Owner: Postcards from the Mothership URL:http://danigirl.ca/blog/ Join Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:48:30 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Now new and improved!
Canadian working mom of two preschool boys. Sometimes thoughtful, often witty, always verbose. Site statistics:Click here
10-pages-in book review: The Ruins 2007-09-19 05:59:57 What’s that, you say? A long, long time ago, I used to write book review
s on this blog? Hmmmmm, maybe I remember that, way back in the distant recesses of my brain.
For the most part, I haven’t written a book review
here in ages simply because I haven’t read a book worth reviewing. Most of the summer has passed in an enjoyably mind-numbing fashion, reading the likes of James Patterson and other paperback pulpy nothingness. I just finished Kathy Reichs’ Break No Bones, and I was planning to write a review on that one, but I accidentally finished it before I could get a 10-pages-in review written. (I really, really like Kathy Reichs. I can’t stand that TV show, Bones, based on her protagonist, but I do love the books.)
But really, this post is not about the books that I have not reviewed (although, apparently, that is a post in itself) but the book I am currently reading and about to review forthwith and without further ado: Scott Smith’s The Ru Read more:Ruins
Snack trauma 2007-09-18 07:47:31 Although Simon’s new preschool isn’t a co-operative, the parents are asked to contribute a snack on a rotating basis. Given that there are 16 kids, and the kids go three days a week, our turn in the rotation comes up every five weeks or so.
Now, I should confess here that I already suffer snack trauma
from dealing with just Tristan’s snack. At this time last year, I was happily packing him simple snacks like a baggie with some ritz cracker sandwiches and juice or a little dish of grapes and some water. I was always cognizant of the choices I was making, thinking myself quite the good mother for not simply throwing in a Twix bar and a can of pop.
One day near Christmas, I volunteered for a day in Tristan’s JK class and was gobsmacked to see what some of the other children hauled out of their backpacks for snacktime. We’re talking multi-course snacks here, with various containers and utensils. These kids were eating better for snack than what I usually Read more:Snack
A love letter to my daughter, who will never be 2007-09-17 07:36:57 To my darling daughter, who will never be:
It may seem odd to begin a letter with a farewell, and perhaps even moreso a farewell to someone who never was, someone who never will be. But I needed to find a way to say goodbye to you, my daughter, because even though we never had the chance to say hello, you’ve always been a part of me. You’ve been with me - the idea of you - my whole life. As far back as I can remember, I expected you. I spent my life preparing for the act of mothering you. I carried the potential of you, my daughter, close to my heart, and in quiet moments I have loved to savour the imagining of you. But now, through the vagaries of fate and nature, it seems you are simply not to be.
It’s a wonder of the human heart that it can be filled with boundless joy at the idea of a son, and yet haunted by regretful longing on losing the idea of a daughter.
I am sad to have lost the opportunity to know you. I feel an empty hollow in the place I’ve
The 20 week update - half way there! 2007-09-14 07:02:11 How ’bout that? As of today, I’m officially half-way through this pregnancy. (Although I do tend to agree with a friend of mine who observes that the last month is the longest half of a pregnancy.)
My belly is quite unsubtle now, enough so that neighbours and casual acquaintances at work are bold enough to ask if I’m expecting. Seriously, people - unless a woman is actively delivering a child, you should never, ever assume enough to ask her directly to her face if she’s pregnant!
It’s kind of cute how the boys have noticed my expanding belly, even though they don’t know the reason for it. They both like to sidle up in a hug and rest their cheeks against my belly while giving it loving pats. I guess they’re just happy that mom is growing an extra pillow for them to cuddle!
Initially, I was going to hold off until much later to tell them about the player to be named later - maybe around Christmas or something like that. After all, we’
Facing the ugly eco-truth 2007-09-13 18:07:46 Yesterday, I alluded to the several pounds of carbon emissions I contributed to the atmosphere (I’m guessing) by driving all over hell’s half acre and back, and how we’re really going to have to capitulate to suburban living in the next few months by buying a second car.
I don’t want a second car. Aside from the fact that I’m reluctant to take on the cost of buying and maintaining and insuring a second car, I’ve always been a pleased with our reduced eco-footprint as a single-car family. I’m happy to content with tolerant of commuting to work by bus.
Now, not only are we looking at a second car, but we need seating for five, and room in the back seat for three car seats. I’m holding out hope for the Mazda 5, but am thinking we’ll have to capitulate to a (whimper) mini-van. Talk about joining the dark side! At least, I suppose, it’s not an SUV. Or a Hummer.
So anyway, I’m writing all of this while I’m think Read more:Facing
Revenge of the Rideau Centre 2007-09-28 07:45:00 I’ve been noodling a post in my head for some time now about how sick I am getting of the RideauCentre
. For those of you unfamiliar with Ottawa, it’s the largest shopping mall in the city, and I traverse it daily from my bus stop to my office and back again. And then, of course, the magnetic draw of the food court pulls me back in a few more times a week. In the nearly three years since the end of my last maternity leave, I must have passed through that damn mall more than 2500 times. I’m truly and fully sick of it.
But the mall must have been listening to these unfavourable thoughts percolating through my brain, because yesterday, the Rideau Centre took a pre-emptive strike. One minute I was getting off the escalator and striding purposefully past Club Monaco toward the bus stop, and the next minute my right knee and outstretched hands were slamming forcefully into the tile floor. Luckily, I had the presence of mind to lock my elbows, or else I would have ende Read more:Revenge
This would be a bullety post if I weren’t so infernally verbose 2007-09-27 07:08:18 Have you noticed that my posts are getting longer, and longer, and longer? I mean, they’re barely posts anymore, they’re friggin’ chapters… and there’s no sign of relief today, either.
First, something rather disturbing. Through Babes in Blogland, I came across this story about how some users of Orkut (a social networking site similar to Facebook or MySpace, but owned by Google) are “stealing” images of kids from Flickr to create fake user profiles. You can read about it on SaraSmiles’ Flickr account (over 1200 comments in three days… at least people are paying attention!) While I find this distasteful and kinda gross, I’m not going to be pulling my photos off of Flickr anytime soon. I will be following the story, though, and I thought you might like to know about this, too.
On a lighter note, I have to tell you that I scored a victory for slacker snack moms everywhere last week. We had “meet the teacher” n
Chills 2007-09-26 08:34:19 My mom and I were chatting about images from the Internet and pregnancy, and how some of the coolest images you see are actually photoshopped and fake. Somehow, that made me think of the image I’d seen a long time ago, one that I knew was real, of a surgeon performing in utero surgery on a fetus.
I went looking for it to show my mom what I meant, and found this image.
(Photo from TruthorFiction.com)
Baby Samuel was 21 weeks old when surgery was performed to correct something arising from spinal bifida. According to TruthorFiction.com, ” In this particular surgery, the baby’s hand poked out of the incision in its mother’s womb and Dr. Bruner says he instinctively offered his finger for the baby to hold.”
My baby is 21 weeks old right now. I can’t stop looking at that image… and smiling.
The neighbours 2007-09-26 07:08:36 My leafy suburb is probably one of the most child-friendly in all of Ottawa. And yet, the street we live on has no kids under 10, save for my boys.
When we moved in, we had childless couples living on either side of us. The first couple moved out of the province in the summer of 2004, maybe a year after we’d moved in, and a woman and her three kids moved in. The kids were older - a boy and a girl around 9 and 11, and a teenage boy around 15. The boy was a nightmare, to be honest, and we frequently saw the police bringing him home or coming to get him. He left last summer, and the neighbourhood settled down again.
Last month, the fun young childless couple who lived on the other side of us moved out, too. Laura was quick to reassure us that the new neighbours would be terrific: “She’s a school administrator, and her grown daughter will be living with her.” Well, that sounded pretty good to me, even though I’d've preferred a family with kids that th
Marketing to Mommy Bloggers 2007-09-25 07:20:09 I need to pick your collective brains again.
I’ve been asked to speak next month at a monthly gathering of local communications and marketing folks who have a professional interest in the tools of social media from a business and government perspective. They’ve had some amazing speakers this year, from Paul Wells to Stephen Taylor to Mitch Joel (tonight!). How I fit in with speakers of this caliber is both perplexing and daunting, but the organizers have said they’re interested in the “marketing to mommy bloggers” angle, and I do certainly know a thing or two about that… both professionally and, erm, bloggily.
I think what intrigued the organizers is something I’ve noticed recently: when I wear my “social media professional” hat and go to these conferences and events, I’m still inclined to be almost apologetic for my mommy blogger roots… largely because the folks that attend these things tend to be dismissive of mom Read more:Marketing
, Mommy
Parenting questions not covered in the manual 2007-09-24 07:11:57 So I was reading through the operating manual
that came with my kids last night (what, you don’t have one?) and I realized that there are a few pages that have fallen out over the years. Or been yanked out. Or been used to draw pictures of Luke Skywalker locked in mortal combat with SpongeBob Square Pants.
And since I don’t have the definitive answer on these questions
, and since I’m just making this shit up as I go along, and since you mostly seem to - at least collectively - know what you’re doing, I’m opening these questions up to the bloggy peeps.
How do you respond to a three year old who insists “But I don’t WANT a baby brother!” while glancing balefully at your gestating belly? Somehow, my current response of “Too bad, you’re getting one” doesn’t seem terribly sympathetic.
At what age do you switch your kids over from the happy, primary-coloured, endlessly durable Ikea plates and bowls to stoneware (read Read more:Parenting
Get yer blog on - moving to your own domain 2007-10-04 07:42:17 A couple of people have asked me about moving to a self-hosted domain
, and recently Maggie (hi Maggie!) asked me about customizing a blog.
This is more a recap of what I did, rather than a tutorial. I only wish I’d done this years ago! I was so intimidated by the process, though, that I was too scared to try it out. Maybe by sharing this, I can show you how easy (no really!) it can be.
Anyway, this will be long, so I’ve tucked most of it below the fold…
(more…)
Hey you! Lurker! This one’s for you 2007-10-03 11:50:33 Huhn. I thought I had to wait until January for International Delurking week to beg y’all to come out of hiding, but apparently today is (ahem) “The Great Mofo Delurk” day. Don’t believe me? It must be true, cuz they’ve got BADGES!
So! You, over there, the one who visits every day but never says hello. And you! The one who just stumbled over here looking for Star Wars porn - sorry to disappoint you, but you could at least leave a comment to let us know you were here.
Out yerselves, quiet lurkers, and be known in the brilliant klieg lights of the comment box - this is your day to shine.
The one where her preschoolers use Google to find porn 2007-10-03 07:08:01 The boys were playing on the computer the other day, while I was sitting on the couch nearby reading. I couldn’t see the monitor from where I was sitting, but I could hear the sound.
They’re getting quite proficient with the computer, and can load and play games pretty much without supervision. Their game of choice is Star Wars Lego, so when I heard rap music instead of the Star Wars theme bleating from the speakers, I was more intrigued than concerned.
I came around the corner in time to see they had made their way to You Tube, and were watching a video with Jamie Kennedy’s name plastered across the top. It was a stop-motion animation of Star Wars Lego minifigs set to some rap song, and as I blinked in surprise at the screen, the Princess-Leia-in-her-metal-bikini minifig was bent over double and spanked by a Police Man minifig.
(You’ll pardon me for not linking to it. I’m not sure if I could find it again if I wanted to, and I’m not sure I want Read more:Google
Cuz I don’t have enough on my plate right now 2007-10-02 07:17:07 I’ve written over 950 posts in less than three years, writing at least one post a day on weekdays the vast majority of the time. What’s a few extra posts on the weekend to an already overbooked schedule?
So yes, I’ve signed up for National Blog Posting Month, otherwise known as NaBloPoMo, starting November 1st.
Visit NaBloPoMo
I did this last year, too, and with 10 days left in the month I had my miscarriage. In the end, I think it was incredibly cathartic to force myself to keep blogging through it, unpleasant as it may have been to read along as I struggled back to normalacy. Looking back I’m kind of glad I was stubborn enough to keep posting just because I said I’d keep posting. Here’s hoping this year is a lot less traumatic, at the very least!
This year, NaBloPoMo host Mrs Kennedy has launched a fancy-ass new Facebooky-type social networking site specifically for NaBloPoMo, and if you sign up we can be “friends” and you can join
At least my daughter-in-law will be obedient 2007-10-01 07:25:43 Tristan has been thinking a lot lately about how things will be when he grows up.
First, there will be a new set of rules. Nobody will ever have to cut their fingernails, or go to bed if they don’t feel like it, or share with their brother.
And he’ll be financing his long-nailed and sleepy lifestyle with a variety of career options. These are the things he has told me he wants to be when he grows up, in roughly the order he announced them:
an elephant trainer
King (I love this one)
a fry cook (curse you, Sponge Bob)
an animal doctor
a hairstylist (!!)
Last week, he looked at me with those stunning, clear gray eyes of his and confided, “Mommy, I know who I’m going to marry when I grow up.”
“You do?” I asked, my heart already breaking with the cuteness of it. “And who might that be?”
“Katie!” he announced with assurance.
I could only laugh. I mean, she’s a gorgeous blond with soulful brown eyes, and she&rsqu Read more:least
My baby brother 2007-09-30 08:47:45 When I posted last week about being a lifelong Rush fan, kgirl asked if I had a cool older brother, because it’s been her experience that girls who are Rush fans usually have cool older brothers.
Nope, not me. I have a cool younger brother.
Sean is five years younger than me, and despite the fact that he rarely makes an appearance in the blog, he’s one of my best friends as well as being my brother. It’s actually a bit of an oversight to not mention Sean here more often, as I think he as much as anyone in my life has had an impact on my sense of humour and how I see myself in the world. He and his wife Nat and their two kids - the beautiful, bald, blue-eyed girl who appears in my Flickr photos is his daughter - live outside of Toronto, so while we don’t see them as often as I’d like, I think about them all the time.
I wasn’t always happy to have a brother. Does this look like the face of a girl who is happy to cede her place at the centre of the
An afternoon at Cannamore Orchard 2007-09-30 07:44:00 It seemed like a great idea. A couple of friends from work with boys the same age, getting together for an afternoon of apple-picking. We found a date that worked for everyone, the weather forecast called for sunshine and mild temperatures. The only problem? No apples. Thank goodness somebody thought to call ahead the day before we went! I guess with the gorgeous weather we’ve been having, all the pick-yer-own orchards have been picked clean. After checking with a handful of places, we decided to try Cannamore Orchard
s because not only did they have some pre-picked apples available, but they advertised a bunch of fun activities for families.
And that’s how we discovered another of Ottawa’s hidden treasures: Cannamore Orchard.
It’s about a 40 minute drive south-east of the city. Personally, I’d never heard of it, but then, we’d always done our picking at Kilmarnock Orchards. While Kilmarnock is gorgeous, Cannamore offers some great stuff fo
Today is National Grouch Day 2007-10-15 07:12:34 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 i
Massive slaughter of innocent hyphens 2007-10-12 07:40:42 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 lo Read more:slaughter
The one that could use a few segues 2007-10-11 07:13:24 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 wonde
Wherein I succumb completely to the PR bandwagon 2007-10-10 18:35:31 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 2007-10-10 07:31:52 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. Breast
feeding 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
“Motherhood is a trap for women” 2007-10-09 06:57:04 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 child Read more:Motherhood
Error messages - sorry! 2007-10-09 05:56:15 Sigh. I don’t know what happened, but please ignore the extraneous error messages
and wonky formatting.
I did an SQL db backup last night, but everything was fine later in the evening. According to Google, I’m getting the funky messages because of a disk size problem at my host’s end. I’ve raised a ticket, so hopefully I can get it fixed today… although I really don’t have any time to be puddling around with it this week!
Argh!!!
Anyway, the blog functionality seems to be working, and you should be able to comment and click through as usual.
Anybody recommend a good hosting service? I’m losing patience quickly here.
Read more:sorry
10-pages-in book review: Everything’s Eventual 2007-10-08 07:29:32 It’s a bit of a challenge to write the usual 10-pages-in book review
when we’re talking about a book of short stories. I’m about half way through this book, and I’ve consumed (it’s a deliberate word choice; reading Stephen King is a literary gastronomic delight for me) a little bit less than half of the stories and the other half remain unexplored territory. But I really wanted to write a post about this book because of the excitement and sense of discovery it has inspired in me. The book, by the way, is Stephen King’s Everything
’s Eventual
, a collection of short stories released way back in 2002.
When the movie 1408 came out this past summer and the ads trumpeted that it was based on a Stephen King story, I was perplexed. I only saw the trailer, but it sure didn’t look like any Stephen King story I’d ever read, and I was pretty sure I’d read all the ones that had been anthologized.
When they started advertising for the Read more:book review
Snog-worthy literary characters 2007-10-07 08:19:06 I was going to save this meme for later in the week, but I got so wrapped up in the writing of it that I couldn’t bear to leave it in the can.
Veronica at Toddled Dredge wrote a post about posts she has not written, and one of those topics was seized upon by her commenters as a post that should be written. Thus, the meme that wasn’t, but is: my top ten ’snoggable’ literary characters.
This was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I mean, a “kissable” character is not the same as a “favourite” literary character. Arthur Dent from the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, for example, and Garp, while among my favourite and most memorable literary characters, are not exactly the ones I’d most like to lock lips with. Plus, I’ve lamented before about my absolutely horrible memory for the details of a book once I’ve closed the cover for the last time. But once I got rolling, I realized that (a) there are lots of kissab
Feedreader questions 2007-10-06 14:00:36 Okay, I have some questions
for y’all.
First, why do you truncate your blog’s feed? It seems to be the vast majority of the “personal” bloggers I read truncate their feeds, while the majority of the business bloggers use a full feed. I’ve seen lots of debates on which is better, but I’m curious as to why YOU do it.
Care to take part in my highly scientific poll on the matter? If you have more to say, you can always leave a comment, too!
polls - Take Our Poll
And for those of you simply reading feeds instead of publishing them, what do you think? Does it matter to you whether the author publishes the full post or just a snippet?
FWIW, I leave the full feed simply because that’s what I prefer when I’m reading. I’ve had some issues with scraping, and had one site shut down for using my content without attribution, but now that I’ve figured out how to add an attribution tag through feedburner that says “This item is
Social bookmarks 2007-10-20 14:28:59 I’ve been meaning to get around to installing some social bookmarking widgets for a while now, and finally got around to it. They’re the little boxes at the bottom of each post. If you don’t know what they are, you can safely ignore them - but I highly recommend del.icio.us as a social bookmarking tool if you aren’t already using it! The rest of them I just kind of chose at random from the list of options based on what I’d heard other people using.
Let me know if the display is messed up in your browser, or if it slows the loading of pages for you! (And, yes, the blog was down for 14 hours in the last 24 hours. Am seriously considering changing hosts….)
Read more:Social
Three! 2007-10-19 08:05:22 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
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