From there to here, from here to there, Funny things are everywhere
Tensely clicking through various websites looking for info on the tsunami off the coast of Mexico for reasons I will more fully discuss in a few days, and I came across this. Via tweetstats, a wordle of my tweets.
Completely and utterly useless? You betcha. And yet, kinda cool nonetheless. And quite frankly, a welcome distraction. Now back to CNN I go…
Surely you heard the twitter-storm that turned into a media frenzy last week, about the wildly exaggerated rumours of the death of Gordon Lightfoot. But did you know it was an Ottawa woman and mom of two, nothing more nefarious than a biologist, who was the catalyst for the rumour? Read the full story from her perspective in this Globe and Mail article. Best line in the whole piece? “Thankfully, Gordon Lightfoot didn’t believe the radio, or he wouldn’t have made it to his dentist appointment.” *snicker*
I’m just glad I wasn’t the most infamous person on the interwebs last week — for a while there, it was beginning to feel that way!
We’re thick in the midst of birthday party season at our place: all three boys have birthdays in a five week span. Over the years we’ve mostly contracted out the birthday party, largely because the idea of avoiding 10 caked-up boys drunk on adrenaline on the loose in my house is worth just about any price! As such, I thought it would be nice to share our perspective on some of the various birthday party options for the school-age set in Ottawa.
Our perennial favourite has been Starr Gymnastics. They have two locations, one east and one west. I’ve never been to the Lancaster location, but have only good things to say about the west-end location. We’ve done four, maybe five birthday parties there, plus taken a couple of years’ worth of gymnastic lessons and even done a week of summer camp there. Starr gets a gold star in our book!
We tried Cosmic Adventures one year when Tristan was wee, I think it was his third birthday. It was fun, but the location is not convenient to Barrhaven, and we’ve never gone back. The boys have been to parties at Midway and Fun Junction, neither of which are convenient to Barrhaven although the boys had a good time.
One year we went with a few friends for an informal playdate at Playtime4Kids before having cake back at our house (that was the year Simon turned four and I was eleventy-hundred months pregnant with Lucas — we were looking for simplification that year!) and I was not really impressed with them at all.
This year, we did Simon’s party at A Gym Tale in Barrhaven, and we were extremely pleased with everything. The package included nearly an hour of free play on their indoor playground (very clean and very safe for toddlers), then a half an hour “adventure” led by a hilarious party helper. The kids did an obstacle course, and then the leader dressed up as an alien and let the kids pelt her with balls — the kids thought it was fantastic and the grownups watching couldn’t help but laugh. Then we had the standard 30 minutes for cake and presents in a private room. All told, I was highly impressed by the value and quality — another gold star!
We’ve considered parties at the Agriculture Museum and the Museum of Science and Tech — would like to get around to those one year. Last year, we did Tristan’s 7th birthday at Merivale Bowling Centre, and I found that to be another excellent value that seemed to be a lot of fun for the kids. We toyed with a Cineplex party, as the kids have enjoyed attending parties there in the past, but there were simply no good movies on around the kids’ birthdays this year. And speaking of movies, did you know you can rent a movie theatre at the Colliseum to play Xbox on the big screen? How awesome is that! We’re *so* considering that for next year!!
But I don’t think any year will top this year’s party for sheer awesomeness, at least in Tristan’s mind. This year, I am so delighted by finding the perfect personality-theme mix that I am even willing to risk hosting it in my own house. Next month, I’m inviting five 8-year-olds (plus a nephew and two little brothers) to a Lego birthday party for Tristan. We’ve contracted “The Lego Guy” to come to our house for the event. You might have heard of him, he does a lot of Lego workshops around town. Here’s what he offers for birthday parties:
My party starts of playing the LEGO Creator Game, then building machines and structures using LEGO Technic pieces, example projects are amusement rides, hand drills, paper crinklers, etc., most of the projects can be motorized. The last part of the party is spent building LEGO robots using NXT Robotic System, and then do some sort of activity with them such as Sumo Wrestling and / or exploring with sensors to make the robots react to their surroundings.
Isn’t that perfect for a kid who lives and breathes Lego? And lookit me go, instead of dollar-store invites, I made personalized Lego invites with my mad photoshop skillz:
Fun, eh? The mini-fig is Tristan’s own representation of himself, made from this awesome “create yer own minifig” site. (If you’re doing this with the kiddies, make sure you use the kid-friendly version *without* cigarettes and handguns available!!) Of course, there will be a full report after the fact. Wish me luck on actually having the kids in my house!!
Now to see if we can find an alternative to loot bags (hate them!) that the kids loved as much as their personalized birthday CDs to give away!
Care to share your experiences? Any suggestions for fun kids’ parties in or around Ottawa? What has been your kids’ favourite or most memorable party experience?
Leave it to Marla to come up with the perfect final word. By the time I’d gone to bed last night, I was feeling that vaguely hangover-y, regretful way she describes in her comment. You know, that guilty and indulgent way you feel when you’ve eaten too many chips or wasted too much time on the Internet when you could have been doing more productive things with the real people in your life? Not that spending a couple of hours with y’all is a waste of time, and anyway, I was already feeling tired and cranky for reasons that have nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with a toddler who thinks he’s a newborn and wakes up 4x a night now, so I didn’t mind sitting on my ass tapping away and not washing the floor for a couple of hours.
And it was a really interesting conversation, wasn’t it?
So here’s the thing. Today, Theryn sent me an e-mail to say hello. Theryn, aka Heather Lyn, the author of the thesis, who is still a regular reader and even a blogger herself. Look, she even said hello on the comments, and I’m not sure anyone noticed. And here’s the big lesson of the day, one I should have known better: she’s a real person, not just the two-dimensional author of some obscure (less obscure than last week, though!) thesis. And whatever we might have collectively inferred about her academic abilities, turns out she’s pretty nice, too. Certainly she’s got a thicker skin than me, and bore all of our criticism and commentary with grace and good humour.
As I told her in our e-mail exchange, I’m still not sure how I feel about her thesis — but I do regret bringing down a hailstorm of unsolicited and occasionally savage criticism on her head. And so Theryn, I’m sorry that you had to endure a verbal assault on your work that would have brought me to tears, thin-skinned and praise-needy as I am.
Funny thing, this Internet. Even for someone like me who lives and breathes it, who prides herself on hosting fair and respectful discussions, it’s easy to forget that there are people behind the keyboard, people with feelings and biases and opinions that are different. I can’t say that I regret my original post, because I wrote it in good faith and I think it resulted in a truly fascinating conversation. I haven’t changed my mind about thinking that Theryn crossed a line in her assumptions, and that she took my work out of context. But I do regret that I was naive enough to think that Theryn wouldn’t see the commentary if I didn’t explicitly name her, and frankly I regret that she did see it if only because I would have been hurt by those criticisms if there were directed at something I’d invested a lot of time and energy and myself into.
Ironic or what?
For those of you not on Twitter at 10:00 pm on a Saturday night (what, you have a life?) you might have missed the latest gossip. Turns out some woman at SFU wrote a masters thesis about called “Works in Progress: An Analysis of Canadian Mommyblogs.” In it, she examines in minute detail the writings of eight Canadian bloggers, and uses that fodder to make egregious assumptions and inferences about their income, their marriages, and their children, among other things.
Mine was one of them.
In fact, it was me who stumbled on the thesis yesterday afternoon. I was googling my own name of all things, for an upcoming post that I’ll get around to finishing once all this settles down. I was bemused at first: “Oh look, someone referenced my blog in an academic paper.” But the more I read, the more it creeped me out. This woman spent what must have been days poking around in my archives, copying and eventually analyzing several months’ worth of writing. Analyzing several month of my life. And then she starts making assumptions, and that’s where I’m no longer impressed. She makes inferences and assumptions about my marriage, the division of labour in our house, my income, my job aspirations — about my life.
By the time I’d finished reading, I felt — violated. It’s a strong word, used intentionally. I felt that someone had taken what I put out into the Internet and used it for a purpose I neither intended nor approved. It’s not even the real me, it’s an unauthorized repackaging of the avatar of me that I slip into whenever I sit down at the keyboard.
Now, I have never been shy about sharing the most intimate details of my life online. Back in 2007, Chatelaine magazine (who has a much larger readership than this thesis ever will) wrote a feature piece about Beloved and me that looked at our reproductive history — infertility, miscarriages and all — in intimate detail. We’ve been on CBC TV discussing infertility twice. Neither one of those bothered me in the least, because there’s two key differences here. The first is that the MSM took the time to contact me and ask my permission first. The second is that the MSM seem to understand the fact that what’s on the screen is only part of the story, and doesn’t assume otherwise. They ask questions to get to the real truth, not the one that gets packaged for Internet consumption.
For the first time ever, I felt embarrassed and ashamed of myself and the blog when I finished reading this woman’s thesis. I thought, “Is that what I’m putting out there? Is that how people really see me?” And then I realized that that’s exactly my problem with what she did — she stripped my words and thoughts and ideas of their context and used them for her own purposes. (For example, she seems fixated on posts where I comment about potty training and take out, cross-referencing them extensively.) She treats my writing as a factual rendering of my daily life and completely ignores the fact that I am writing to entertain, so of course I am exaggerating some details and omitting others.
As I mentioned, there was a good little twitterstorm going last night, and most people seemed to agree that not contacting the bloggers in question was a significant ethical violation. (You can scan the conversation by clicking on the #creepythesis hash tag.) If she had, I think she would have had a much more interesting and well-rounded thesis. And she would have had my permission to quote me, something that she didn’t bother to acquire. By the way, the other blogs in question are Cheaty Monkey (Haley-O and I discussed this issue at length yesterday), The Writing Mother, Cheaper than Therapy, Adventures in Motherhood, Hypergraffiti, Chaos Theory, and Momcast. There’s also quotes from a lot of the other players in the Canadian momosphere, from Mad Hatter and Veronica Mitchell to Her Bad Mother. Go ahead, use the search feature and see if she quoted you without permission, too!
Now, I haven’t totally lost my perspective on this. I do realize that there are inherent risks in putting so much of my personal life out onto the Interwebs, and I realize that the “wrong” that has been done here is relatively minor. But I am offended by this, and I do intend to follow up with both the writer and SFU. In fact, my first impulse was to include her name along with a long list of accusations of ethical wrong-doings, because while I may soon forget how violated I felt in this moment, Google never will. (Figures. Now is a hell of a time to develop a sense of discretion!)
So, bloggy peeps, I’m willing to bet you have thoughts on this. Am I being overly sensitive, feeling as I do like a bug on a microscope slide? Or should I be flattered that anyone paid that much attention to my writing? Would you be creeped out? Would you act on it?
Me, I gotta go to church. *sigh*
The big boys are at an age where they can really enjoy the Olympic Fever that’s sweeping the nation. They had a whole week-long build up at school last week, and we’ve been watching events throughout the week. In fact, one of my prouder moments as a parent was last Tuesday morning. I was just on my way out the door to work at 7:00 am when I realized they were watching the rebroadcast of Alexandre Bilodeau’s gold medal podium ceremony. I explained that they had to stand for the national anthem (Beloved teases me that I insist on this!) and choked up when they began to sing it out loud. It was a great little moment.
All that to say, this is what Olympic fever looks like at our house:
(I swear, I did *not* dress him in that outfit. That was entirely his own doing. No, really!)
Beyond the Olympics, we’ve had remarkably pleasant winter conditions around here. Sunlight and shadow on snow is a surprisingly hard combination to manage, though.
This one was a near-miss. I’m having issues with the colour levels on my laptop (it’s on my to-do list) and I thought that’s what made this one look a little less than crisp in focus. Turns out it was just out of focus! Oh well. (The point, btw, was mardi gras beads for Mardi Gras. And no, I’m not telling you how I ‘earned’ these!)
And finally this week, did you know raspberries come in yellow, too? This colour filled me with longing for spring and summer far more than an ordinary pint of red raspberries might have!
Oh wise and worldly bloggy peeps, riddle me this: do I need a Facebook fan page for the blog? Please argue the pros and cons.
(Caveat: I am not a huge FB user and would not I would not otherwise consider making a fan page, except I’ve been asked to investigate the concept at a professional level. Plus, I loved the kismet of starting to wonder about such a thing on the exact day that Scary Mommy posted this excellent and easy-to-follow FB fan page tutorial!)
I was playing with Google Maps, trying to show the boys the distance from Los Angeles to Hawaii. It found LA with no problem, and I asked it for directions to Honolulu, Hawaii.
I was perplexed to see it suggested driving up the western coast of the United States, but absolutely tickled when I realized it was suggesting I take to the water in Seattle and kayak up through Puget Sound all the way to Hawaii.
This begs more than a few questions, including why one couldn’t shave a good week or so off the trip and just start kayaking in, say, the Port of Los Angeles, let alone why Google Maps defaults to kayaking as the suggested mode to traversing the Pacific.
It made me smile, though, so that’s why I wanted to share it with you! Have you come across any other quirks in Google Maps?
We were watching the Olympic mogul races (Go Canada Go!) the other day when one of the boys started talking about how Germany was evil. I don’t know whether it was something they’d been watching on TV or something from school, but it led to a long talk about heritage and ancestry (Papa Lou was born in Dusseldorf) and circuitously to a talk about war. We boiled it down to an analogy of bullies and defenders at the global level, and the big boys seemed able to relate to that quite well. By the end of the conversation, Simon was actively cheering for the German competitors when a Canadian was not in the race.
In the serendipitous way the Universe works, when I mentioned on Twitter the other day about things to do on Family Day in Ottawa, the Canadian War Museum tweeted back that we would find an edible fort-building activity at the War Museum today. That, and my new fascination with all things military sealed the deal.
That’s how the three boys and I ended up having the whole Lebreton Gallery all to ourselves early on Family Day morning. We’ve never visited it before, and I really didn’t know what to expect. What we found was a vast room filled with the kind of heavy machinery that fascinates boys and photo-junkie mothers alike: tanks and Howitzers and amphibious vehicles and even a jet. It’s all laid out in a cavern of a room flooded with delicious white light and perfect for burning off a little energy.
I have to admit, I was a little cautious at first. The boys are used to the Children’s Museum, where you’re not only allowed but supposed to touch and clamber on and generally interact with everything. I wasn’t expecting the War Museum to allow that kind of interactivity and in fact, it doesn’t — most things are roped off and you aren’t allowed to climb on anything. But the very excellent docent named Eric quickly assured me that some touching within reason was fine, and when I hauled Lucas bodily and somewhat guiltily back from the far side of a barricade for about the fifth time in as many minutes, he told me not to worry too much about Lucas’s irrepressible need to violate the boundaries and inspect things up close.
We spent the largest part of our morning out in that gallery, learning about the various machinery, the eras during which they were used, and their functionality. We had the run of the place, and Eric offered simple facts on interesting pieces to the big boys while I shepherded Lucas away from the stuff he wasn’t supposed to touch. It’s an impressive collection!
After we’d edged toward wearing out our welcome in the Lebreton Gallery, we headed out to the main lobby for the morning’s main attraction, the edible fort-building activity. I should have seen this one coming, but keeping the Rice Krispie square walls and assorted edible accoutrements (did you know they made gummy soldiers? I so need to bring some to work!) out of Lucas’s mouth proved to be even more of a chore than keeping him out from under the military equipment, so we quickly moved on from that activity to view some of the other exhibits. Our next stop was a special exhibit on camouflage.
Even when he didn’t know what he was listening to, Lucas was happy to push the buttons and use the headphones.
The only moment that made me cringe was in the section of the museum that looked at the military since World War II. There was a series of videos with the sound of a camera’s shutter clicking, which of course is as familiar to my boys as the sound of a mother’s heartbeat is to her fetus. Unfortunately, the images were violent and rather gory and really not appropriate for little kids. Now before you get all excited, I *know* we were in the war museum, and I am not saying we should sanitize any of this. But, let’s face it, little kids under eight just don’t need to be exposed to that stuff. Not at this age. So I just hustled them along to look at something else and made a mental note to talk to them about it later.
Further down, we found a colouring station, which is always a favourite activity.
We found one of these, which has really not much at all to do with war but we had one just like it when I was a kid and I don’t think the boys have ever seen a telephone that actually rings instead of warbling.
I have to admit, before today when I thought of “kid friendly Ottawa” the War Museum did rise to the top of my mind. But both Tristan and Simon rated it as one of their favourite places to visit, better even than our beloved Sci and Tech Museum. Not surprisingly, Simon said he loved the edible fort building activity the best, but Tristan made me smile when he said he enjoyed “learning the stories about everything.” There was a lot we didn’t see (leaving us some good bits for next time!) but here’s a sample of some of the other stuff we did see.
I think context is key when explaining complex concepts like war to kids. The boys know I work with soldiers and am proud of what they do, but the media and their peers give them strong mixed messages about the nature of war, from the cartoonish to the horrifying. While the big machinery appeals to them in the same way that garbage trucks and excavators do, I think the big boys at least are old enough to start learning more of the realities of what it means to be a soldier and a nation that prides itself on its peacekeeping force. A trip like this gives the conversation a little bit of context I couldn’t otherwise offer.
In the end, I’d say we got our money’s worth today, but I’d further opine that I’m not sure I’d be willing to make it a part of our regular seasonal rotation simply because the cost is high relative to other Ottawa activities. We paid $7 for parking, plus $20 for one adult and one child admission. Lucas was free, as was a second child under their special Family Day promotion. I know the War Museum’s job is not to cater to families, but I don’t see a comparable value to a visit to the Children’s Museum, which costs the same and is worth every penny and more.
Having said that, I’m glad we went. If you’ve never been, you should go. We had fun, all four of us, and we each learned something, too. What more could you ask for?
The weather forecast for Family Day in Ottawa looks just about perfect for Winterlude’s outdoor activities, which means that the entire population and half the tourists will be skating on the Canal or zooming down the ice slides at Jacques Cartier Park. Had enough of outside? (If you haven’t, here’s five ideas of free things to do!) Looking for family-friendly and frost-free indoor activities for this Family Day? Here’s five suggestions!
However you’re planning to spend it, Happy Family Day!