End of an Ergo

I'm giving you a little break so you can catch up on all my past posts, and all the other things going on around the Internet, whatever they may be. At least, apparently that's what I'm doing. But in the meantime, a few bullets to get me out of this bloggy doldrum:

• I dusted off and gussied up my resume (which mostly meant changing all the fonts so they looked less 2004 and more 2013 to my non-graphic-designer eye; maybe it just made the whole thing look different to me and therefore as if it must have new information even though it doesn't, much) and sent it to someone who expressed an interest. So that was nice. I will now proceed to freak out about all the free time I don't have even though nothing has happened yet.
• We had visitors, which was lovely and gave my deeply ingrained Internet addiction a little break. I'm also re-reading the His Dark Materials trilogy, which is exciting enough to get me away from the computer from time to time.
• I have given away, sorted out, and designated for donation the last of the baby clothes. Even more finally, I am selling the Ergo. (And the Moby, if anyone wants it.) I put them on a local mailing list yesterday afternoon and by 6pm I had three offers for the Ergo. I think it will be taken today. I used it daily for, I'd say, four years in total, and apart from some fading it's in perfect condition, not a stitch out of place. Those things are built to last, and if you're looking for a baby carrier I can't recommend it highly enough.

Oh, Ergo. The fun times we had.

• By which I mean that the baby train has left and I am not on it and I'm finally fine with that. (Disclaimer here so that writing this sentence does not immediately cause me to accidentally conceive. We do not intend to procreate any further, that's all.)

• Bedtime has taken a turn for the worse. It's not fun. I do not like chasing Mabel around the street in her nightgown after stories because she's not tired (except she is, so much) and as a result her second-favourite Barbie is now reposing in the recycling bin. I suppose I'll take it out, but it's the first time I've actually been forced to take such a drastic step. Or lost my temper enough to go through with it, I suppose.
  
• I hope it's a phase, because the rest of my life isn't looking much like a good time if it's not.

Pedicure

One wholly superficial thing that tends to make an otherwise nice-looking man less attractive to me is long fingernails. Long dirty fingernails are, of course, worse. I had a huge crush on a guy in college until I noticed his nails, and that - happily for me because I was more insignificant than a gnat in his eyes and he was probably a total asshole anyway - put the kybosh on the crush. I was once again able to attend my Greek and Roman Civilization tutorial without blushing furiously and fumbling my pen the entire time.

So when I met B the B, I was happy to see that his fingernails were perfectly groomed. Not long at all. Maybe a tiny bit on the short side, to be honest, but whatever, there is no too short. Unless you're talking about my History teacher in high school who used to bite his so low that they were painful to look at. (No crush there either. Not a hint of one. Good teacher, though.)

So anyway, B and I had probably been married quite a while before I realised that he never clipped or cut or filed his fingernails. "What do you do?" I asked, mystified. "I bite them off," he replied. They don't look bitten. They just look neat. I never see him biting them. I decided that I could live with this, and decided to pretend we'd never had that conversation.

Trouble is, apparently it's genetic. Dash lets me cut his nails very nicely now that he's, you know, seven; though for the first few years of his life I carried the nail clippers with me and would give him a manicure whenever he dropped off in the carseat. Mabel, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of keratin.

When she was a baby, I suppose I managed to cut her nails as required every now and then, but since the age of about two she's been biting them, just like her father does. They're too short, but they don't look gnawed, exactly. I tell her she'll pull off too much and hurt herself, but it hasn't happened yet.

She also bites her toenails.

I suppose some day in the distant future she'll want to wear nail polish enough to stop herself biting, or else her joints will seize up in old age and she won't be able to get her toes to her teeth any more. In the meantime, this is just one fight I'm not really fighting.

She'll probably blame me when her boyfriend dumps her for doing it, though.

The momentous and the mundane

Oh, dinner, how you tease me with your needing to be made, every single damn night, unless I was organized and made lots the night before, which works well with winter dinners like chilli and lasagne but somehow rarely manages to cut it in the summer, when I have all these leaves and tomatoes and things.

I don't know what we're eating, don't bug me. There's hours yet to dinner time. Well, one hour, maybe. Dash has a baseball game to which his father will take him, and Mabel and I are on track for an early bedtime, seeing as how yesterday was one of those thankfully-not-common nights when I held her for several hours because she has a phlegmy cough (sorry, were you eating?) and was borderline feverish and I felt she needed to be propped up in bed but couldn't engineer that unless she was actually on me. Which is not so conducive to me sleeping either. It was like old times with a snurfly newborn. Except she didn't nurse. Which really is quite lovely and amazing, because it would have been a lot more tedious this time last year (or even a few months ago) when she'd have been latched on all night as well.

And you know, the funny thing is that she seems (seems, I say, not counting any chickens) to be dropping the morning nurse as well, the only one we have left, the one she was so adamant to keep. A few non-standard mornings have distracted her from remembering at the point when she normally would, and it's possible - just possible - that we will have weaned at four-and-a-half after all. Which is nicely matching her brother's age of weaning, and let me emphasize this may mean that I will soon be no longer lactating for the first time in seven years. Seven straight years. That's a long time. For all I know, my boobs might schlurrpp themselves into tiny fried eggs when they figure out what's going on. Or, more probably into the sort of things I could helpfully roll up before stuffing into a bra. Sigh.

This is not what I was going to say, but is it ever? Stream of consciousness, baby.

Oh, I know.

There are only thirteen and a half days left of school before summer. Hold me.

Gratuitous photo of Mabel, hiding around the corner the more safely to watch a scary part of The Princess Bride.

Exposition

So what happens nowadays (by which I mean this week, probably; my memory is short and constantly renewing itself) is that every few mornings I put on my sexxay workout gear and I flit around the house doing the normal before-school morning things like eating cereal and making Dash's lunch and nagging people to get dressed and checking my Facebook in case something important happened on the Internet overnight. The children are slightly confused: "What are those jeans?" Dash asked me this morning.

And then I bring Mabel to school and then sometimes I actually do something like exercise and other times I have what my cousins taught me is called a French workout, when you dress for the gym but don't go. And they should know, because they live in California where you have to at least pretend to go to the gym.

The something like exercise I'm tending towards at the moment is a 20-minute "extreme burn" pilates workout DVD. It doesn't sound like much, especially when you realise that extreme burn is an extreme exaggeration (except for my abs, which, ouch), but it's more than nothing and I think that's the point.

I've also been known to take a bike ride or even just a brisk evening walk lately, since my Stupid Toe won't let me run any more. (It's much better. I don't even notice it, unless I try to run half a mile or so, and then I start limping, which is unpleasant and makes me grumpy and despondent.) I loved the yoga class I went to a few times in the new year, but it takes too much of a chunk out of my brief, brief window of morning. By the time I'd got home and showered it was time to go straight back down and pick up Mabel, because she's all done with formal education at 11.30 every morning. And formal education has about had it with her by then too.

The prospect of going to BlogHer bang smack in the middle of the summer is actually more of a motivator than the idea of the local swimming pool opening up at the end of this month. My swimsuit, after all, is stretchy, and I've basically got into the habit of switching off all my mortification circuits on entry, as a self-defence mechanism. Anyway, all the other people I run into there are similarly uncovered, and we're mostly all imperfect one way or another.

But BlogHer is another story: I'll be meeting a whole passel of new people, mostly women, all of us trying to make the best first impression possible but look like we didn't have to try very hard because we always look this way. I won't lie - it's a scary notion. But in reality it will probably end up much like the swimming pool - we're all imperfect, and we'll all focus on the pretty, whether it's someone else's shoes or their necklace or their smile that lights up the room.

I'm really quite excited about BlogHer, you know. Apart from giving me a little more impetus to get fit(ter) and a rock solid excuse to buy some new clothes, I have a cool and lovely roomie whom I'm looking forward to getting to know a bit better, and for the first time since I've had children, I'm going to be doing something that's just for me. For three whole days.

It's a milestone of sorts. I don't know exactly what I expect to get out of it - I'm not fired up about any particular conference session, though I may learn great things or hear great people at whatever ones I end up attending. I'm not dying to get spectacularly drunk at any of the parties (though it may happen). I'm just looking to expand my blogging network a bit, meet some new people who like the same sort of things I do, get some new readers, and - most of all - take a step towards establishing who I am when I'm not being someone's mom.

It's been a long time coming. It's going to be good.

Rule of blog

There's this thing about blogging. A sort of an unwritten rule. If something's going wrong in your life, you're not allowed blog about it until you've fixed it. If you do, you're just a whiner and you're bringing everyone down and that's depressing and nobody will want to read about it.

Or else, which is sometimes worse, you do blog about it, just this once, and everyone thinks you were asking for advice, which you may or may not have been doing but you're going to get it anyway, and nothing makes you feel more of a big fat failure than lots of helpful advice telling you to do the things you know you should do, but the whole point was that you don't want to do them, or you can't for whatever reason that may or may not be basically laziness or disinclination. Like if I said "Waahh, my sentences are too long," and you said, "Well, there's this great thing called a full stop," and I said, "But I don't wanna stop it there, I just wanted to whine for a minute."

So while we all want to remain human and mortal and real in the eyes of our readers, we also want to present our best faces, the public ones - or semi-public - wherein if we get things wrong we then figure it out and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, by jimminy, and our lives get better because we're Doing It Right, and what's more, You Can Too.

It's a bit of a no-win situation, to be honest. You want to be cheerful, you don't want your readers to leave in droves because every time they click over to your blog you're whinging on about that thing again, and if they wanted to hear whinging they could go talk to their own four-year-olds thank you very much. On the other hand, you don't want to be one of those insufferable bloggers who has the perfect decor and the perfect children and the perfect life and the perfect housekeeping skills because we all hate those people. And if you only blog about the perfect and ignore the imperfect, that's as good as pretending to be perfect, which is just as bad only duplicitous as well.

I have nothing wise to say on this subject. It's just something I've thought lately. A blogger narrates their story as they choose, it's our prerogative. We are unreliable narrators, of course, because we can't see ourselves from above, and because we can't tell everything even if we wanted to. As a reader, you takes what you gets, and you build a picture that might be true or false or somewhere in between. You impose your own expectations and assumptions and irrational likes and dislikes on what I've said, and I have no control over what you end up with. That's your prerogative.

And somewhere way back along the line, all we wanted to do was pass the time, writer and reader both. Life is complicated.