Month: March 2005

Yesterday’s rant on my bloggy obsessions started to run a little long, so I shut myself down. (See, there are editorial processes at work here, just very very loosely applied ones driven mostly by whimsy and caprice.)

But the question still remains… if you can’t blog at work, and you can’t blog at home, then where the heck do you blog? The answer is, everywhere. I’m constantly blogging in my head. It’s shameful to think about how many brain cells are dedicated to blog thoughts on a given day. I think about blogs (yours, mine, the ones on my blogroll, all the ones that I might add to my blogroll if only there were about six more hours in the day to explore the blogosphere) pretty damn near all the time. I do the mental blog while I am waiting for the microwave to beep, while I am making photocopies, while I am showering, while I am walking the dog. Don’t tell the boss, but I have been known to think about blogging during staff meetings. But only during the boring parts.

I’ve been thinking about what Ann over at Mother of All Blogs wrote recently about being WriterMom, and while I am not presumptuous enough to categorize myself with her as a writer, I know for a fact I have drifted in conversation to the “I’m here but not really here” thousand yard stare as I contemplate my inner-blogger. Actually, what Ann wrote is just a really great excuse for absentmindedness IMHO, for I’d rather be accused of contemplating exciting writing projects than just contemplating my navel, which is equally likely to be true.

Sometimes I even lie awake at night, thinking about things I’ve read, or things I could write. I am such a droll and witty blogger at 3 am, you wouldn’t believe it. I tried leaving a pencil and paper beside my bed, but when I read it the next morning the only word I could decipher was ‘pickle’ and despite my best effort I just couldn’t make a clever blog from that paucity of material.

True confessions time: where do you do your best blog-thinking? How many hours a day do you dedicate to blog thoughts?

My name is Dani, and I am a blog junkie.

Phew, it feels soooo good to finally admit it. But, the only problem is I don’t want to recover. I love blog and all things bloggy – my blog, other people’s blogs, articles online and in the print media about blogging, talking to my friends about what they’ve read in blogs. Blog is good. Blog is life.

Unfortunately, some key people in my life feel a little differently about blog. My employer, for one. Don’t worry, I’m not about to go all Dooce on you and get my ass fired. But, I suspect the IT support guys are on to me. I can only imagine the reports I must trigger with even the most mundane blog content. The smut filters must rev into overdrive on all those references to poop, nipples, sperm, breasts and vaginas, to mention just a few less than innocuous terms I trip over daily on the Mommy Blog circuit.

“No really, I read this stuff for work. I’m compiling a study on, on, (thinking fast, wheels spinning) on the use of blogs to reach a wider audience on the Internet.” Nope, they won’t buy that. How about, “I’ve been analyzing language use in online users, to make sure we are wording our outreach products in terms to which the users can relate.” Hmm, gonna have to work on that one… Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?

The only way I can get any amount of work done at all is to set little performance goals for myself throughout the course of the day. “If I respond to these three urgent e-mails from last week, I can look at one blog.” And, “Since I posted today’s blog entry from home last night, I can follow someone’s blogroll list to TWO new blogs today. Only two. And I’m only allowed to read the most recent post on each. Absolutely NO ARCHIVES. Okay, maybe archives on one. But only if they’re really good blogs. Or mostly good. Or showing a lot of potential, that I will probably find in the archives.”

Well, you’re probably thinking, why don’t you just do all your blogging at home? Ah, but it were that easy. Even if I suppress my bloggy urges until the kidlets are in bed, there is still Beloved, my blog widower. I don’t think I’m fooling him anymore. I think he realizes that it doesn’t take me 20 minutes to “check the laundry” (did I mention the computer is in the basement beside the laundry room?) or an hour to “pop on to the Internet to see if that cheque cleared”. (Nancy mentioned the same pathetic attempts at subterfuge in her comment last week.) We are sad indeed.

Beloved has so capitulated to the fact that blog is simply an irresistible force in our lives that he is in the process of mounting a campaign for us to acquire a laptop. He dangles tantalizing tidbits like “wireless network” and “you can blog from anywhere in the house” – he is almost as insidiously evil as the bus people. The idea of spending a couple of grand on a laptop simply to feed my blog habit is wrong. It is very wrong. It is oh so wrong. It is unimaginably wrong. And no, that is not a Best Buy flyer open on my desk. (But we could probably do without groceries at least one week a month, right?)

I’m sorry, bus people. Are you listening? I take it back. I didn’t mean to criticize the great, powerful and all-knowing bus people.

If you hear nothing else I ever tell you, hear this: don’t mess with the bus people. When they say revenge is a dish best served cold, they mean it. As in leaving you stranded at the bus stop in pre-dawn subzero temperatures waiting, waiting, waiting, while your legs, protected only by the thinnest filament of nylon and the shortest skirt you own, slowly begin to lose all sensation as you freeze from the bottom up. Coincidence? I think not.

Taking the bus is the highlight of my day, and any decision the bus people make as to how to schedule services is the right choice. I can’t imagine a day without bus. The bus people are benevolent and indulgent. I am nothing.

They will say that bus service was reduced for March Break, but I know better. They saw my letter, and it pissed them off. So they took revenge, not only on me but on an entire suburb, by cutting service this morning. That’s just how they are.

You were right, oh mighty and omniscient bus people, to mete out such a carefully considered punishment for my transgressions. It is a long, long ride in from Barrhaven to downtown when you are standing in the aisle, and I had plenty – PLENTY – of time to repent for my sins.

I think I’d better lay low for a while, lest they really hit me where it hurts and mess with the service to get home again in the afternoon. Commuters of the world, unite -but do it quietly, so the bus people won’t hear you!

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I got my knickers in a twist over an article in the Ottawa Citizen that threatened to cut bus service to my end of suburbia, so I cranked out a letter to the editor.

They ran my letter this morning, and a picture to go along with it. Can I take a minute to say how much I hate being edited? (Yet more reasons to love blog.) Oh well, it’s still fun to be published. My only real complaint is that I ended my letter with “if it ain’t broke…” and they finished the axiom for me by adding the “don’t fix it.” Just makes it seem more trite, IMHO. They also changed a couple of key words, and even changed the intro where I originally mentioned the bus I was riding was the bus they were talking about cutting — it sounds like I make it a habit of reading the morning paper out loud to the other people on the bus just for fun.

Funny how just a few changes can alter the tone of it ever so slightly… or maybe it’s having had a few days to cool down that reading my own letter gives me the impression I come off as a bit of a lunatic? I think I’ll stick to blog from now on. Until the next time I get my knickers in a twist…

You might accuse me of being a bit of a media slut after this. You might be right.

I got my knickers in a twist yesterday when I was riding the bus to work, reading the morning paper. (Editorial aside: morning paper almost as much a source of mischief as search engines.) There was an article about how the city is considering eliminating the “express” routes that run directly from the suburbs to the core in favour of a system more like Toronto’s, where local buses run to hubs on the outskirts and secondary buses bring commuters to the core from the hubs. The only route specified in the article was the one I happened to be riding.

So when I got to work I was good and fired up, and cranked out a letter to the editor and sent it off and promptly forgot about it. Late in the afternoon, the photo editor from the Citizen called and asked if they could run my letter, and if they could send out a photographer to take my picture to run with it. They’re coming by the house after work tonight, where I assume they are looking to get a nice picture of me freezing my ass off in front of a bus stop sign. I’ll post a link if they publish it.

The need to share my opinions through the media is a thread that runs through my life. Maybe it’s because I wanted to be a journalist when I was a kid, and this satisfies an unfulfilled part of my psyche. Or maybe it’s an approval thing. My first published letter to the editor was in Grade 12. My teacher promised to upgrade my A to an A+ if I got published by the end of the semester, so I did.

I’ve had a few letters published since then, most notably with a picture of then-four-month-old Tristan and Beloved when I replied to another letter that had equivocated the embryos lost through in vitro fertilization to abortion. IVF also played a part in us getting interviewed on CBC Newsworld, once before we cycled in 2001 and again on the day I was due with Tristan. Poor Beloved, a quiet and shy kind of guy, has had the most private parts of his life examined in the national media because his wife can’t control her exhibitionist compulsions.

The blog seems like a natural extension of my exhibitionism. And heck, there is no editor on the blog to censure or censor me! No matter how inane or relevant my thoughts, I’ve got a forum to bounce them around. I guess I’m still that kid in school, hand in the air waving to get the teacher’s attention while she tries to ignore me and choose somebody, anybody, else to comment.

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m trying to read the morning paper and drink my first sacred cup of coffee, but Simon is climbing up my leg and telling me in no uncertain terms that it’s time for breakfast. Just as I’m putting the paper aside, having read a scant page and a half, I notice on the cover of the weekend Style section something about mommy blogs. So I put Simon in his highchair and feed him a couple of spoonsful of breakfast, but I’m still thinking about the mommy blog article, so I fold open the paper on the table to read it while I’m feeding Simon.

Hey, I’m thinking, I know these people! The books editor has pulled together 28 excerpts from mommy (and daddy) blogs, one for each day in February. As I’m scanning, I’m nodding and smiling because I’ve read a lot of this stuff already. There’s Jen from MUBAR, and Ann D, and Alice from Finslippy and Suzanne from MotherInChief. There’s DC Mom and of course there is Dooce.

So I say to Beloved, “Hey, I know a lot of these people… too bad I didn’t — HEY! THAT’S MY BLOG!!!!” And whadda ya know, there I am, my very first blog entry ever, right there on February 2.

I guess I should say thanks to the Ottawa Citizen for the free publicity, although it would have been nice of them to drop a courtesy note and let me know they’d be publishing me. And if you’re dropping by as a result of that article – Hi and welcome! Grab a coffee and stay a while. And drop me a note in the comment box to let me know you were here and what you think, if you please.

Edited to append the article itself, as I like Jen’s argument that since the article consists primarily of other people’s intellectual property (including mine), I think that it is quite alright to quote the article which quotes me.

Feed. Burp. Change diaper. Blog. The new reality of parenting
New kids on the blog
BY SUSAN ALLAN
Susan Allan is the Citizen’s books editor.

We announce the arrival of newborns in pounds, in ounces and, more and more these days, in blogs. We know it’s a trend — a development milestone — because the New York Times deemed it so in a recent report on the approximately 8,500 websites devoted to life after birth. In a recent blog entry, Alice Bradley explained the need for the online chronicles.

“We’re after, I think, some representation of authentic experience that we’re not getting elsewhere. We sure as hell aren’t getting it from the parenting magazines, which provide canned information about vaccines and discipline and baking nutritious muffins that look like kitty cats, but will never help you feel less alone, less stupid, less ridiculous,” she writes at Finslippy (finslippy.typepad.com). “This is the service we try to provide — we share our lopsided, slightly hysterical, often exaggerated but more or less authentic experiences. If one blogger writes about her traumatic doctor’s visit, then maybe at some point, some freaked-out new mother is going to read that and feel a little better — less stupid, less ridiculous — about her own breakdown at the pediatrician’s.”

All that said, here’s an authentic look back at February featuring 28 blogs in 28 days:

Name: Ann Douglas, author and parenting guru Address: anndouglas.blogspot.com Feb. 1: Another reason to let dads pitch in: Researchers have discovered that changing diapers is good for the fatherchild relationship.

Name: DaniGirl, a 35-year-old Ottawa mother of two Address: www.momm-eh.blogspot.com Feb. 2: To blog or not to blog? Does the world really need another soccer-mom wanna-be sending dispatches from suburbia, trying to strike a voice somewhere between Erma Bombeck, Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Cosby, but in the 21st century, not Jewish, not male and not black? And potentially not really funny? Why the hell not.

Name: Brian, 32, writer, poet and father to a three-year-old, a.k.a. The Girl. Address: www.beingdaddy.com Feb. 3: If The Girl, while sitting at the dinner table, excuses herself after farting loudly, but does so while her mouth is still full of food, do I praise her good manners or correct her bad ones?

Name: Christine, 33, “100-per cent, stay-at-home mother” of two boys 4 and 6 Address: christine.typepad.com/usually_frazzled/ Feb. 4: Spent a large part of the morning playing with and then cleaning up our vintage Meccano set. That thing has about a zillion tiny pieces! Took said son for a haircut after that, then wasted a lot of time on the computer in the afternoon while wishing hard (but in vain) that child would nap.

Name: Jessica, wife of Eric, mother of Jake and Nate Address: www.verymom.com Feb. 5: Eric insists on home hair cuts to save money. My poor child now has to walk around looking like someone cut his hair with a Flowbee.

Name: Jenn, 31, mother of Sam Address: inkpen.typepad.com Feb. 6: How do you make an almost three-year-old listen to you? He just averts his gaze, like if he cannot see me, he cannot hear me and that’s that. I am not much of a yeller, to be honest, so I have been practising my “Stern Voice.” Which also makes me laugh.

Name: Janene, mother of Alexa and Luke Address: www.spasticmommyhead.com Feb. 7: I could probably write a whole bunch of stuff, but I don’t have the energy. Lexa was up at 5 a.m. and I’ve been at it ever since, minus the five seconds that I fell asleep on the sofa before she jumped on me and woke me up.

Name: Jen Lawrence, a Toronto mother of Baby Girl, born November 2003 Address: tomama.blogs.com/mubar — MUBAR, as in Mothered Up Beyond All Recognition Feb. 8: Baby Girl is teething. At least I think she’s teething. It’s not like I’m going to reach my fingers into those piranha jaws of hers — I’ve learned that lesson the hard way.

Name: The Munchkin, son of Kira, a 34-year-old, married, slightly neurotic SAHM (Stay-at-Home Mom) to a two-year – old boy.” Address: crankymommy.blogspot.com Feb. 9: Woo Hoo! My kid finally used the potty today … Crouching on it on all fours on his potty, but it all went in the little bowl. Yay, my little man.

Name: Julia, mother of Patrick Address: julia.typepad.com Feb. 10: Patrick suddenly turned two about five minutes ago, a Capital T, double-barreled Two. The age that is more attitude than a measurement of time and the sort of thing people mean when they shrug apologetically and say, “He’s Two.”

Name: Trixie MacNeill, born July 31, 2003 Address: www.athomedad.com Feb. 11: Trixie is back in daycare today after so far missing three out of eight scheduled days due to stomach problems. … The situation makes me think that there may be a market for daycare sickness insurance … It might sound crazy now, but this time next year we’ll see Superbowl Ads for DaycareHedge.com.

Name: Lori, mother to Zachery, 4, and Kailyn, 3 Address: 2littlemonkeys.blogdrive.com Feb. 12: I know I’ve been boring!!! There’s just so much going on in my life right now, I haven’t had a chance to update … We got the kids a bunk bed last weekend along with bedding. Zachery got Shark Tale bedding and Kailyn got Princess bedding.

Name: Julie, 33, mother of Charlie Address: www.alittlepregnant.com Feb. 13: When he dropped off my breast a while later and still looked hungry, I investigated the bottle I’d been trying to give him when our peaceful mealtime went to hell. I thought maybe the milk had gone sour, so — I can’t believe I did this, much less that I am confessing it — I put the nipple in my mouth and gave it an experimental suck.

Name: Melissa, mother of Madison and Max Address: www.suburbanbliss.net Feb. 14: About seven years ago, over Valentine’s Day weekend, Logan and I went to the Old Shillelagh and later got unexpectedly pregnant with Madison, just seven months into our marriage. While on the pill. I am terrible at these types of holidays.

Name: Byron a.k.a. Milkbreath il Magnifico, born June 19, 2003 Address: www.webamused.com/milkbreath Feb. 15: This is mostly for my own reference, to remember what he sounds like these days: Pancake more? Hi guys! Down me! Read it. Sausage more? Off it! Please nicely? Nap puppy? Peach more? Fire on? Move it! No kicking! Two minutes! More more?

Name: Suzanne Galante, mother of an almost two-yearold Address: www.motherinchief.com Feb. 16: All our lives we believed that having it all was attainable and worth attaining. Holding onto that notion has been the grown-up equivalent to believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.

Name: Trixie, mother to Ewan Address:www.distracteddiva.blogspot.com Feb. 17: Ewan has decided that napping is quite out of style, which has made my days quite busy (and my entries here scarce).

Name: Mr. Nice Guy (“My wife is pregnant. I have nothing else to do. Leave me alone.”) Address: bonnehomme.blogspot.com Feb. 18: Every other parent-tobe in this city has their shit repulsively together: One week after finding out wifey is expecting, they’ve enrolled their unborn child in baby yoga and Portuguese lessons. At two months, they’re interviewing at the 92nd Street Y and arranging for the proper shady stock analyses to be issued. At five months they’re banging out the details of their wills, their child’s trust fund, the philanthropic foundation that will bear their baby’s name. At six months, they request applications from Harvard and Yale. You get the picture. Us? Forget even coming close to competing with our type A supermommy Manhattan cohort of genetic mutant freakparents. We don’t have any baby gear yet.

Name: Gerah Dutkiewicz, 26, mother of 18-month-old Kyra A Address: poopandsuits.blogspot.com Feb. 19: Well, I’ve done it. I’ve joined the world of geeks (I say that in the fondest terms) that spend their free time sitting at their computer that they already sit at for way too many hours of the day, writing down their inner most thoughts, then publishing them to the web for the whole world to see. Strange, yes. But, oh well, here I am.

Name: Kelly, 29, mother to Nathan and Austin Address: kelly.typepad.com/kelly/ Feb. 20: Talk about baggage. I recently decided to switch purses, which usually doubles as a great time to get rid of all the crap that gets collected. You have to multitask when you have kids!

Name: Anathea, 27, mother to Maya Address: www.zenlunatic.com Feb. 21: Busy. Exhausted. Crazy. Mommying. Wifing.

Name: Peter John, born June 1, 2002 Address: www.babyblog.co.uk Feb. 22: Today at school I may (or may not) have cut a little bit of my own hair off. Apparently I’ve made a little bare patch, but I can’t see it so I’m not bothered.

Name: D.C. mom Address: elb.typepad.com/ halfchangedworld Feb. 23: There’s a Jewish tradition that you’re supposed to carry a slip of paper with a message in each pocket. On one side, you carry “You were created in God’s image” and on the other side, you carry “You came from dust, and to dust you shall return.” When you get depressed you look at the first, and when you get cocky you look at the second. I think the parenting version of this is that on one side you carry the start of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: “Relax. You know more than you think you do,” and on the other side you carry the start of Philip Larkin’s This be the verse: “They f—- you up, your mom and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do.”

Name: Kris, mom to Ben and John, wife to Brian. Pregnant with baby 3. Address: wondermom.blogspot.com Feb. 24: Overall, I give a big thumbs down to pregnancy. But I do love: 10. Parking in the for “for pregnant women” spots. 9. Not being able to do killer workouts. 8. Eating a bowl of ice cream every night. 7. Having a baby that makes no noise and requires no diaper changes or midnight feedings …

Name: Sheryl, mother of Emily, Haley and Will Address: papernapkin.typepad.com Feb. 25: I haven’t posted in almost a week! But I have been travelling through the blogosphere.

Name: Gina, web designer and mother of Amelia Address: www.momblog.com Feb. 26: Guilt descends about how much further Amelia would be if I just spent the time and really sat down, an hour or three, every day, turned off the tube permanently and taught her things like colours and the alphabet, and isn’t she supposed to be spelling her name by now??

Name: Alice Bradley, mother of Henry Address: finslippy.typepad.com Feb. 27: I should post more, but then I don’t post more. I know, I know. It’s just that I’m all over the place these days. I haven’t been able to sit down long enough to figure out what’s on my mind.

Name: Heather B. Armstrong, mother of one-year-old Leta Elise Address: www.dooce.com Feb. 28: Leta has the chicken pox. Sort of. It has to be the worst mild case of chicken pox on record. Her pediatrician said she might get a few bumps from the vaccine, but he didn’t mention the fever or the grumpiness or the fact that it would make me want to run head first into a brick wall. Without a helmet.

Today, we whine. Consider yourself warned. If you’re not in the mood for it (and I certainly don’t blame you), move along and we’ll see you again in a few days when I’ve gotten over myself. But today, we whine. We whine because I am tired and grumpy and in just a bit of a state and it’s my damn blog and if you don’t like it stop reading then. See, just a little bit cranky.

We are whining because I am so very sick of having to be responsible all the time, to be careful, to be cognizant, to have to keep impulses under control and be mindful of the bottom line and think of the consequences of my actions. (Hmmm, maybe this is my inner 14 year old having a rebellious day? In reading this, it sounds like what I want to be is a teenager.) I’m so very tired of being on the run all the time, hurrying to get to work, to get my work done, to make it to the bus on time, to get home, to get dinner ready, to get the kitchen cleaned and spend some ‘quality time’ (gag) with the kids, balancing my guilt for not being with them all day with my desperate desire to get them into bed so I can just stop moving for a few minutes. My life is a freakin’ treadmill powered by guilt.

Another thing that has me royally pissed is that I’ve gained SIX pounds since I started back to work. SIX! There should be a rule, if you are feeling really stressed you should be able to self-medicate with chips and cokes and oreos and not gain weight. So not only do I have to watch what I eat, but now I have to find some time to exercise to halt and reverse this unseemly trend.

There is a gym in the mall I walk through to get to work, but even if I did commit to getting up an hour earlier a couple of times a week to work out (which, while it pains me to lose more sleep, has a certain appeal as I do miss regular workouts in my life) I don’t think we have room in the budget for a gym membership.

So there’s not enough time, not enough sleep, not enough money and too many calories. I think that about covers it.

(If you’re still here, thanks for reading this far. I feel better now. Come back tomorrow and we’ll have a nice civilized discussion about preschooler idiosyncracies and the wonders of Google . I’m going to hide under my desk and and drink my coffee and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist for a little while.)