the article. In case you hadn’t gleaned that from my oh-so-understated neon billboard of a post about it.