MoonJar winners!

Wow, what a great response from you guys on the MoonJar giveaway! I knew you guys would like that one!

Brent from MoonJar, whom I wish would give lessons to other PR and marketing folks on how to deal with bloggers effectively and with respect, sent me an e-mail last night because he didn’t want to comment on the thread and come across as too pushy or “sales-y” with a reminder that if you really like the MoonJars and aren’t one of the winners today, you can pick them up at the fine retailers noted on his Web site. Or, you can order one online and get a 15% discount (yay for discounts!) with coupon code SHARE15.

Also, on the topic of teaching your kids about money and finances, he said:

There are many resources on the web and books about teaching kids
about money, and some links on our site. Check them out and see what works
for your family. We wrote a short piece as well, that can be found here.

And now, the winners! I numbered all the commenters sequentially, removed the duplicates and my own, and Random.org spat out the following three winners.

Congratulations to Brie of Capital Mom and Meanie of Mean Old Mommy, winners of the Classic MoonJar, and to Elizabeth, winner of the standard MoonJar. I’ll be in touch via e-mail this weekend with all of you!

Thanks to everyone who participated in the conversation — this one was a lot of fun! Stay tuned, there’s another giveaway in the works for sometime in the next couple of days…

Project 365: Monsters and melons, oh my!

This week was the closest I ever came to missing a day. Somehow, all of Saturday slipped by without me taking a single picture. Then we had company for dinner, and still the camera sat neglected on the shelf. The guests left, we tidied up and I realized that I even though it was well past my bed time, I still had to pull something together for the photo of the day. Luckily, we had this lying around taking up space in the living room.

221:365 Let sleeping dogs lie

Let sleeping dogs lie — unless you are desperate for a photo subject and it’s dark and you’re otherwise flat out of inspiration and really just want to get it over with and go to bed yourself.

These little guys were in a shop in the Byward Market. Kind of sums up how I’ve been feeling this week!

220:365 Colourful monsters

(Hey, I just realized that they made it into Explore for a little while there. Kewl!)

This week, I’ve been playing with a new technique I read about way back in the beginning of my 365 project. It’s called TtV, or Through the Viewfinder. You take a picture through the viewfinder of another camera. In this case, I used my little FujiFinepix point and shoot, because it has a terrific macro setting that lets me get within one centimeter of my subject, and held it right up above the viewfinder of my ancient Brownie Hawkeye that my uncle gave me when I was a kid. Then I cropped the image right to the edge of the viewfinder. This is my first try:

222:365 TTV Fruitbowl

It was surprisingly difficult to get everything aligned, which is why there’s a bit of a tilt to the composition. Ordinarily, I’d correct that in photoshop — but because I’m working within the frame of the viewfinder, I can’t correct it. The dark patches are the dust and scratches in the glass of the old Hawkeye.

Here’s another one I tried later in the week with Lucas. There’s a bit of a glare, which is why most people who do any amount of TtV work build contraptions with tubes attaching their digital camera to their viewfinder camera, blocking out all the extraneous light.

224b:365 Lucas TtV

The Hawkeye isn’t the ideal camera for TtV, either. I’ve been scouring the flea markets and garage sales for an old Kodak Duaflex IV or a Starflex — let me know if you have one you’d like to part with!! I’m quite addicted to this now, and would like to try a lot more TtV stuff in the future. If you want to be blown away by the possibilities (or maybe it’s just me!) take a peek at the TtV Flickr group.

Of course, I filled some gaps with more conventional pictures this week, too. I took this picture just so I could title it “Show me your melons!”

224:365 Show me your melons!

And then there was this one, of one of the grand old maple trees in our neighbourhood, just starting to show the first blush of fall colour. (Oh, the colours! Think of the photo possibilities of all that fall colour! It’s *almost* enough to make up for the end of all those gorgeous summer flowers.)

225:365 First blush

And it’s always nice to capture a lovely sunrise, if for no other reason than the picture of the day is in the can by a quarter to seven in the morning! I like this one (snapped from the window of the bus on my way to work!) because of the funky flare shape, the bit of reflection on the silhouette of the railway crossing, and the hint of mist you can see on the fields to the right of the frame.

226:365 Sunrise at the crossing

Of course, I couldn’t let the first day of school go by without commemorating the occasion!

223:365 Back to school

And, speaking of milestones, the end of August means another monthly mosaic. August certainly was a colourful month!

August mosaic

1. 223:365 Back to school, 2. 222:365 TTV Fruitbowl, 3. 221:365 Let sleeping dogs lie, 4. 220:365 Colourful monsters, 5. 219:365 Fake TTV daisy, 6. 218:365 Hair-raising slide!, 7. 217:365 Garden spider and (*cringe*) egg sac, 8. 216:365 Granny and Lucas, 9. 215:365 Lion cub, 10. 214:365 Pug, 11. 213:365 The Black Tomato window, 12. 212:365 Damn hydro lines, 13. 211:365 Contraption, 14. 210:365 Peas, 15. 209:365 Cotton candy ice cream, 16. 208:365 I’ve lost my marbles!, 17. 207:365 The apple thief, 18. 206:365 Summertime in B&W, 19. 205:365 Beer bokeh, 20. 204:365 Doughnut, 21. 204:365 Not quite ripe, 22. 203:365 Connaught Building, 23. 202:365 The lost art of Sunday afternoon, 24. 201:365 Tristan in B&W, 25. 200:365 Colours, 26. 199:365 Weathervane, 27. 198:365 Toddler rage, 28. 197:365 Vintage rose, 29. 196:365 Buskerfest revisited, 30. 195:365 Jurassic Sean, 31. 194:365 Birthday beach bliss

Memo to the universe: Please slow down!

Is it just me, or has the pace of life sped up considerably over the last couple of days weeks? I’m feeling breathless everywhere I go for the sheer number of things I’m supposed to be doing, trying to do at the same time, or simply not getting around to doing at all. Usually, I feel this way about work while my home life is relatively sane, or vice versa — but life seems to be simply relentless lately. You? I’m trying to figure out if it’s the simple fact of having a life filled to bursting with three busy boys, the shift in routine from summer mode to back in school, or just the non-stop chaos that comes with having a toddling menace wandering around undoing everything I’ve done and then some each time I turn around.

I’m feeling a little lot overwhelmed by the stuff I’m not getting done these days. Despite running through the last week or so at about a hundred miles an hour with all cylinders firing, my “oops, never did get around to that” list seems to be outstripping my “phew, another thing checked off the list” list at an alarming pace.

Sometimes, the bloggy well is dry and I’ve got nothing to write about, so I’ll toss up a post begging your indulgence while I search for my navel muse. Right now, though, I’ve got tonnes of bits of things to write about… and it’s driving me crazy that I can’t get organized enough to get them out to you. One post needs pictures, another needs research, yet another needs a bit of serious contemplation and careful craft — and none of that seems to be happening these days!

All that to say, help! No wait, what I really mean is, there be good stuff ahead, I just have to figure out how to milk an extra couple of hours out of my schedule to get to it. And, I’m sorry for all the e-mails I’m not replying to right now, the blog posts I’m not reading and the comments I’m not leaving. I’m kind of falling down on the “social” end of my social networks these days.

This is just a phase, right?

Book review: Hell is Other Parents

Okay, I’d admit it, the title of this one sucked me in. It made you look, too, didn’t it? When the rep from Hyperion/Voice offered me this book to review, she pitched it as a series of funny non-fiction essays from a New York City mother of three navigating the new world of helicopter parenting. Seeing myself as a free-range-parenting kind of girl, it caught my attention enough that I said “Yes please!” to the offer of a free review copy.

Despite my interest being piqued, I was somehow prepared to dislike this book. Would it be yet another snide, snippy book written by a Lululemon-wearing yoga mom, aching for her lost figure and trying too hard to be hip? Turns out, not at all… despite my first impressions.

The author and I have a lot in common — we both have three kids and, erm… *sound of crickets* …yeah, well, I guess that’s all we have in common. She’s a Vespa-riding apartment-dwelling resident of New York City, a stage mother to the kid who played “Young Spock” in the latest Star Trek movie and who turned down a small role for her son on Lost because it would be too disruptive to the family, and a former Emmy-award-winning TV producer and war photographer. No, really! And I am — none of those things, although I do like to take pictures and watch Lost religiously.

Anyway, despite my initial misgivings and the lack of shared life experiences, it’s a testament to Deborah Copaken Kogan’s lively writing style that she totally sucked me in, and I ended up hooked on the loosely linked vignettes that form the chapters in Hell is Other Parents, And Other Tales of Maternal Combustion. From the very first essay, where she tells the story of her youngest son’s birth and sharing a hospital room with a teenaged new mother with a potty mouth, I was endeared. Writing with equal parts humour and pathos, Kogan has an easy and amiable intimacy in her style that makes reading her essays feel a lot like reading some of my favourite bloggers.

The pitch from Hyperion/Voice was a little off the mark, though, in my opinion. The book shares its title with the second essay, and does paint a picture of mothering in Manhattan that bears no resemblance whatsoever to mothering in suburban Ottawa. She writes:

I read No Exit, Sartre’s famous existentialist play, in my early twenties, and I remember thinking at the time that it was interesting on a conceptual level but not a literal one. Hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone every actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape.

Then I became a parent.

And I realized that anyone who defines hell as being stuck for eternity with an adulterous deserter, a lesbian sadist, and a narcissistic baby-murderer has never spend an hour at a Mommy and Me class. Or killed a Saturday afternoon in the children’s shoe store in my neighbourhood, with its sign-up sheet thirty kids deep and shoe projectiles flying across the aisles. Or been forced into any seemingly innocuous but secretly agenda-laden interaction with the parent of your child’s peer.

And she goes on to enumerate some truly wretched interactions with other parents, including one mother who is aghast at the mention of Cookie Monster in her toddler’s presence, “yell-whispering, ‘Sam has never eaten a cookie!'” while slapping her hands over her son’s ears. So, despite an early connection to Kogan’s writing, I found it hard to relate to her on an level of shared experience. The other parents I know in real life seem to be, for the most part, as perplexed by parenting as I am, but generally willing to share the journey amiably.

It was this paragraph, buried deep in another essay called “La Vie en Explose” that made me realize that even though she was dancing on the edge of celebrity, leading a life I could only imagine in terms of movies I’ve seen, maybe Deborah Copaken Kogan and I weren’t so different after all. Stuck in a hospital ER for hours with undiagnosed appendicitis, an editorial deadline overdue and no backup childcare, she writes:

Here in the United States… where our social safety net seems limited to the guarantee of a Starbucks on every corner, family life can often feel as if it’s stacked like a house of cards, with one small gust of air — an absent babysitter, another day off from school, a medical emergency — knocking the whole structure to the ground. One can plan theoretical contingencies in the event of each occurrence, but life doesn’t always offer a single gust at a time. Sometimes the perfect storm blows into town, and then your left, in triage limbo, with a bum appendix, a dying man at your feet, three kids scattered to the four winds, your sitter in Manila, and only your wits and whatever karma you’ve accumulated back on earth to save you.

I think that line about “social safety net limited to the guarantee of a Starbucks on every corner” is just about perfect, don’t you? And the rest of the paragraph just gets better from there.

I have to say, my only caveat about this book is that occasionally, it seemed less like real life and more like reading what would happen if Carrie from Sex and the City grew up, got married and had three kids — but in a good way. Reading about Kogan’s life is like reading science fiction, a world that bears little resemblance to ours at first glance, but where parallels become clear in the details. In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, so much so that I’m going to search out a copy of her first book, Shutterbabe, a memoir about her years as a war photographer.

Stay tuned, and later this week you can have a chance to win my very own slightly worn but well appreciated copy as part of another giveaway!

Teaching kids to save and share the fun way (a giveaway!)

Every now and then, a pitch stands out from the noise that is my in-box. Brent from MoonJar.ca caught my attention right off the top by referencing my new pitch policy. As an Ottawa-based, family-run affiliate, he was concerned that he might not have enough Can-con to catch my attention. (!!) He and I are apparently leading parallel lives: he has three daughters, all of them within a year of the ages of my boys, also lives here in Ottawa, also drives a Mazda5, also has a yellow and red swing on the tree in his front yard… it’s spooky, really, in a funny kind of Internet way. All of which is of no real consequence at all, except to say that I was immediately endeared to him, and I was almost afraid to look into his product because even though I immediately liked him so much I was worried that he might be hawking something I had no interest in or could find no connection to, and I wouldn’t be able to help him out by promoting it here on the blog.

I needn’t have worried.

So let me tell you about the Moon Jar moneybox. It’s the kind of quirky thing you see in specialty toy stores or at your cool friend’s house, the kind of thing that is both fun and functional, and makes you say, “Dang, why didn’t I think of that!” It’s elegant in it’s simplicity: a three-part bank in cheerful primary colours. One compartment is labelled “save”, one “spend” and one “share”. It helps teach kids about financial responsibility and opens the door to conversations about financial literacy.

Image courtesy of MoonJar.ca
Image courtesy of MoonJar.ca

Here’s the official company boilerplate:

Since 2001, Moonjar has created Award Winning books, toys, games and the well known Moonjar Moneybox. Their goal is to recycle and transform time-tested principles into innovative, simple and high-quality products for a new generation of learners. We provide FUN products for independent young minds and innovative tools that address basic life skills.

Our Products:

  • teach kids about money through Saving, Spending and Sharing
  • promote financial literacy and youth philanthropy
  • encourage families to keep their conversations going, about money and life.

We offer unique partnerships with Financial Institutions, Planners,
Educators, Non-Profits and Retailers in a variety of ways. Moonjars are
used in schools as fundraisers, as well as in classrooms, financial
institutions and community groups and homes to teach financial literacy to
children.

(You can see why I love this idea, no?)

Did you know, by the way, that Canada has just launched a National Task Force on Financial Literacy? I’ve seen many references to the fact that poor financial literacy is one of the major contributing factors to the global financial meltdown earlier this year. Now, I’m not saying that by using the Moonjar Moneybox, you’ll help Wall Street recover and stabilize the TSX, but IMHO we should take any opportunity to help our kids learn about taking on financial responsibility as early as possible.

I was curious, though, about how my boys would react to the idea of not only a “save” component to the plan, but a “share” one as well. (They’ve got the “spend” component down to a science, of course. Each week’s allowance is converted into how many Pokemon cards can be acquired and how much pooling of resources can acquire even greater numbers of Pokemon cards.)

When I opened the package of samples that Brent supplied, Tristan was looking over my shoulder in curiousity. (I think he was initially intrigued by the bright colours. He’s a magpie like his mother!) When I explained the various components of the “system” and the idea that if we started using the Moonjar moneybox for his allowance, he’d have to set aside a portion each week for saving and some for sharing with people who weren’t as lucky and fortunate as us, he was perfectly fine with the idea. Now, to be totally honest, we haven’t yet had a chance to implement the save/spend/share system because I wanted to get this information out to you right away. But so far, he’s intrigued and we’ve started talking about money — that’s more than half the battle, right?

And Brent was generous enough to give us a complimentary set of MoonJar moneyboxes to share with you, my bloggy peeps! Tristan has already laid claim on one of them, but I have one more Classic MoonJar and two Standard MoonJars (these ones are made of cardboard and you assemble them yourself) to give away.

To enter, leave a comment on this post with any one of the following:

  • a tip or idea on improving financial literacy within the family
  • your thoughts on the best spend/save/share ratio
  • tell me how allowances work in your house – no allowance, based on age, linked to chores, etc
  • one thing you wish you would have learned or done as a child to improve your own financial literacy as an adult

Entries will be accepted through 5 pm EDT on Thursday September 3, 2009. Three winners will be chosen at random based on the entries received. The first person chosen will receive the Classic MoonJar, and the next two will receive the Standard MoonJar. You must be willing to share your home mailing address with me so I can ship the prize to you.

By the way, I know some of you are elementary school teachers, and Brent says he is strongly focused on the teaching aspect of the MoonJars. They’ve got some good information on saving and spending on their resources page, and they’ve developed curriculum for elementary schools. Contact him for details!