The Blues Clues Miracle

If there were an award for Most Bickering Siblings, my boys would be declared winners by a large margin. They have been at each other constantly lately, today even more than usual. Israel and Lebanon are playing much more nicely together than Tristan and Simon these days. They bicker, they taunt each other, they tattle, they whine. They won’t make it to Labour Day at this rate.

That’s why I was even more dumbfounded by Tristan this afternoon. He was at a birthday party for one of his friends at a local place called Cosmic Adventures. Tucked away in one corner they have a bunch of arcade-style games and you win tickets by playing, then parlay those tickets into useless crap that wouldn’t even make the cut at the dollar store – Dora stickers and farm animals and other plastic bling.

Tristan perused the glass display case for a long time, pondering how to best spend his bounty of tickets. Finally, he selected a small Blues Clues figurine. I was a little surprised, because he grew out of Blues Clues more than a year ago (“that’s baby stuff,” he says with the derision of a teenager while Simon watches it with rapt attention), and the figurine would expend all of his hard-earned tickets. I checked with him more than once, to make sure he really wanted it.

“Simon will love this,” he confided as he admired his acquisition. “I thought of him as soon as I saw it and I knew he would love it.” Sure enough, as soon as we got home, he gave it to Simon.

And then he proceeded to chase him all around the house, trying to take it away from him. He’d wait for Simon to put it down and snatch it away with a gleeful, “Simon, I’ve got your Blues Clues, and you can’t get it!”

Brothers.

The Motherlode Conference

I was going to write a long, gushing post about how excited I am to be a part of the upcoming Association for Research on Mothering’s 20th anniversary “Motherlode” conference this fall, but I couldn’t do a better, more succinct job than my bloggy friends have already done.

Five of us are going to be presenting a panel discussion on blogging and mothering, and you can bet I’ll be asking you for your thoughts and opinions between now and the conference at the end of October. Here’s the official scoop, as cut and pasted from Ann’s blog:

Mama’s Got a Brand New Blog: The Rise of the Weblog and its Impact on Mothering

  • Mothering in the Age of Blog: Ann Douglas (author of The Mother of All Pregnancy Books)
  • Welcome to My Sandbox: Danielle Donders (Communications Strategist) (that’s me!)
  • A Blog of One’s Own: Marla Good (Freelance Writer)
  • I’ve Been There, Too: Andrea McDowell (Editor, TheWholeMom.com)
  • Tool of Revolution or Online Shrine to Parental Self-Absorption: Jen Lawrence (Creator, T.O Mama)

Ann will be doing a solo session on the history of the modern pregnancy book: Modern Pregnancy: Doing it By the Book.

A whole flock of other mom/writers/researchers will be heading to the conference — Andi Buchanan, Amy Tiemann, Miriam Peskowitz, Faulkner Fox, to name just a few of the dozens of fascinating women who will be conference bound. I would encourage any mom who can make it to the Greater Toronto Area that weekend to block off these four days on her calendar now. This is the most exciting motherhood conference event ever. I am thrilled and honoured to be a part of it. Don’t miss out. Grab a mom-friend and plan to make a date of this four-day celebration of everything mom. If you plan to attend the Motherlode Conference, you’ll want to register soon. The registration deadline is September 12, 2006.

I’m so incredibly excited to be included in this group of smart, insightful, opinionated mothers. Excited, and humbled. And terrified. Yep. Definitely terrified.

But this means that I finally get to meet Marla and Jen in person, and I think I’m more excited about that than anything!

Another lazy Friday comment game

Oh oh, it’s Friday again and I forgot to put something in the can for this morning.

Anybody got any bright ideas on what I should write about this morning? Something witty and insightful and full of colourful vocabulary that can be slapped together in about 12… nope, make that NINE minutes?

* sound of crickets *

Yah, me neither. Okay, hows about we play the comment game again? I know, I know, my two year old doesn’t fall for the same trick twice in one week, and here I am asking you to do it. I promise, next Friday I’ll have something clever tucked away (the pledge of the procrastinator).

So, if you weren’t here last week to play, here’s how it goes: I’ll propose a movie, and you post an actor/actress who is in that movie. The next person posts a different movie that said actor is in, and the person after that posts a different actor in that movie… and so on, until the end of time. You can check out the comments from last week to see it in action. We made it to 48 comments last time – can we hit 50 this week?

I’ll start you off with: Moulin Rouge, because I have the soundtrack rattling around in my head. (One of the best unanticipated features of the Escape Pod is having Ewan McGregor croon sweet nothings directly into my ear – be still my heart!)

Tradespeople in Ottawa?

I’m blatantly taking advantage of my burgeoning local audience with this.

We need a few tradespeople to do some work around the house. We’ve managed to fritter away almost the entire summer without getting around to stripping and staining the deck, or getting the roof repaired, or washing the windows. As the temperature moderates and the days become shorter, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that we’re simply not going to get around to doing any of this stuff by ourselves. It’s time to farm the work out.

Can you recommend a good contractor for any or all of the above jobs? You can e-mail me at danicanada (a) gmail (dot) com if you prefer.

Thanks!

School days

In three weeks, Tristan has his first meeting with his junior kindergarten teacher. In four weeks, he has his first small-group, delayed admission first day of school. Ten days after that, he has his first full-class day of school.

One of those is his first day of school, but I haven’t yet decided which one it is.

It’s hard to believe my son is school-age already. I remember being in JK – not clearly, but in fuzzy snapshots of event and emotion. I used to walk to and from school myself, through a big field and a park. It’s about the same distance that Tristan will travel, but he will have to cross a relatively busy suburban street. All the same, I still can’t imagine the day when I’ll just open the door and kiss him on the cheek and say, “See ya, kiddo. Have a great day!”

I don’t think I’m going to be one of the moms with fingers laced through the chain link fence on that first day(s), sobbing disconsolately for my lost baby, but I definitely won’t be clicking my heels and doing the viagra dance either. Going to school is a big transition, no doubt, but sending the boys off to daycare was way more daunting.

It would be more difficult, I think, if it weren’t so obvious that Tristan is more than ready for school. It’s more than just his early forays into reading and math and his inate curiousness, though; where I really see his readiness is in his interactions with other kids. Funny, just as I’m typing this I’m realizing that my deepest fears for him are not how he will do academically, but how he will do socially. He’s plenty bright and quick and curious, and I have no doubt he’ll do relatively well with his reading and writing and arithmetic, and I have no reason to doubt he’ll do just fine socially – but it still makes me breathless with anxiety to think about it.

School was a minefield for me, socially. Sometime in the early primary years, for reasons I’ve never understood, I became one of the target kids. I was always an outsider, picked last for teams, and teased mercilessly. We moved when I was in Grades 1, 4 and 7, which although gave me a couple of shots at a fresh start, also meant I was pretty much continually the new kid. It got worse instead of better, and by the time I was in high school I was deeply afraid nobody would ever find me worthy of love. (Which left me hugely vulnerable to my first serious boyfriend, who turned into my first husband when I was barely 20 years old. Who me, issues?) Not to say I didn’t have a terrifically happy childhood with plenty of blissful memories, but when I think back to my school years pretty much through the middle of high school, the first things I remember are the excruciating awkwardness, the overpowering desire to be liked, and the mystified hurt of rejection.

As a toddler, Tristan was relatively shy. He is often just as happy playing by himself as with the group, and he doesn’t seem to share Simon’s gregarious bravado. But over the summer, I’ve seen him suddenly start to notice the other kids, and to want their attention. We go to the park almost every evening after dinner, and my heart alternately aches and soars watching him interacting with the other kids. He gets a look of joy on his face when the other kids include him in their games that makes it painfully obvious that he’s going to have the same need for inclusion and affirmation that his mother has – poor wee soul.

I wish there was something I could give Tristan, something I could do to prepare him and to smooth the way for him. I wish that in hindsight I could look back and say, “You’ll be fine if you just avoid XXX” or, “Above all, just make sure you XXX” – but I have no idea what formula separates the happy, popular kids from those on the fringes or worse – the kids who become the targets.

It also occurs to me that I’m doing a lot of fretting on this one in advance of there actually being anything to fret about. He hasn’t even started school yet! But he’s growing up, my baby is. He’s becoming his own self now, so much more than an extension of me. The whole world is about to open up for him, and I couldn’t be more proud, or more excited. But I can also see on the horizon the first of many hurts that I won’t be able to heal with kisses and a Scooby-Doo band-aid, and that’s the part that I’m simply not yet ready for.

And I thought the labour and delivery would be the hardest part of mothering…

Notes from a therapy session

Tristan: And did I tell you about that time when I was four, when my mother tried to kill me twice in the same month?

Therapist: Hmmm, I don’t think so. There was the episode where she locked you and your brother in a running car while you were sleeping…

Tristan: Right, and then less than two weeks later, she yanked me off some playground equipment and I dropped like a stone from eight feet in the air.

Therapist: Surely she didn’t mean to…

Tristan: It was one of those things where you dangle off a handle and zoom across a beam from one platform to another. She called it a zip line, but I insisted on calling it a zip code, which was pretty funny because we don’t even have zip codes in Canada. Anyway, I had just barely mastered holding my own body weight up but I loved that zip code. We went to a new park one evening on our bikes, and I was so proud to be able to actually reach the zip code from the raised platform, and all I did all night long was zip back and forth.

Therapist: And what did your mother do?

Tristan: Well, she was watching and cheering for me at first, but then she said it would be easier if I used my feet to push off the platform at the far end. The big kids could hurl themselves across really fast and bounce half way back on one push, but I kind of had to wiggle and squirm to make it all the way across and back. Remember, I was a big kid for my age, but I was only four years old.

Therapist: Mmmm hmmm…

Tristan: And so my mother said, ‘Here, let me show you. Just use your feet to push off the platform…’ and she grabbed me by the ankles to demonstrate, but she pulled me off balance and I lost my grip on the handle. I fell face first in the sand, and because she was still holding my ankles I landed with my whole body perfectly horizontal, basically doing a giant belly flop into the sand.

Therapist (cringes): Ouch! That must have hurt!

Tristan: Yah, it knocked the wind right out of me. There was a long minute where I just lay on the sand and tried to figure out if I was still alive or not, and my mother later said the entire city of Ottawa fell silent and every pair of eyes at that very busy playground turned to me to see what would happen next.

Therapist: Were you okay?

Tristan: After I cried for a couple of minutes and got over being pissed off about all the sand in my mouth I was okay. My mother said she had nightmares for days about how close my head came to hitting the platform on the way down. I mean, I got over it pretty quickly and once my mom finished wiping the tears off my face and the sand out of my mouth with the corner of her t-shirt, I went right back to playing on the zip code for the rest of the evening. Funny, though – when we got home my mother had a whole bunch of new grey hairs I had never noticed before…

***

Bonus conversation!

We were playing in the driveway last night, and there’s a little plastic toy that was supposed to have gone in the garbage. I’m not sure how it migrated back out into the driveway, but I ended up running over it when I backed the car out of the driveway to give the kids more room to play.

Tristan picked it up and ran over to me excitedly. “Look mummy! You sure broke the hell out of this thing, didn’t you?”

The day the music died

Are you completely exhausted by my adventures with electronics lately? You may want to pass this post over, then. Apparently my electronics are sick of me, too. Or maybe there were sunspots yesterday that disturbed the electromagnetic spectrum. Or maybe I’ve just exceeded my place on the techno-savvy spectrum, and this is the way that the universe busts my britches.

My iPod died last night. It’s been a stellar two and a half weeks, and each day I found new ways to love the little dickens, but it’s all over now but the crying. I don’t know what happened. I downloaded two songs off iTunes and transferred those plus three songs that Beloved had ripped from our CD collection back when he gave me my original MP3 player last year onto the iPod. I got a funny message from the system tray of Windows XP, and started fiddling with things. (cue ominous music) At one point, I decided I should just take everything off the iPod and start all over again, but even though I deleted everything it was still showing the memory as in use.

Eventually, I made my way to apple.com’s iPod support pages, and I tried their 5R approach to troubleshooting. I installed the iPod updater twice, reinstalled the iTunes software at least once, maybe three times (things got a little fuzzy after I was up past my bedtime) and restarted the computer at least four times. I got at least five different types of error messages in different platforms, but the bottom line was that something in the iPod itself was corrupt. By the time I was done, I wasn’t getting the funny message from the system tray anymore – but iTunes wasn’t recognizing the iPod anymore either.

My iPod has been disowned by its peeps. And it’s so deeply in mourning that it won’t speak to them or me. Poor little “Escape Pod” gave me nothing but joy, and it had to end like this – it’s nothing short of tragic.

I finally gave up and went to bed and turned tech support over to Beloved. He fiddled with it for another couple of hours, and this morning I figured all would be right with the world again. Au contraire – it seems over the course of the night, my iPod gave up the will to live entirely. Despite being almost fully charged, and being plugged into the laptop for the better part of five hours last night, it ran out of power and died a lonely death sometime around midnight. Thank electra for the extended warranty program.

And that fancy-ass Nokia phone I’ve been going on about? It went on strike last night, too. I was trying to key a few names and numbers into the contacts folder, and the keypad started behaving randomly. You know how the number pad keyboard works, where you click the number a few times in rapid succession to get the letter you want? It started giving me random letters from each number, sometimes starting with the second or third letter on each number and sometimes giving me random strings of letters. If I pressed 333 quickly, sometimes I’d get a D, sometimes I’d get FFE, sometimes I’d get DEF, sometimes just an E. No idea why. Sometimes it would stop at four letters and give me a ? and not let me type any more characters. Random confusion.

So today I’m going out to Grand and Toy and buying myself a nice gel roller pen to go with the pretty little notebook with handmade paper that my mom gave me last week. Maybe I should make that a quill and ink, just so the universe sees that I’m truly penitent for my unapproved forays into the land of technology. And hosting my own blog? You never heard that from me. If the universe isn’t satisfied with my contrition, it may come down to writing my posts with an eyebrow pencil after all.

P.S. I guess Blogger was listening. Even though I damn well know better by now, I clicked “publish post” without copying or saving this post – and got a 404 message. Luckily, it was still here when I pressed the ‘back’ button.

I prostrate myself in repentance, gods of technology. I apologize for having offended thee. I’m not worthy.

Edited to add: at least I’m not the only one with techno-woes. Maybe it’s contagious?

Nokia phone birthday photos

Okay, so it took me two weeks to figure it out (which translates into about 35 minutes of time, spread in 17 instalments over six separate days), but with Beloved’s tech support I finally managed to figure out how to get my fancy new Nokia 6682 to release the pictures I took on my birthday.

For those of you who live in Ontario, that was the blistering hot day when the humidex topped out in the high forties, and there’s no better place for a day like that than at the beach. Britannia Beach, in this case – the nicest, most kid-friendly beach in the Ottawa area.

A self-portrait, for Marla:


This one is grainy, I think because I maxed out the zoom. Still, I liked it enough to set it as the wallpaper on my phone. Simon loves wearing the “goobles”.

For my birthday dinner, we went to Lone Star for fajitas. This is the boys with my wonderful mother, who is conveniently also my best friend.

Unfortunately, my dad looks a bit like a growth out of the side of my head in what would otherwise be a really cute shot.

These pix were taken with the phone straight out of the box. One day I might sit down and actually figure out how to compensate for light levels and such, as I think there are a whole whack of controls that I should be able to master in about a year and a half.

This concludes the paid advertising portion of our program. Thanks to Nokia, Matchstick and Rogers for the sweet deal!

A place of one’s own

I was having coffee with Andrea last weekend, and the topic of blog hosting came up. (Andrea was great company that night – too bad I couldn’t say the same thing about myself. It was the same week we found out that frostie didn’t work out, and Simon was in the thick of his barf and poop marathon. I could barely get my nose out of my navel, and yet she left me feeling better than I had all week. Perhaps I should have said thanks for that before now…)

Ahem, anyway, we were talking about my disappointment that Blogger won’t allow true mobile blogging for cellular customers outside the US, and she said that I’m a big-girl blogger now and perhaps it’s time to move out on my own.

Six months ago, I would have said I was perfectly content with Blogger, but the tides are slowly turning. I’ve long coveted the capability to make catagories, and I made a stab at it with del.icio.us a while back, but I never kept up with it, and the idea of sorting and tagging several hundred posts makes me tired just thinking about it. And Blogger’s capriciousness with its ability to post photos is annoying at the best of times. And maybe a nice three-column format would be nice for a change, wot?

But, there are obstacles. First, Blogger is free and domain hosting is not. Then I’d have to choose another blogging interface, and while for no particular reason I’m leaning toward Typepad, don’t I have to pay for that, too? (Too lazy to click around and find out.) And the biggest obstacle is that moving from blogger means change – and you know how I feel about change. There’d be a change to how blog looks, and a change to the blog-posting interface, and a change to how you’d find me, and I’m just not sure if I’m up for all that.

So, whaddya think? Any thoughts or recommendations? Tell me what you love and hate about the blog interface you use. Is it time for me to pony up an actual cash investment for this silly, addictive hobby of mine? If you don’t mind, if you’re paying an ISP in Canada, would you comment or e-mail me with information about your domain hosting so I can get an idea to expect what to pay, and whether you would recommend your ISP? (I have absolutely no idea.)

Would you still drop by if I moved to a fancy uptown place? And hey, if it works out, stay tuned for the ‘name that domain’ autumn contest!

Edited to add: if you’re thinking about domain names and web hosting in Canada, check out the most excellent analysis over at Miche’s place. Thanks, Miche!

Obligatory free phone blog

As I mentioned last month, I was offered a free Nokia 6682 smart phone for the simple price of blogging with and about it. I’m fulfilling the last half of that obligation today, and will do the former just as soon as I figure out how. The whole time I wrote this post, I waited for the USB cable drivers to install themselves, but something’s not working. Ugh, technology.

It’s a sweet little phone, I must admit. It has still and video photo capabilities, a video editor, internet connectivity, e-mail and instant messaging, it can play MP3s and act as a voice recorder, it has games – oh yah, and it’s a telephone, too.

Here’s the whole package I received from Matchstick.ca, the buzz marketing specialists who are working with Nokia on this campaign:

There’s a Bluetooth wireless headset in there, extra memory, and a whole bunch of other widgets I am only now beginning to understand. So you can understand how truly state-of-the-art all this is for me, here is my former cell phone. I think we bought it around 2001.


It has text messaging – which I’ve never used because I was too cheap to pay for voice mail and call display, let alone a data package – and that’s about it. When I brought the new Nokia 6682 into the Rogers outlet to have them help me transfer the account, the enthusiastic young woman who served me said that Rogers will no longer even be supporting this type of phone after this year, so the arrival of a free replacement was more timely than I realized.

She was very impressed with the Nokia 6682, and even moreso with the concept that I got it for free, just for blogging about and with it. She said it was one of nicer phones she had seen, and enthusiastically showed it to several other employees and even a familiar customer while she helped me transfer my cell account.

I was a little worried that my grandfathered cell account, originally activated through a no-longer-available corporate plan back in 1998, wouldn’t support this new phone, but I had no problems. I’m going to buy a small data transfer package (an extra $3 a month) so I can do a little bit of mobile blogging, but I was disappointed to see that Blogger doesn’t support true mobile blogging for customers outside the US. It may just be time to cut the apron strings and move to hosting my own blog, but that’s a post for another day.

I find the phone very easy to use, even for a Luddite like me. The phone itself and the camera features are fairly intuitive. I haven’t used much of the Web connectivity features yet because I haven’t upgraded my phone account for the data package, but it’s fun to play with. I set the ring tone to the sound of an old ringing phone (think of the heavy black rotary dial ones) as a tribute to my utter lack of familiarity with any of the phone’s features.

It would have been nice if it were a flip phone, or at least came with a protective case, because the display screen is already a little scratched just from being carried around in my purse, but that’s my only complaint. There are features I know I’ll never use on a regular basis, but it’s still fun to have them. And with time, I’m sure I’ll start using some of the other features simply because I have them.

For now, I’m still trying to install the software that will liberate the photos I’ve taken from the camera. It’s been twenty minutes and the USB drivers seem to be hung, so I’ll have to go back and reinstall the software, I think. More later when I figure it out!