Three!

Why is it that when I’m short on time, I’m shorter on ideas? I just want to dash off a quick post today and I’ve written about 600 words on four different topics – none of which will coalesce into anything worth posting.

(I suppose I should have known I was scraping the bottom of the blog-fodder barrel when I admitted to the Interwebs that I wet my pants in Loblaws. Pretty clear sign in retrospect that maybe I need to restock the ideas cupboard!)

And now I’m completely out of time, and have nothing. Nothing!

So, in lieu of an actual post, I will resort to the laziest of devices and turn it all back on you.

Tell me three things about you. Any old three things at all. Your three favourite colours, three favourite foods, names of three pets you have owned, three vacations you have taken or want to take or would never dream of taking. Three books you want to read. Three shows you wish were still on TV. The three best toppings on a pizza. Why three? Because I’m thinking in threes lately – three sons, three boys, three children.

Don’t be shy – speak up! Surely there are three of SOMETHING rattling around in your brain.

The Sneeze

It’s not like I didn’t brace for it. After all, I’ve been pregnant a few times over the last six or seven years, so I know what to expect. I was walking into Loblaws when I felt it coming on, and I even paused and braced for it. It didn’t help.

I sneezed, and to my utter dismay, I squirted.

What the hell? I’m barely six months pregnant, and I didn’t even have a full bladder. I’ve even been doing my kegels.

Speaking of kegels, after birthing 9 lbs and 10 lbs of boy, I take my kegels very seriously. If I didn’t, I imagine my uterus may end up dangling somewhere between my knees by the time I whelp this one. I remember from our prenatal classes, way back when I was pregnant with Tristan, that the nurse said you should find an activity that you do every day and use that activity as a reminder to do your kegels. I could have maybe chosen when I’m standing in my private kitchen making dinner, maybe chosen my private bathroom while brushing my teeth, but no. For every single pregnancy, you know where the only place is that I can remember to do my kegels? At the bus stop. The Rideau Centre bus stop, that is, the one with a minimum of 75 people standing cheek-by-jowl waiting for one of the 6000 buses that pass by during rush hour.

I’m sure the occasional bystander must wonder about the well-rounded woman staring off into the middle distance with a look on her face not unlike she is passing a rather large bowel movement as she stands waiting for the bus. I’m just glad I am (usually) able to keep the grunting under control as I work those muscles.

Gah, sometimes I think pregnancy is just one long series of ever-increasing indignities so by the time you’re propped up on the table with your feet in the stirrups and a roomful of strangers staring at your hoo-ha, you simply don’t care anymore.

Ah well, I suppose there’s irony somewhere in the fact that after a long and arduous road to success, Simon is now perfectly potty trained… and I no longer am.

The one where she bans Star Wars from the house

We were having dinner last night. Spaghetti and garlic bread, a simple and favourite family staple. I had been updating Beloved on my appointment Monday with the midwife, and told Tristan that the “ladies who help the baby come out” said that he and Simon should come to the office one day so they can hear the baby’s heart beat and even feel the shape of the baby. (How amazing is that? I can’t imagine my OB offering to host my kids for a shared family appointment. Matter of fact, the midwives encouraged it. I made the right choice in going with the midwives for this baby. I’m so happy with them.)

So Tristan and I started talking about the baby, and he tells me that mommies go away to have their babies. (This also builds on a conversation from a few days before, where we read an “Arthur” book about a dog that goes missing and it turns out she’s hidden to have her puppies.) I say yes, mommies go to the hospital to help the babies come out.

“And Padmé went away to have baby Luke and baby Leia,” he observes. I’m nodding in half-remembered agreement of the mythology of the last movie of the second Star Wars trilogy – which the boys aren’t allowed to watch because they’re too violent. Before I can see what’s coming, he looks at me with his solemn, gorgeously clear gray-green eyes and says, “And Padmé dies when she goes away to have the babies. But you won’t die, Mommy.”

I’m so rocked by the speed with which this previously innoccuous conversation has degenerated that I can only think to say, “Yes, well, but – that’s just a story. That doesn’t really happen. EVER.”

Tristan carries on, unperturbed and in a tone that is both reassuring and seeking assurance. “You won’t die for a long, long time, right Mommy? Not until you’re very old.”

Swallowing hard against a tide of emotion that I absolutely cannot allow to show on my face, I repeat again that it’s just a story, it’s like the cartoons on TV and not real, and change the topic as fast as I possibly can.

Afterwards, I confront Beloved and ask how they know Padmé dies if they haven’t seen the movie. He has no idea, but thinks it might be in the Star Wars lego video game they love.

That’s it. No more Star Wars, no more video games. We’re going back to all Blues Clues all the time around here.

The best way to appeal to a blogger is through her ego

This was one of the several things we discussed at last night’s Third Monday social media gathering, featuring me! (Warning: my ego has been pumped to nearly unbearable proportions after last night. There will be no living with me until I brag just a little bit about how much fun I had, so you might as well just let me get it out of my system.)

I have been agonizing for weeks about doing the “Marketers and the Mommy Bloggers” Third Monday presentation. Recent Third Monday speakers have included Paul Wells, Mitch Joel and Stephen Taylor, and I just couldn’t wrap my head around what I might have to offer to a crowd of people mostly unfamiliar with Mom Bloggers but very familiar with PR and social media and marketing.

I needn’t have worried. The whole evening had a friendly, intimate feel to it, which I think made all the difference. My friend and government-and-social-media mentor Ian Ketcheson did a great job moderating the conversation, making the evening less about me doing a presentation and more about an interactive question-and-answer type of thing.

You can tell it was a very sombre occassion and we both took our roles very seriously.

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(Thanks to Barbara for her photographic skills, her most excellent questions and especially for meeting me for dinner before the event and distracting me from my mounting nervous anxiety with candy. When wine is not an option, candy is a decent alternative!)

So what did we talk about? For me, it was a really interesting discussion covering so much of what I love about blogging. I had sketched out some topics I wanted to cover, and going in I was afraid I’d get through all that in about 15 minutes and then have nothing left to say, but the conversation took its own course.

We talked about everything from the personal (how do I keep coming up with stuff to write about after more than 950 posts) to the general (contrasting the mom blogs to the glossy parenting magazines) to the professional (how the government should be using the tools of social media.)

The core series of points I wanted to make was about how I think the PR and marketing folks should be approaching Mom Bloggers (and other “niche” bloggers, for that matter):

  • Get to know the bloggers. Read, comment, be a part of the community. If you’re going to pitch me, I want to feel like you’re interested in me and not just the eyeballs that crawl across my blog.
  • Respect my work. Don’t ask me to “contribute” articles, or my feed, to your ad-filled space for free.
  • Don’t try manipulation or false flattery.
  • Use Google Alerts or Google Blog Search to find out who is already writing about your products or product category. The offer of free Nintendo DS games to review arrived mere days after I blogged about my preschoolers discovering computer games. Coincidence?
  • Follow up to let the blogger know you read and appreciate the post(s).

People asked all sorts of interesting questions, ranging from the ethics of accepting PR pitches to what proportion of the mom blogs contain gossip as compared to “useful information” (I opined that gossip and anecdotal storytelling is not really mutually exclusive from useful information, especially in a personal context) to my opinion of Erica Ehm’s Yummy Mummy contest and Rebecca Eckler.

Brendan Hodgson, my Scrabulous nemisis who happens to be VP of Digital Communications at Hill and Knowlton, didn’t hesitate to ask a few challenging questions and got me thinking about the relationship between bloggers and the PR and marketing firms and the companies for whom the marketers are working. I hadn’t realized until last night, and Brendan seemed intrigued – perhaps even worried – by the idea, that when I do agree to be a part of a campaign like H&K’s KRZR phone campaign from last year, I see my “client” as the PR firm and not the company they are representing.

I wish I could remember more of the conversation to share with you! Joe Thornley, the chief organizer behind the Third Monday meetups, captured most of the conversation with his digital recorder, and if it’s of decent quality he’ll post some of it, so I’ll share the link if he does.

What really made the evening great for me, though, was connecting with people before and after the presentation itself. Things got off to a great start when I was approached by a lovely person who said she was so pleased to meet me in person after she’d been following the blog for a while. (Hi Natasha!) And another woman was kind enough to say her sister (or was it cousin? Ack, my memory is truly an embarrassment) is a regular reader. It’s both extremely gratifying and oddly unsettling to meet strangers who feel like they know me… this blogging thing just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.

Another woman named Sherry talked to me a bit about the upcoming launch of her gifts-for-babies site, but then we got sidetracked into a really neat idea she had for setting up a Blog Club, similar to a Book Club except that everyone would read a given blog for a week or so, then people could get together and discuss it: what did you think of the blogger’s take on this subject, did you agree with her approach to this, etc. What a wicked cool idea, eh?

Special thanks to Joe and the other organizers of Third Monday for giving me an evening in the spotlight, and a chance to talk about my bloggy passions. I hope the evening was half as enjoyable and informative for the people in attendance as it was for me! (And if you happen to be visiting as a result of last night’s presentation, do say hello in the comments and let me know what you thought.)

Edited to add: Joe Thornley did a great job of capturing the essence of the conversation on his Pro PR blog, if you’d like to see some of the details of what we talked about.

Today is National Grouch Day

Sheesh, they ought to give a girl a little bit of notice on these things. According to the Ottawa Citizen, today is National Grouch Day. Had I known, I would have – erm, well, not baked some cupcakes. Um, not kissed some kittens. Uhhhh, well, I would have done something to mark the occasion. Maybe sucked a few lemons, at least. (Grouch image courtesy of the Muppet Wiki.)

How often do we get to indulge our inner cranky-pants? I’m puffing out my dimples, flattening the laugh lines around my eyes and getting all Oscar today. Today is all grouchy, all the time.

(And just between you and me? It has very little to do with National Grouch Day. In fact, today might be more aptly named Abject Terror Day. I’m doing this tonight, and I’ve got a major case of the performance-anxiety twitchies.)

So, bloggy peeps, I know it’s a break from the relentless cheeriness of our usual Yay Day habit, but what the hell. It’s National Grouch Day, after all. Have at it – grumble, groan, bitch or moan. What’s pissing you off today?

Massive slaughter of innocent hyphens

Fryman, one of my favourite sources for unsolicted blog fodder, sent me an article from the Globe and Mail detailing the mass genocide of 16,000 innocent hypens in the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Formerly hyphenated words will either become new compound words (pigeonhole, waterborne and chickpea) or separated into two distinct words (test tube, water bed and hobby horse.)

In many of these cases, the Oxford was merely catching up with usage: Waterborne, for example, is probably used by the majority of newspapers anyway. (But as if to prove how arbitrary this all is, the old Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors has long given waterbed as one word. Aren’t these books published by the same company?)

Of course, the Shorter Oxford retained some hyphenated phrases to avoid ambiguity: They will permit the phrase “twenty-odd,” meaning “approximately twenty,” because to say “twenty odd people” has a somewhat different meaning. Copy editors love to give examples of the ways in which missing hyphens can cause confusion; perhaps the best-known example is “used car salesman,” which can be read in two ways unless you make a hyphenated compound out of “used-car.” The phrase “50 year old kittens” will also need a hyphen somewhere if it is to make any sense.

According to the UK Telegraph (I will stop at nothing to provide you with high-quality research), Shorter Oxford editor Angus Stevenson said the hyphen has fallen victim to our inherent laziness and unwillingness to stretch out our pinkies and reach for that hyphen key in our electronic communication.

It’s been a while since I railed against the injustices of an evolving language. My latest rant on the subject was outrage at the reduction of two spaces to one after a period (link is to the old blog because your comments are actually more entertaining than the original post!) And, for what it’s worth, a year later I am still firm on this one. A period gets TWO thumb-thwacks on the space bar, not one.

I am much less perturbed about a reduction in the use of the gentle hyphen, however. (I also have more moderate views on the use of the serial comma.) As far back as the first edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary in 1911, there has been confusion about the role of the hyphen:

We have also to admit that after trying hard at an early stage to arrive at some principle that should teach us when to separate, when to hyphen, and when to unite the parts of compound words, we had to abandon the attempt as hopeless, and welter in the prevailing chaos.

I’m guilty of having at least a working knowledge of the accepted practices of hyphenation – and ignoring them for convenience’s sake. When I’m feeling persnickity, I’l go back and edit them in after the fact, most notably when talking about my three-year-old. But some days, it’s just easier to talk about my five year old, ya know?

The one place I use the hyphen rather compulsively, intentionally and against what seems to be growing convention, is in the term “e-mail.” Email just doesn’t look right to me – you need to stretch out the eeee sound with that hyphen.

What say ye, oh wise and learned bloggy peeps? Do you have even the faintest idea of how to properly use a hyphen – and do you care?

The one that could use a few segues

You know why pregnant women are cranky? It’s not the hormones, it’s not the sleep deprivation, it’s not the heartburn or the aching joints or the fact that your brain has taken a holiday in the south of France leaving you to defend for yourself without one.

It’s the pants.

You’d be cranky, too, if you had to adjust your pants every. single. time you moved. Stand up – hitch up pants. Before sitting down – hitch up pants. Walk any distance greater than four steps – hitch up pants. Every half hour, your underwear have been hitched up and down by your migrating pants so many times that you have a wedgie AND they’re somewhere near your knees. AT THE SAME TIME. And it’s not just the pants, because your shirt tails have to be adjusted, too, because pregnancy shirts are so long these days. It’s more like “stand up – lift shirt tail – hitch up pants – adjust underwear – smooth out shirt tail – take two steps – repeat.”

No wonder women wear those silly-looking bib overalls for most of their pregnancies. I mean, sure they’re cute and all when you’re a perkily pregnant 24. But when you’re a lumberingly pregnant 38, you wear the damn things just to have some blessed relief from wrangling gravity for your pants all the damn day long.

***

Did you see the CanadaWrites contest on CBC? They’re calling it “the writing game for quick-witted Canadians.” Send in your original short piece in one of the following categories: songs, humour, ad, movie pitch or … wait for it … BLOG POST!

I was so excited about this until I realized just how very short 200 words is. I took a look at four or five of my favourite posts, and they were each in excess of 800 words, some of them more than 1000 words. Yikes! It takes me 200 words just to set the scene some days. Oh well. I may still enter – and tell me if you do, so I can vote for you!

***

My friend ÃœberGeek sent me a note yesterday playfully accusing me of propping up my search rank by lacing my breastfeeding post with google bait for porn searchers. I laughed him off, and then cringed ruefully this morning when I got more than five hits from this referrer: girls.go41.de/?s=girl%20breast%20photo. I didn’t want to click through and I’m not going to give them the benefit of the link. But sigh. And ick. And sigh.

***

We’ve heard a lot about bad corporate behaviour on the Interwebs lately, between pictures being stolen from Flickr and Secret Agent Josephine’s artwork being stolen, not to mention the endless proliferation of content scrapers and splogs.

This is not one of those stories.

I noticed a couple of hits from links at MommyClub.ca, so I clicked through to see what they were linking to. I was rather annoyed to find my entire post from yesterday, and when I looked around I saw that they were syndicating my feed. I was just about to write a “cease and desist” letter when I got an e-mail from one of the managing partners. She said she had approached me some time ago asking my permission to syndicate the content (which she did) and did not remember if they had my consent or not (they didn’t.) They’d had some sort of infrastructure change and somehow my feed was activated, and when she noticed it she wanted to check with me to make sure it was okay with me if they posted my feed.

I politely declined, but I have to say I was highly impressed with MommyClub.ca’s behaviour. They proactively checked with me, not once but twice, to ask my permission to publish my content. When I said no thanks, the posts in question were gone almost immediately.

The Interwebs are full of bad behaviour, but there are some good people who still behave ethically out there. I thought this one deserved some props.

Wherein I succumb completely to the PR bandwagon

I’d heard that Dove had a new video out (remember “Evolution“?) but it took me a while to get around to watching it. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few days thinking criticially (and somewhat cynically) about PR pitches and viral marketing and buzz marketing and exactly this type of campaign. Even though this is very much a marketing move on the part of Unilever, I also think it’s a very well-done and important message, and I’m completely putting aside my cynicism to share it with you. It’s worth sharing, and even ties in loosely with the theme of the day about women and their bodies.

Can’t see the embedded video? Visit the Campaign for Real Beauty site.

The Breast Fest

I’m sure you’ve seen the dust-ups about breastfeeding in public recently. Bill Maher, Applebees, Facebook, even the YMCA have proven themselves unfriendly to nursing mothers just in the past couple of months.

I’m not going to add to the millions of pixels of righteous – and rightful – anger that have been dedicated to this argument already. Breastfeeding is a woman’s right, and a beautiful thing, and lunch for an innocent baby, and I find it inconceivable that there are calls for a woman to be “discreet” while nursing in a world that encourages boys to wear pants that sag low enough to show a plumber’s crack and thirteen year old girls to dress like hookers. I’ve seen some pretty disgusting feeding behaviour at the local fast food joint, and yet nobody’s putting a blanket over their heads as they cram sauce-dripping big macs into their pie-holes and chew with their mouths open. (Okay, maybe I had just a few pixels of vitriol to add to the debate.)

I had intended to post a picture of me nursing one of the boys today, to play along with the Great Virtual Breast Fest. I gave myself a week’s lead time, and left reminders for myself — but still forgot to dig out the old pictures. S’okay, though, because I like to think I’m pretty good at painting a picture with all these wordy-words of mine.

Breastfeeding did not come easily to me. It was, in a word, hell. From the first day of his life, nursing Tristan was a challenge. He was born at 9:00 in the morning after more than 27 hours of sleepless labour, and I remember being on the maternity ward with him when he was about six hours old, absolutely stupefied with exhaustion and terror, and the nurse coming in to ask me if I’d fed him. I blinked at her as the guilt swelled up for the first time in my parenting career – barely a quarter of a day into a lifetime – and told her I didn’t know how. She clucked her disapproval, shoved the baby onto my breast, and walked away.

That night, a kinder nurse used wet facecloths to torture poor, sleepy and not-quite-one-day-old Tristan into enough wakefulness to get him to latch on. We had to do this every three hours, all night long, and it took about 45 minutes to wake him up enough just to get him to latch every time. I was petrified to go home and leave behind the kindly nurse with the wet washcloth. I simply didn’t feel ready to handle it on my own.

The first two weeks of his life, we made every-second-day trips to the lactation clinic at the hospital to adjust the latch and have him weighed. I would cry with the pain every time he latched on, and he would spit up my blood after every feed. He came dangerously close to being labelled with the ominous “failure to thrive” as he continued to not gain weight. My poor husband and my visiting mother tried a few times to suggest that I capitulate and give him some formula, that I had tried my best, that he would still be fine raised on formula as millions of babies are.

And yet, I dug in my heels. When Tristan was five weeks old and had finally regained enough weight, the ped gave me permission to stop setting the alarm for myself so I could wake Tristan for a feed every third hour throughout the night. After endless tubes of lansinoh, the latch had gone from excruciating to sore, and I could handle that. And then we got thrush. That, too, passed.

When Tristan was four months old, just when nursing moved from torture to tolerable, the ped suggested we start supplementing with forumula because Tristan was having serious problems with reflux and not gaining enough weight. Oh the irony, that these large breasts of mine – a bane through my whole life from their first appearance in grade school – would betray me yet again by not producing enough milk to satisfy my son. For another five months, I gave him two bottles a day and nursed him the rest of the time. By the time he was eight months old, we were down to one ritual morning feed, more of a comfort nurse than a nutritional one, and had to spend the entire day on Christmas day at the ER when he had a wicked fever. We had nothing packed for him to eat, but somehow my beleaguered breasts stood up for the task and I managed to produce enough milk to satisfy him for the entire day.

He weaned himself around 10 months, and Simon was conceived six months later. I had hoped nursing would be easier the second time, but it wasn’t – at least, not to start. More blood, more cracked nipples, and this time a voracious 10 lbs baby who wanted to feed every two hours. No wet facecloths were ever required to entice Simon to a meal. I nursed him until he was 16 months old, a good four months after I had gone back to work after the end of my maternity leave.

Breastfeeding was never the zen, earth-mama, natural experience I had been told it would be. It was painful, physically and emotionally. It caused vicious late-night arguments between sleep-deprived and emotionally overwhelmed parents. It was bloody hard work for all of us.

And yet, it’s one of the things I most look forward to. I know the first little while will be painful, and scary. But when it settles into a routine, nursing a baby can be a wonderful thing. And I’ll nurse this baby anywhere I damn well please to do so. I’ve nursed the boys in the mall, at the park, at the community centre, in a truck stop, in a restaurant… all without the benefit of hiding under some sort of tent.

Check out the League of Maternal Justice today for some links to other moms (and dads) who are joining the Great Breast Fest today.

“Motherhood is a trap for women”

The title of this post is the chapter title of a book by a French author named Corinne Maier, who has written a best-selling book extolling 40 reasons not to have children. I haven’t read the book, but there was a fascinating article about it in the Globe and Mail last week.

Maier rails against France’s equivalent of the culture of the soccer mom, coining the term mèredeuf: “French speakers recognize it instantly as a contraction of mère de famille, the traditional phrase for a full-time mother, a housewife, a woman who makes mothering her career. But the contraction turns it into something that sounds like a combination of merde and oeuf, carrying the implication that these patriotic mega-moms are ‘egg-shitters.'”

As I was reading the article, I started out thinking I’d write a post refuting her 40 reasons against having children one by one, but I think that might end up somewhere between tedious and futile. (Her reasons not to have children are laid out as chapter titles, and appear at the very end of the Globe article. They include the title to this post, plus such pithy advice as:

Don’t become a travelling feeding bottle.

You will inevitably be disappointed by your child.

A child will kill the fond memories of your childhood.

To be a mother, or to succeed: You must choose.

Matter of fact, I like to think this whole blog is a sort of refutation of her theses; that blog demonstrates that motherhood can be fulfilling while it exasperates, uplifting even though it demoralizes, and it doesn’t have to mean the end of an otherwise productive life outside the home or a functioning intellect.

Maier, a practicing psychaitrist, is herself is a mother of two children, ages 10 and 13. She seems able to separate her criticism of the state of motherhood from criticism of her own children, but I can’t help but feel sorry for her kids. If she truly believes what she has written (which is not a given, mind you, as she seems to have a knack for writing inflamatory texts) then one can’t help but extrapolate some latent dissatisfaction with her children, of which they will inevitably become aware.

Of the whole article about her book, the quote that intrigued me the most was her assessment of why people choose to have children:

“Generally speaking, people who have children have them for the wrong reasons,” she says. “They have them because they’re afraid of being alone, and they want to grasp a tiny bit of immortality. And anyway, we never get that immortality. You are doing something that is very foolish for society just because you have believed something that is not true.”

Now this is an interesting question. Why did you have children? Was it always in your grand plan? Was it something you did because that’s what everybody does after they finish school and get married and establish a career and buy a house? Did you do it because somebody else wanted you to do it?

To me, it was always a given, an irrefutable fact of my life. The only thing I ever wanted to be was a mother; everything else was just a means to that end. I’ll even risk tripping over the raw edges of hyperbole by admitting that I believe having children is my higher calling, and my greater purpose in life. Granted, it’s not the only reason I’m here, but I like to think it’s a large part of it. The irony is that I’ve cultivated a reasonably successful career on the side and that the path my life has taken has precluded me from being a full-time stay-at-home mom — but I genuinely don’t think it’s diminished my ability to be the best possible mother to my boys.

Maybe seven or eight years ago, I was seeing a psychologist for a while. I had some shit to work through, left over from some of the crappy things my ex-husband said and did. One day, after I had been speaking about my childhood, the psychologist told me that when I speak about my childhood, there is a look of bliss that comes over me, and that one of the best things I could do was to raise a bunch of children the way my parents had raised me.

So I did. And I will. And while I won’t profess to be loving every minute of it, I’m pretty sure I could come up with at least 400 reasons why having children is the best possible thing I could have done with my life.