Postcards from the Mothership

Simon is looking at a Wiggles reel on the viewmaster.

Simon: I see Wiggles!

Beloved: Yes, and they’re in stereo.

Tristan, from the next room: No, they’re in Aus-tra-li-a.

Less than an hour later, we’re getting the boys ready for bed. Simon walks into the closet and pulls the door closed behind him.

Me: Oh no! Where’s Simon?

Simon, muffled: Inna closet.

Via Nancy and Phantom Scribbler, this very cool bloggy word cloud:

The larger and darker the font, the more frequently it is mentioned. You can make one yourself and even have a T-shirt made up here.

I can see you asking yourself right now, “She isn’t going to try to milk a third day of posts out of this TV thing, is she?”

Did you even have to ask?

I mean, these may indeed be blog’s glory days. Not that I spend a lot of time obsessing over my stats (only with days that end in “y”), but yesterday I got about 70 more hits than my previous best-ever day back in December, in the thick of the heady “plot to take down Rick Mercer” blog award days. So let’s stretch this out for just one more day.

Oh, and if you didn’t catch the broadcast yesterday, Andrea has a 26 MB download of the 10 minutes of interview footage on her blog. (I’m sure there are probably some sort of bandwidth issues that should compell me to host the download on my own site and offer it here, rather than leaching off of Andrea’s resources, but I have no idea how to do it. Andrea???)

I got a note from a lovely woman named Christie, who watched the broadcast from Williamston (Hi Christie!) and she was asking me a few general questions about blogging, which made me think that now would be a good time to link to the article I wrote back in the summer for our employee newsletter on the Wonderful World of Weblogs. It’s a beginner’s introduction to the world of blogs and blogging.

You know what else I noticed after the fact? The Eat, Shrink and Be Merry cookbook that Leanne gave us has been autographed by the author, Janet Podleski. Isn’t that cool? Now, in addition to my autographed Canadian literature collection, I can add this to the book Ann has autographed for me and have an autographed non-fiction collection, too! (Hey, a collection can have two books. It’s a start!)

Okay, one more quick story, and then I’ll try to get over myself and let this go. My dad made me a copy of the interview and gave it to me at dinner, and since Beloved FORGOT (!) to watch it, we watched it together with the boys last night. There’s one transition where Dan the camera man zooms in on Emma sitting at the table and colouring, and Tristan, who has been only half paying attention to this point, perks up and says, “Hey, who’s that pretty girl colouring?” in a funny little voice about half an octave above his normal speaking voice.

Andrea, I think we’re going to have to talk. The men in my family have always shown a predeliction for older women!

Wow, this must be my lucky day!!

As if the whole TV thing weren’t enough to feed my ego for a month or so, Sarah Gilbert picked today of all days to run my answers to her questions about defining feminism on Blogging Baby. I had, quite frankly, almost forgotten about this. Way back at the end of November, Sarah wrote a piece in response to Linda Hirshman’s ridiculous article opining that college-educated women who choose to stay home are somehow destroying feminism. She asked for women to share their thoughts and stories, and I had a few thoughts on the subject.

Thanks, Sarah, not only for the podium, but for sharing my rant. And thank you especially for rebutting Hirshman’s argument in the first place, and opening this conversation. It’s definitely a topic worth examining.

Just got back from taping and watching the CJOH news at noon segment. It was SO MUCH fun! I mean, even if it weren’t being filmed for TV broadcast, I could have sat around and chewed the fat with Andrea (and her gorgeous daughters) and Robyn and the ridiculously charismatic Leanne Cusack and the patient and friendly Dan the camera man all day long. Nicest people in the city of Ottawa, IMHO.

Got the day off to a rolicking start by realizing after I had left the house and pulled into traffic that I had no idea where I was going, so back to the house, wade through the snowdrifts and soak my cuffs again, crank up the laptop and find Andrea’s address. Then I got to her neighbourhood, and they’re doing snow removal on her street, so I have to go around and make a loop and find my way in through the back way, but I’m stuck behind the plow and miss her house and have to do an 800-point-turn between 2-metre-icebanks to get turned around, and then drive through a 20 cm windrow of frozen slush just to get into her driveway. By this point my blood pressure is already about double normal and I’m endlessly grateful that Andrea suggested we meet a bit early to chat and warm up (or, in my case, decompress) before the camera crew arrives.

But as soon as I start chatting with Andrea, whom I’ve met before, and Robyn, who is instantly likeable, I know it’s going to be good. Unfortunately, Kristina was so sick she couldn’t make it. We sit for a few minutes in Andrea’s lovely dining room, and discuss her very cool appearance this very week in none other than Reader’s Digest. I mean, you might call me a media slut, but I’ve got a lot to learn from Andrea – she’s a goddess!!

Dan the charming camera man arrives just a few minutes before Leanne. Leanne walks in bearing gifts (chocolate chip cookies, bless her generous heart), and her charisma is so strong that you feel like you are her best friend within two minute of meeting her. She introduces herself and makes a passing reference to how cute Tristan and Simon are, and I am completely in love with her. She obviously has my number – admire my boys and I’m yours forever! I have a moment of panic when I realize that a famous person has been reading my blog. Duh! She’s doing a segment on blogs, of COURSE she’s been to blog.

(Hi, Leanne!!)

Within 20 words, we’re all best friends. It’s just like that – I imagine that most people she interviews feel this way, but she is such a likeable person and so easy to talk to that I feel like we’ve all been girlfriends for years. We get to talking about Greta and Janet Podleski’s cookbooks, and it turns out Janet is not only a friend of Leanne’s, but that Leanne has a trunk load of their latest cookbook Eat, Shrink and Be Merry in the trunk of her car, so she gives us all one. (Unsolicted plug: If you haven’t read LooneySpoons or Crazy Plates or this one – you must try them! They’re my favourite only cookbooks!)

Where was I? Oh yes, basking in the glow of laughter and great conversation. So we do eventually get around to filming the segments, and thanks to Leanne’s easygoing nature and Andrea’s wonderful sense of humour and Robyn’s technical support and the adorable blond girls wandering in and out of the picture, it’s a huge amount of fun. At one point, Leanne is in the middle of saying something into the camera, and (sorry, I can’t remember if it was Emma or Sarah) one of the girls tugs on Leanne’s leg to show her the picture she’s just drawn. Leanne just bends over and thanks her for the picture, right on camera – it’s such a lovely moment it almost wrecks my mascara.

Leanne recognizes us for the attention-whores that we are, and makes sure that our blog addresses are mentioned in the clip, appear on-screen AND are linked to us from the CJOH Web site. So, if you are visiting for the first time as a result of today’s broadcast, hello and welcome!! Clear off a chair and make yourself at home, and drop me a note in the comment box or send me an e-mail (danicanada @ gmail . com) to let me know you were here. If you have any questions about blogs or blogging, feel free to ask.

And as if all that weren’t enough, while we were wrapping up, Leanne asked us if we’d be interested in doing an in-studio blogger panel, answering calls from the television audience. That high-pitched shrieking noise you heard around 11:52 this morning? Yah, that was me. I think she took it as a reluctant yes.

By the time Leanne and Dan went off to file the tape, it was almost noon so Robyn, Andrea, the girls and I settled down on the couch to watch ourselves. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out, all in all. Andrea will be sending me a digital copy of it soon, so either I’ll miraculously figure out a way to stream it here, or (much more likely), you can go over to her place and watch it.

Things I learned about watching myself on TV:
– I have to learn to think with my eyes open instead of fluttering my eyelids every time I open my mouth.
– My hair is too flat and I really need to learn how to put on makeup one of these days.
– My voice is much deeper out in the universe than it sounds in my head.

You know what the funniest part is? I called home after the first 4 minute segment to see what the boys thought, and Beloved HAD FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT IT!! He had to stop the Wiggles DVD and flip it over to the right channel to catch the second 5 minute segment. Sheesh, so much for the fan club at home!! (smooch, I love you muchly anyway…) I called back on my way out from Andrea’s, and I guess Tristan said when he saw it, “I miss mommy. Can we go to her work to see her?”

I’ve missed a bunch of details, I’m sure, but I’ll post them as they come to me. You’ll have to excuse the overt fawning over Leanne and Andrea and Robyn, but I’m completely infatuated with all of them now. Thanks, my (new) friends, for such a lovely morning. And the TV thing was cool, too!

Yesterday, I traveled to Kingston and back for a conference. The conference was actually three days long, but between family obligations and that thing that’s happening this morning – what was it again? Oh yeah, I’m going to be on TV!!!!! Ahem – well, it was just too much for me to attend all three days, but Kingston is only two hours away by train.

I love the train, I really do. I guess Tristan comes by his obsession honestly. You get a totally different view of the world from the train. Houses face the road, not the train tracks, so the view from the train seems very intimate – it’s almost like peeking into lit windows at night. And there’s something about riding the train in the dark that makes you feel dissociated from the rest of the world – you can just sit and ride and think (or read, or snooze, or – god forbid – work.)

The conference itself was great, too. It was one of those days where you feel like your world is a little bigger than you realized, and you feel a little bit more connected to the rest of the world.

Perspective – that’s the word I’m looking for. Even someone as change-averse as me needs to step out of the everyday routine for a while and take a look around. The trick is in doing something with the perspective, not just prairie-dogging up for a bit and then going back to doing the same old thing.

I realized recently that I’ve become so used to being busy and overworked that I cram something into every moment of every day – and more than one thing, if I can multi-task. Then one day I forgot to bring a book to read on the bus on the way home, and they were out of the free daily paper with the soduko puzzle, and so I just sat there for the entire 35 minute ride and stared out the window – and I realized that I can’t remember the last time I did that. I just sat, and thought. Pondered. Considered. I didn’t have any relevations, except that maybe I need to just sit and stare off into space more often. It felt surprisingly good!

End of January resolution: more slacking. I’ll put it on my calendar.

It’s no secret that my eldest son is a bit of a picky eater. Preschoolers are notoriously fussy eaters, and as long as nobody tells Simon the omnivore that, it’s all good.

What might qualify as a little more quirky is Tristan’s predilection for food shaped like the alphabet. It’s beginning to look like a bit of an obsession.

It started innocuously enough with letter pretzels. I was looking for an alternative to the ubiquitous goldfish, and aside from the salt, these pretzels are a reasonably healthy little snack. They are also Tristan’s absolute favourite food on the planet, and have been for close to three years.

It only took me about two years for me to figure out, Hey – if he likes letter pretzels, maybe he’ll like letter shaped pasta, too. And so I bought a can of Alphaghetti, and he gobbled the entire bowl down. (I searched high and low for a link to Alphaghetties, but apparently everyone’s favourite neon orange letter pasta doesn’t exist on the Interweb.) And Nancy, you will be so proud to hear that I didn’t even wash the tomato sauce off of them first. I’ve come a long way – and gone through a lot of washcloths- from the days when I used to suck the tomato sauce off the ravioli bits before giving it to my toddlers.

Somewhere along the way, we added ‘letter cookies’ to his list of favourite foods. ‘Letter cookies’ is what Tristan – and now Simon – calls the Loblaw’s knockoff version of Oreo cookies, called Eat the Middle First. (Letter cookies because, well, they have letters on them.)

Last month, in a stunning cognitive leap, I rediscovered Alpha-Bits cereal. Of course, Tristan adores them. He wants them first thing in the morning as a dry snack, and he wants them again with milk for breakfast. And he must tell me all the letters that every single spoon-or-handful contains.

So now that I’ve discovered a theme that is working for us, do you have any suggestions? It would probably be a good idea for me to invest in some letter-shaped cookie cutters. Think those things would cut through a steak, or a piece of chicken? Anybody know where I can get letter-shaped carrots, or broccoli?

(Edited on January 27 to add: if you’ve ever had a picky eater, you MUST peek over at Nancy’s blog for a few suggestions on how to make an ordinary lunch extraordinary. I’m not sure whether I feel incredibly inadequate or extremely excited to have a bunch of great new ideas. I’ll let you know whether they pass the “Eww, I’m not eating THAT!” picky preschooler test.)

I’ve been itching to tell you about this, but I didn’t want to ‘scoop’ Andrea on her own story.

About a week and a half ago, I got an e-mail from the endlessly creative and witty Andrea from the Fishbowl. She had been contacted by CJOH TV, and was asked to be interviewed about blogging on their highly rated noon-hour news show. Andrea decided out of the kindness of her generous heart to share the joy, and asked other Ottawa bloggers Kristina and Robyn to appear with her on the segment. Oh yah, and she asked one other blogger to join her, too. Can you guess who?

ME!!!!!

(insert pause for Dani to do the “I’m gonna be on TV” dance here)
(keep pausing – it’s a long and embarrassing dance)
(almost there)
(watch out for the limbo and the ‘spinning on her head like a breakdancer’ finale)
(okay, phew, we can move on now)

Andrea has a few more details on her post this morning. It will be filmed Thursday (January 26) morning, and air some time during the noonhour broadcast. We’ll actually be interviewed by co-host Leanne Cusack, whom I had the opportunity to meet a couple of years back at the North Gore farmers market, and whom I can say is one of the nicest, most friendly and engaging people I have ever met. And I’m not just saying that so she’ll make me look good on TV!

Did I mention I’m going to be on TV? Did I mention BLOG is going to be on TV?

I’ve been on the news (as opposed to IN the news) twice before. Back in May 2001, just when Beloved and I were starting our first IVF cycle, we were interviewed by CBC Newsworld for a segment on infertility and IVF, and in particular the health risks of IVF. A little less than a year later, another reporter from the same network called us and said they were doing a segment on the ‘rights’ of frozen embryos and what to do with surplus embryos from IVF to juxtapose with a piece on adoption rights. The reporter was delighted to find out she had called me by sheer concidence on my due date and I was exactly 9 months pregnant with my IVF baby – it added a great visual impact to their story!

(Poor Beloved. Even before I discovered blogging as a way of sharing our most intimate details with random passers-by, I managed to find ways to drag him cringing and flinching into the spotlight.)

So the rest of the week will be consumed with ironing out important details like what to wear (I’ve already been told that striped turtlenecks are strictly forbidden) and what to say. In her post, Andrea cleverly asked for any tips and pointers, and I will do the same.

Any thoughts on how to look less nervous, smarter, thinner, funnier and not borderline neurotic on TV?

It’s Simon’s birthday next week. Two years old already – I can hardly believe it.

We’re having a hard time coming up with gift ideas for him. There are already so. many. toys. in the house that don’t get played with. He’s got all the toys that we bought for Tristan at age two, plus all the new stuff Tristan gets, and aside from his obsession with the Wiggles, we’re having hard time finding things that are distinctly Simon.

A lot of you have kids in the two-year-old range. What were the big hits from Christmas time this year? Any thoughts?

Some days have a gentle magic by virtue of simply being ordinary. It’s been that kind of day. I wish I could catch hold of its essence and tuck it away, to keep it and remember it – the joy, the bliss, the gentle peacefulness – for days and years to come.

I couldn’t tell you what combination made an ordinary Saturday extraordinary. I got to sleep in late, all the way until 8 am, even though the dog and the noisy boys and the sounds of the day roused me every half hour or so after the rest of them got up at 5:30. Not having to start my day at that ungodly hour was definitely an excellent start.

I made it to the gym, which is also a fairly reliable indicator of a good day. Snow had been falling heavy and wet all morning, so when I got home from the gym the boys and I shovelled the driveway, inasmuch as one can shovel the driveway while simultaneously playing hockey and building a snowman and replacing wandering mittens every ten minutes or so.

There was a quiet moment in the middle of the afternoon, just after I finished reading not only the best parts of the Saturday paper but a quick chapter of a new novel as well, when Simon was sleeping and Tristan was playing trains contentedly in the next room and the snow continued to fall silent and white outside, that I closed my eyes and savoured.

And in this expansive day, I still managed to vacuum rooms that have forgotten what the vacuum looks like, and do laundry, and build with Tristan a looping wooden train track that covered the dining room floor, and even make a meatloaf dinner. Everybody acually ate the dinner, and while there was cajoling and prodding, there was no arguing. And it was good.

And because it had been that kind of day, after dinner we played hide and go seek, the four of us, and my sides hurt from trying to hold in my laughter over and over again. Tristan can never manage to stay hidden, and Simon wanders the netherworld between hider and seeker, and makes me laugh so hard the tears run down my cheeks as he carefully counts to ten and calls “Here I come!” – as you’re trying to hide with him in the closet or under a blanket. He watches us hide and tries to tell Tristan where we are, but Tristan either doesn’t hear him or doesn’t believe him, despite Simon’s excited gesculations and shrieks of “Here she is! In here! Here she is!”

Some posts I write for you, my dearest readers, but this one is for me. I don’t care how it’s written or how it sounds – I just want to remember this magically ordinary day, a series of beautiful moments that I wish I could capture like photographs and hold on to forever.