Guess who’s coming to dinner?

Okay, so I prolly should’ve written about this three or four days ago, since our Canadian Thanksgiving was on Monday, but I just never got around to it on the weekend. We were too busy apple-picking and playing with friends and eating turkey and visiting the Farm in the glorious autumn sunshine. I’ll have another too-late post full of pictures, if I can ever remember to upload the darn things.

But I had to comment on this article in last Friday’s Citizen. Some things just beg to be blogged. Indigo books commissioned a national survey asking which author Canadians would most like to host for Thanksgiving dinner. The answer surprised me, even though it would have been one of my top-three choices: Stephen King! The rest of the top five were, in order, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, Bill Bryson and Alice Munro.

So you know what my next question is. If you could invite three authors to dinner, who would you choose? It’s not so easy as you might think. Do you consider the compatibility of your guests? (I would dearly love to be seated across from Margaret Atwood and Stephen King and listen to them go at it for a couple of hours.) Do you choose exclusively from your favourite authors, or the most colourful personalities?

Okay, after very little deliberation on my part, I’d invite: Will Ferguson, Nick Hornby, and Stephen King.

You?

Mommy blogging

I’m supposed to have a coherent, polished presentation ready to show my Motherlode conference co-presenters by the end of the day today. I have spent many, many hours thinking about this, but only about two hours actually committing any of those thoughts to paper or pixels.

I really should have done this about a month ago, but if it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done around here. And my life has been ever so slightly out of control this past six weeks or so, for reasons which you are well aware. (Ah, you think, she has no shame. She will play that pregnancy card to death by the time she enters the second trimester. And you are right.)

So here’s what I want to ask you. I need your ideas and experiences to flesh out my themes. One of the subjects I want to discuss in my part of the conversation is why blogs are a communication tool to which mothers in particular are drawn. What is it about blogging that we find so addictive and so compelling? Is it in the reading, or the writing? More specifically, would you be willing to share (either in the comment box, or more privately, via e-mail to danicanada at gmail dot com) an anecdote about how blogging helped you as a mother? Was there a time when you were at the end of your rope, and blogging helped you find another inch to hang on to? Did reading someone else’s experience help you realize you were not alone, not the only person struggling with something?

Myself, I always think back to my epic “is this my life” whine last year. I was so tired, so frustrated, so overwhelmed by everything, and just sending it out into the blogosphere helped me get it off my chest. Then so many people responded, either with a ‘there, there’ virtual pat on my shoulder, or a “me too”, and I felt so relieved. It was okay to be overwhelmed, and having you all acknowledge it helped me be okay with it too.

There have been other more practical things I’ve gotten from the community of blogging. I learned about cheap OPKs online, got great gift ideas for Simon’s birthday, and got some great tips on potty training, to name just a few.

And the fact that I’ve blogged so much of the minutia of our lives means that I have it here, recorded in cyberspace. I love it when I happen to be flipping through my own archives looking for something and I stumble across an anecdote or set of photos I had completely forgotten about.

So that’s three things I love about blogging: the sense of community, the connection with other people, and the chance to tell my stories to a receptive audience.

It’s your turn, because I’m just too lazy to do this whole thing on my own. What about you? Why blogging? What is it about the medium that makes it so popular with mothers? What has blogging done for you lately?

Edited to add: In reading your comments, you made me realize that my own questions were very leading. Maybe there is a darker aspect to blogging that I didn’t consider. What are the detriments to blogging? What do you think about the idea of blogging as a popularity contest, of the accusations of clique-ishness, of blogging as exclusionary instead of community-building. Thoughts?

Conquering the French

Oh, the irony!

Yesterday, I took my dreaded oral exam for the third time since February. Less than 22 hours later, I read this article in the Citizen about how the public service is finally revisiting how it evaluates second-language capability, and how they’ll be moving from a (positively painful) one-on-one interview in a tiny office with a tape recorder sitting in front of you to a more natural evaluation like shadowing you on your job and listening to you interact in French, or discussing a presentation or video you just watched together.

The article says that the pass rate for anglophones is between 32 and 35 per cent at the advanced level C. (Hey, I guess I’m right on target, having twice previously failed my own language test so far this year, albeit at the intermediate level B) while the pass rate for francophones in English is 68 to 72 per cent. Sigh.

This is my last kick at the can; if I don’t pass it this time, I will likely have to forgo the promotion I earned way back in May 2005 and give up the acting assignment I’ve had since June 2005. In other words, there’s a lot riding on my exam. Matter of fact, my substantive position was bilingual, too (I passed the oral exam at the B level back in 2000, two year-long maternity leaves ago) so I don’t even know if I have a position to go back to. Yikes.

I’m not going to speculate on how it went. The last time, I was sure I nailed it, and I still failed to achieve the intermediate level I need. I don’t even need to obtain the advanced level C for this position, but I will if I ever want to work in a higher-level communications position with the government. The article says that 63 per cent of the jobs in the national capital region are bilingual, but I can’t remember the last time I saw an English-only position come up.

I suppose the good news is that any future test I take will be under this new regime, but it would have been nice to have this article come out any time other than within 24 hours of the exam!

Results should be in by the end of next week. You’ll know when I know!

One book meme

Stolen from Rebecca at Clumsy Kisses:

1. One book that changed your life:
Generation X. It made me take a very critical look at my life and who I was and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was an awakening that gave me the strength I needed shortly thereafter to leave a less than ideal marriage at the tender age of 24.

2. One book that you’ve read more than once:
Contact, by Carl Sagan. Each time I read it, I get something new from it.

3. One book you would want on a desert island:
Any of Alice Munro’s short story collections. I’d spend all my time trying to figure out how she works her magic.

4. One book that made you laugh:
I read some of the autobiographical bits of Stephen King’s On Writing out loud to Beloved and had tears running down my cheeks from laughing so hard.

5. One book that made you cry:
I can’t read the newspaper these days without crying. The first time I read S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders when I was thirteen, I couldn’t see the page for sobbing when Johnny died.

6. One book that you wish had been written:
The owner’s manual for my kids.

7. One book that you wish had never been written:
Should any book not have been written? Some time around the 400th reading, I was beginning to feel that way about Where’s Spot?

8. The book that you are currently reading:
The Continuity Girl by Leah McLaren. (Thanks, Nancy!)

9. One book that you have been meaning to read:
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley.

10. Books you don’t enjoy:
Formulaic chick lit; serial-killer/FBI crime fiction (although I do like a good legal thriller).

11. Book you remember as a real page-turner:
The Time-Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I also got some serious late fines recently on Zadie Smith’s On Beauty because I ran out of time but couldn’t stop reading it.

12. Non-fiction books you have enjoyed:
I love books on astronomy and cosmology, and reading about things like superstring theory and chaos theory. A Brief History of Time, The Elegant Universe, The Left Hand of Creation.

13. Children’s books your family has loved:
Tristan really enjoyed books in the Matthew’s Midnight Adventure series. Funny, a little bit silly, great illustrations and Canadian, too! When they were little (as opposed to now, being all grown up and all) they both absolutely adored the book If You See A Kitten, by John Butler. Possibly one of the most beautifully illustrated children’s books I have ever seen.

I’m not going to tag anyone, but if you want it please feel free to steal it and let me know so I can check out your answers – or you can answer in the comment box.

Almost famous

Remember waaaaaay back in early September, when I mentioned that I had been to a blogger meet-up with Andrea and Kerry? I never did get around to writing more about it, but that night there was a reporter from the Ottawa Citizen there, and she was intrigued by our discussions about the free stuff bloggers get (and you know how I love the free stuff) and the agonizing I was doing at that time over running ads on the blog.

Well, this morning the feature she wrote was the cover of the Tech Weekly section, with a giant photograph of Tristan and I, framed in our laptop monitor! How cool is that? I so wish the photograph was in the online edition, because it really is a lovely shot. Maybe I can scan it and show you later on.

The article itself was great. The reporter compared four Ottawa bloggers and our different approaches to blogging for profit. I know one of the other bloggers (Hi David!) and met another one of them at the blogger meet-up. It was a lot of fun to be part of the process, too. While I’ve had letters to the editor run a few times before, this is the first time I’ve been part of an actual article.

I had to laugh when I saw she had written, “Postcards from the Mothership provides an intimate look at Donders’ life. The federal government employee recently told readers about her pregnancy before she told her bosses.” Hmmm, as of this morning I still hadn’t gotten around to telling some of those bosses formally yet. You think communications exectives read the paper much? *cringe* Then again, I’m not sure all of them knew about blog, either. (Hi, big bosses!)

I laughed out loud when I read that the reporter, Alexandra, worked in a plug for me. In discussing ads on blogs, she quotes me saying “‘Blogging — for me, at least — is so very personal that allowing ads on the blog seemed a slippery slop to selling myself and my kids and our personal experiences,’ she says” but then continues on with “while pointing out that she’d be willing to consider a book publisher’s offer.” Random House, Harper Collins, House of Anansi – are you listening?

The best reaction was from Tristan, though. Newspapers have an elevated status around our house already – the boys know nothing happens in the morning until Mommy has read the newspaper. The picture of us is almost a full half-page, and he is absolutely tickled by it – and by the fact that you can see his new-for-school Scooby Doo backpack in the photo! We were both up a few minutes before the rest of the house, so I had time to show it to him before anyone else was up. He practically bowled Beloved over shoving the photo up to his bleary, half-opened eyes, and wouldn’t let me take Simon out of his crib until Tristan had positioned the paper just right for optimal viewing.

So, if you’re here as a result of the Citizen article, welcome! Pour yourself a coffee and feel free to join the conversation – we’re a friendly lot around here. Me, I’ll be out looking for extra vanity copies of the paper. For Tristan’s baby book, of course.

Edited to add: thanks to Andrea – although I hate to foil her enterpreneurship! – I have this scan of the photo from today. Props to Citizen photographer Ashley Fraser, who took this and about 100 other pictures that day, and was incredibly patient with both Tristan and me!

Nine-week update

I had my first OB appointment this week. I’ll have the same obstetrician I had with my other pregnancies, and I really like her. She’s warm but not touchy-feely, and while she’s very kind and empathetic, she doesn’t let me get away with anything. It’s a nice mix!

Frankly, I could have practically phoned this appointment in. I’m only at nine weeks, so it’s too early to hear the baby’s heartbeat with the doppler. There isn’t too much that she could tell me that I don’t remember from my last two pregnancies, either. (I always stumble over the number of pregnancies. This is in fact my fourth pregnancy, since we lost the first one, but I don’t want to keep dragging that into the conversation. Anyway, I digress…)

She listened to my heart and lungs, and took my blood pressure, which always tends to the low side. The only part I didn’t like was the weigh-in, mostly because her scale is a full five pounds heavier than the scale I’ve been using at the gym to monitor my weight weekly. Ugh. I’m more paranoid about my weight this time around than I ever was before.

The one conversation that I meant to have and that I forgot about was the “advanced maternal age” issue. I’m 37, which while not exactly ancient still puts me into the risk category. I’ll be having the Integrated Prenatal Screening (IPS) test that’s available to all pregnant women in Ontario (can I get a hallelujah for socialized medicine? Throughout my entire pregnancy, the only cost I am likely to incur is in the hospital when I give birth, because I will upgrade from a ward to a private room at $100 a night.) IPS consists of an ultrasound at 12 weeks, plus two blood tests, and screens for increased likelihood of Down Syndrome, Trisomy 18 and neural tube defects.

What I can’t quite bring myself to do is an amniocentisis. Because I know my OB fairly well by now, I don’t think she’ll push one on me, despite the ‘advanced maternal age’ issue. When I was pregnant with Tristan, the 18 week ultrasound showed an echogenic cardiac focus, a bright spot of calcification on the heart that was at the time considered to be a ‘soft marker’ for Down Syndrome. We went for genetic counselling, but facing a 1 in 200 chance of Downs, I couldn’t bear the risk of the 1 in 200 chance of miscarriage with an amnio.

Although, it sure would be nice to know whether this baby’s plumbing is of the indoor or outdoor variety – and the amnio can confirm that. Waiting another nine weeks for the ultrasound that shows gender is going to be excruciating!

The one thing I love about my OB’s office is the chart on the wall with the actual-size representation of what your baby looks like right now. I’m thrilled to see that the little munchkin has developed fingers and toes already, and is roughly the size of my thumb. Nine weeks down, 31 to go!

10-pages-in book review: JPod

I’ve been trying to write this latest 10-pages-in book review for the better part of a month. When I was thirty or forty pages into the book, the place where I usually am when I start fleshing out a review in my head, I wasn’t sure what to say. So I kept reading, and my opinion of the book kept changing, and then I was so close to being done that I figured I might as well just read the whole damn thing.

And then I still didn’t know what I wanted to say.

If you’ve been around for a while, you know I have a huge literary crush on Douglas Coupland. For as long as I’ve been reading him – and I’ve read all his books – he has always had a knack for observing the same things I was observing, of thinking the same things I was thinking, of wondering the same things I was wondering – and for writing them with a satiric flair that makes me weep with envy. And I think that’s why I’m so conflicted about jPod.

JPod is the story of – well, even that’s not so easy to nail down. How about jPod is the name a sextet of misfit video game programmers give themselves. They all have surnames beginning with the letter J and are housed in the same quadrant of the Vancouver tech firm that employs them, thus jPod. They are familiar characters from other Coupland novels – smart, tech-saavy, ironic, and playful. They work long hours and have no significant lives outside of their cubicle walls, but seem to spend most of their days surfing gore sites on the Web and writing up mock descriptions of themselves as if they were items for sale on e-Bay. When the marketing geniuses decide the skateboard game they are coding needs a benevolent turtle character inserted into it at the last minute, they go to great lengths to sabotage the game by programming a rampaging Ronald McDonald terrorist easter egg into it. They search for meaning in technology, in games, in each other, and expend the majority of their time finding ways to avoid growing up.

Some other stuff happens, too. The narrator, Ethan Jarlewski, has to deal with a burgeoning crush on the new girl in the next cube, a mother with a cash crop of pot in her basement and a tendency to infidelity, a father who desperately covets a speaking part in a movie, and a tenuous but growing connection to an oriental crime boss with a penchant for ballroom dancing. By the end of the novel, though, Ethan’s biggest problem is his new nemesis: Douglas Coupland himself, who goes from self-referential cameo to central character.

Yeah, it’s a strange little book. The plot at some points is simply preposterous, but with Douglas Coupland you know that he’s using irony and satire to make a point and that the preposterousness is intentional, if not a little bit annoying. Also rather odd is his inclusion of a numbing 23 pages (yes, twenty-three) of the first hundred-thousand digits of pi and the 972 three-letter words that you can legally use in a game of Scrabble. More contextual, at least, is the inclusion of the infamous Nigerian spam e-mail, reprints of random product labels, the nutritional information from a bag of Doritos, and the Chinese characters for the words shopping, boredom and pornography.

Despite, or perhaps because of its peccadilloes, lots of people are liking this book. It’s been long-listed for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize, given annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story fiction collection published in English. Many reviews are calling it a sequel to Coupland’s popular Microserfs. It’s all good, and on the whole I enjoyed reading it. And yet, I had some difficulties with it, too.

After all, I’m no longer the young ingenue searching for meaning and a greater purpose to life that I was back when I Generation X knocked me on my ass back in 1993. (I honestly attribute my reading that book as one of the forces that launched me out of a bad marriage and into a reinvention of my entire identity). Heck, now I’m part of the establishment, a suburban mother of two almost three, happily married and finding meaning in my life every time I look into my childrens’ eyes. Although I clearly recognize the ironic, fun-seeking tech geeks at the centre of this story, and I’m close enough to this world to get most of the inside jokes, I’m still having a hard time relating to characters so fundamentally empty that when you strip away all the hip cultural references and ironic asides and winks and nods, there’s nothing left. These characters spend so much time looking to the Internet and popular culture for personal relevance and meaning that they’ve gone from characters to caricatures, and that’s too bad.

I can recommend jPod unequivocally. It’s easy to read, broken up as the narrative is by all the other games and minutia Coupland has doodled in the margins. It’s fun, well-written, and despite the silliness of some of the plot lines, a good story.

I guess what I want is something more grown-up now. After all, poster-boy though he was for Generation X, Coupland is almost ten years older than me, and if I’m feeling my age, I can’t help but wonder if he’s not feeling that way, too. I so love his writing, his keen eye for minutia, and his wit. I guess I’d like to see more of what he thinks of us right now instead of us half a generation ago, and what that means as we all settle down and settle in for the long haul.

Eight days

Eight days. That’s how long it took for us to be called in for a meeting with Tristan’s teachers. Eight days of school.

When she first stopped Beloved late last week and said she would appreciate it if he could take some time to come to a meeting, I was curious but not overly concerned. (Of course, I also dropped a few things so I could clear my schedule and attend the meeting as well. My control tendencies run deep.)

We showed up on Friday afternoon with both Tristan and Simon in tow. Tristan took Simon on the cook’s tour of the junior kindergarten classroom while Beloved and I folded ourselves into half-sized chairs around a knee-high table and tried to look nonchalant. When the teacher laid out photocopies of a worksheet in front of us, I began to suspect this is a meeting she has with all parents. The worksheet had a section for Tristan’s strengths, areas of concern, goals for teacher and goals for parent. A few minutes into the conversation, though, it became clear that There Is A Problem.

Frankly, I’m not incredibly surprised at the nature of The Problem. Tristan is a little, um, wilful. Sometimes. The first “incident” she had listed on a separate sheet (no copies of that one for us) was that on Tuesday, she had bestowed Tristan the honour of being the helper of the day, and he threw a pout on Wednesday when he realized it was someone else’s turn. Um, pouting. Yep, we’ve seen that one at home.

The next “incident” had to do with Tristan not staying in line. Tristan only likes to be at the front of the line. We’d heard about this problem already, and were talking to him about how important it is to stay in line, and the importance of listening to the teacher.

The third “incident” was about circle time. She told us, “He’s very smart, but he has a tendency to shout out the answers instead of raising his hand.” Well, okay, I used to be like that, too. But really – we’re talking DAY EIGHT here. Give him a couple of weeks. And he tends to wiggle and wriggle in his spot and ‘put his hands on the other kids’ in circle time. Well, okay, I’ve seen this at home too, and while I realize he needs to learn to stop, did I mention EIGHT DAYS?

The final incident is the only one that really worried me. He has a little friend, whom I will call Dude to head off any possible future slander action on the part of his parents. (Hey, I read Suburban Bliss.) Tristan talks about Dude constantly; you’d think there were no other kids in his class. Well, apparently earlier in the week, Dude’s mother sent a note to school saying that Tristan had been calling Dude names like “poopy head” and that Dude felt intimidated by Tristan.

My first reaction was gut-wrenching shame. My child intimidating someone else? After I spent my entire grade-school career being the target of choice through three elementary schools? And then I really thought about it. First of all, Tristan is a gentle soul. He’s big, no doubt – the size of a big six year old. And I’ve no doubt that he called Dude a poopy head, because he and Simon are going through that poop and fart language stage right now, and I’ve heard it at home. But to be honest, I haven’t been incredibly stringent about it, because I find it pretty harmless. When Tristan mimicked one of the older kids and called Simon a loser the other day, the whole world stopped turning while I explained that some things are not acceptable and made him apologize. But “poopy head”? Isn’t that a four-year-old rite of passage? It just so happens that I know Dude has not been in daycare, and so maybe that’s why his mother was particularly horrified that Tristan unleashed this verbal assault on her son, but I’m having a hard time being concerned about this.

In all, I’m glad the teacher called us in for a discussion. Because Tristan alternates one week in English and one week in French, this was his first week with this teacher, and I can see why four incidents in five days would be of concern to her. And she herself admitted that she had seen no further problems beyond the first day with the ‘special helper’ incident. And I know that Tristan is both wilful and boisterous, and that’s something we’re all going to have to work on. Maybe it’s time to look for another form of discipline beyond the time out. Anybody got any good books to recommend?

Through the course of the weekend, I’ve gone from shame to bristling annoyance to filing it under “lessons learned + blog fodder”. The teacher is going to make up a little worksheet for Tristan with three or four goals for him (sit nicely in circle and raise your hand to speak; hands to yourself in the cloakroom; etc.), and each day she’ll either mark a check or an X and we’ll review it at home together at the end of the day. It’s a pretty good idea, and I appreciate her efforts.

Eight days. Ugh. How long until graduation?

(Edited to add: ha ha. Today’s Word of the Day on the sidebar is recalcitrant \rih-KAL-sih-truhnt\, adjective: Stubbornly resistant to and defiant of authority or restraint. See Tristan.)