Syndicated!

I am delighted to have a post syndicated at BlogHer today. You may have read it here already, but click on over and see it in situ - it'll look totally different, honest.

I think this is actually the first time I've been paid real money for something I've written.

I'm hoping it won't be the last.

The Internet: not so scary after all

D'you remember the movie The Net? Sandra Bullock, presumably alongside some forgettable male, played someone who was so plugged in to technology that she never left her house, ordered pizza on the Internet, had no friends and no outside-world contact. Your classic movie introvert geek - the it-could-never-happen-in-real-life twist, I suppose, being that she was a pretty young woman instead of a Comic-Book-Guy-esque bloke. She got mixed up in something, she made magic with her fingertips on the keyboard, the computers fizzed and popped, and lo, everything was all right in the end. She was probably even enticed out of her apartment and into the real world.*

The future looked pretty bleak though, and it was a cautionary tale for those people who might end up like Sandy. Don't get too attached to the Internet, they told us, or you'll lose yourself down a rabbit hole of online dating (DANGER, WILL ROBINSON) and endless cheesy pepperoni. You may even forget how to communicate with the guy who brings the pizza, and then he won't get a tip. And then he might murder you. (Different film. Probably.)

But then there's this.

Last week a friend of mine was having a bit of a hard time. Some other friends got together, had a quick whip-round, and bought her a present to cheer her up. She was touched and delighted. All these friends were geographically spread across three countries at the time, and most of them had never even met her, or each other, and still haven't.

Elsewhere, a woman who has helped many parents over the past several years by providing invaluable support and information had a family crisis. There was an outpouring of love and prayers and good vibes for her situation, as a whole passel of people who have been helped by what she has done saw a chance to give back, if only with thoughts and words, a fraction of the good she has done for us.

Once upon a time there was a girl whose not-so-secret desire was to be a real writer. She still hasn't quite got around to writing that book, but thanks to the Internet, she got to write regularly and get encouraging feedback from an array of friends and strangers, and it meant oh so much to her. Because the Internet means she is a real writer.

People on the Internet make a difference for others, without necessarily leaving their houses. They build communities, they make friends, they have real relationships and provide true, unjudgemental empathy. They also have fun dates and meet nice people and, hey, order pizza without going outside, and that works pretty well.

The Internet is not such a scary place, is what I'm trying to say. It's growing up and turning out not so badly, I think.



* I purposely did not look up the movie (on the Internet; oh, the delicious irony) to find out more about what actually happened, lest I touch the delicate bloom of my ignorance and discover that I was completely wrong and my whole carefully constructed (ahem) argument falls apart at the seams. If necessary, you may understand that this is my imagining, from this later point, of what The Net was about. I'm positive it was Sandra B, though. That much I know.

Gainful employ

I have a contracting job. I've spent about five hours this week doing work that people will pay me actual money for. This is quite exciting, I have to say. It gives me some focus when Mabel's in school (apart from focusing on not cleaning the house, which is something I put a great deal of concentration into) and the idea of getting a check at some point in the future that I can bring to the bank and turn into money that I can exchange for goods and/or services is fairly mind-blowing.

I've done freelancing in the past, since I turned my back on the world of 8 to 5 and decided to go all out having babies and baking muffins instead, but they were once-off projects. This is (should be; not counting chickens) more of a regular, steady thing. Of course, I need to keep a chunk for tax, and I should really put all the rest away for our retirement, or into the college fund or something (there is no college fund; the children will have to go to college in Ireland, or get scholarships) but I'm busy spending the rest in my head several times over on boots and bags and new jeans and a cleaning lady and a professional hair-dye job.

Sigh. My wants are modest and meagre.

The work is good. It's not exciting stuff and copy-editing is not everyone's idea of a good time, but I'm funny that way. It's challenging enough to be satisfying, and I was able to jump right in and get down to it straight away, which is nice when you're only working in one-to-two-hour bursts. It's really very gratifying to not only remember that you have skills that people will pay for but actually find the people who want to make use of them.

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I should say something about my new purple badge. I was very happy to be nominated for a Blog Award Ireland and I'm most delighted to have made the shortlist. (I'm also thrilled that the Irish Parenting Bloggers are so well represented, despite the lack of a dedicated Parenting category.)

I'm in the category called "Diaspora", which is what Irish people call anyone who emigrated, because Mary Robinson said it in 1985 or sometime, and it sounds all poetic and stuff. It was nice of them to have a category for non-residents, though it does mean I'm up against all the might of The Irish Times's Generation Emigration blog, for instance, which seems like a bit of a hard act to follow. Nevertheless, as we say in these situations, it's an honour just to be considered.

 

Love of Blog

I heard someone say today that she doesn't read mom blogs. "Because they're all do this and do that, and I think when you're a new parent the last thing you need is more people telling you what you should do."

Valid point. But I think maybe she's seen the wrong blogs.

I would hate anyone to think my blog is telling people what they should do. I really hate to think that I might ever come across as sanctimonious or superior or smug.

Blogs, if you find the right ones, bring your village to your living room. They validate your parenting decisions, they back you up, they open up the world. They give you a sense of perspective, they give you feedback; they are a pillow to scream into and a friend to vent to and someone else who's been there before. Or someone to assure you that nobody has ever been there before because nobody else has your child. Blogs are your teabreak and your water cooler; your snarky friend, your hilariously foulmouthed friend, your beautiful friend, your brave friend, the friend who makes you snort coffee out of your nose.

I could not have made it through the first seven years of parenting without blogs. And I wouldn't try to make it through the rest without them either.

BlogHer '13: But Maud, how did you FEEL about it all?

View from my room on the 21st floor

Can I squeeze one more post out of the BlogHer experience before you're all sick to death of the subject? It's just that I have more things to say about it. I'm still processing the whole weekend, but I also want to write it all down before I forget.

When people in Chicago heard it was my first BlogHer conference, they would say, sympathetically, "It's all a bit overwhelming, isn't it?" But honestly, I didn't feel overwhelmed. It was exhausting, but I didn't realise that till I came home. I did burn out a bit on sessions, but I could cope with that by simply not attending the last one I'd tentatively put on my schedule for the day.

When I went to University College Dublin (17,000 students) from my high school of 300 (which is a normal/medium size in Ireland but tiny by American standards) the same thing should have happened: I should have been intimidated and overwhelmed by the size of the place and all those people. But I wasn't. I found my place and I slotted in, and it felt right straight away.

Maybe it's because I like big cities or maybe it's because I'm halfway between intro- and extravert, or maybe it's because as an only child you're often plonked into situations among many adults you don't know and expected to just entertain yourself quietly until everyone's ready to go... or maybe it's just me. I'm generally content to quietly put myself somewhere and watch what's going on, even if what's going on is positively enormous.

Day one: Not overwhelmed

And BlogHer is pretty enormous. There were about six thousand attendees this year, I was told. The giant hall at the conference center in Chicago full of round tables did elicit a small gasp when I saw it on the first morning, while juggling breakfast plate and coffee cup and quasimodoed by my laptop in my shoulder bag. Imagine your debs (if you're Irish), or a sit-down dinner at a wedding, and then multiply by a couple of hundred, and you have some idea of the scale.

But after breakfast and the keynote speeches, we all broke off to go to our sessions, as if after an English lecture in Theatre L you went to a Spanish tutorial (if I may continue with my UCD reminiscences), and then you were in a room with only fifty or a hundred or maybe ten other people, depending on what you chose to attend. In fact, the whole experience was a little like university, distilled and then concentrated and then scrunched up into two very fast days.

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I may have arrived with some notion that all the business cards I handed out would translate instantly into new loyal readers, perhaps catapulting me into fame and fortune; but the sad truth is that the "big" bloggers, even the ones who might have my card now, are too busy tending to their own empires, and their own real lives, to take the time to read and love and then blogroll little ol' me.

That's okay. I can't please all the people all the time, so I'd better just please myself. That's why I went to the session called The UnMarketing Manifesto, why I went to the writing panels. My blog's purpose is to make me a better writer; that's why I started it, and I don't want to lose sight of that in all this friend-making kerfuffle.

The truth is that I probably won't end up adding all the cards I got to my blog reader, even though I'm following everyone I met on Twitter. And they won't all add mine. And while it's nice to be told that I'm a nice person, or that I'm fun to hang out with, what I really want is to hear that someone enjoys reading my blog.

Am I weird? Is that not, um, normal? Oh well. Thanks for being one of the ones who's reading.

Expectations and exhortations: the BlogHer advice post

Blogging has suddenly gone from something I do on my own to a serious group activity. Blogging isn’t writing at my kitchen table any more, it’s going to roundtable discussions where great writers and hilarious women talk about what they do; it’s eating breakfast with a thousand other women; it’s hugging someone I just met and meeting people I’ve only ever read about (and hugging them too). It’s like work, when work is fun and you get to meet your co-workers from all the other offices and finally put names to faces.

I expected to make connections and I hoped to grow my readership. I thought I would meet like-minded people and learn more about the technologies and techniques of blogging. I didn't expect to make friends. I thought you couldn't make friends instantly like that; friends take time and serendipity and are not just the people you sat at lunch with.

They're not, but actually, it turns out they are. What did I do at BlogHer? I made new friends.

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But if you're looking for actual useful information because perhaps you're going next year, and perhaps it already is next year, or perhaps you're me in the future and I've forgotten all the things I think right now I couldn't possibly forget, here are some weighty words of wisdom for you.

• Conference centers are cold. People said “Bring a scarf or a wrap or a light cardigan,” but they forgot to say “Bring a full-body fleece”.
• Don’t get 500 business cards even if they are only a couple of dollars more than 250. At least, not if you think you might want to change the design in the next couple of years. But do get business cards, and it's a good idea to have your photo on them if you can bear it. Definitely put your Twitter handle on them as well as your blog URL.
• If you can, have a family. I mean, a friend family, a safe space to return to, and people who will save you a seat even as they set you free to go a little crazy having your own experience.
• Obsess over what to wear if it helps you feel prepared, but know that you don't have to. You can wear jeans every day. There is no dress code. I didn’t see anyone in sweats, but I wouldn’t call it “business casual” or “dressy” or anything at all. If I go again I don’t think I’ll feel the need to put so much thought or preparation into my wardrobe.
• A smartphone is pretty handy for keeping in touch with people. My phone is not very smart and decided not to work for Twitter or Facebook even though the wi-fi at the conference was just fine. So I was reduced to old-school texting, which only works if you have had the forethought to get actual phone numbers from the people you intended to twitter-stalk, or taking out my laptop to communicate, which was not so handy if I wanted to find out where my friends were sitting while on my way from the buffet to the tables. Still, it sufficed. Don't feel you can't go because you don't have the technology.
• While I'm on the subject, do use Twitter at the conference. I've only been on it since earlier this year, but I found it invaluable for following people as soon as I'd got their card or sat in the session they were chairing, and becoming part of the conversation instantly. I only realised towards the end that every session has its own hashtag, so if you follow that you can see what everyone's saying about it while you're in the room. Which is quite cool. 
• Comfortable shoes. You know that, right?

And do be prepared to have your entire view of what blogging is turned upside down. Because that will probably happen.

Inter-

We went to the theatre a while ago, my husband and I. Say it the posh way, thee-ate-er. We left the children in the capable hands of a babysitter and took our cue to pretentiously discuss Beckett and Joyce on the metro into town. We even had a drink before the show. We'd never have had the audacity to book ourselves tickets for something like that - a real play, at night, in the city, no less - but we'd won the tickets so we had to go.

It's been so long since I've been to a live production of anything other than a tantrum being thrown that I'd forgotten all the things that make theatre such a different experience from a movie, even though on the face of it you might think they're much the same. This was a great example, though: a very intimate production, in the round, so that watching the audience opposite us react was as much part of the play as watching the actors. And being so close to the protagonists that you could reach out and touch them as they went by (if you wanted to; of course, I would never do such a thing) and admiring the grace and speed with which the actors moved the sets and props around between scenes, like a dance.

I love those moments when they're between selves; they're not quite in character yet, but they're about to be. The curtain call is the same, of course: it's the actors, not the characters, who are bowing to our applause. I strained to see if I could hear them speak as they went by, because the play was done with British accents and I'm sure the actors were American - but I didn't catch any hint of their real selves' voices to lift the veil a little further. I think this is why I love the blooper reels on a DVD so much: it's not just because they're funny, but because we see the actors being themselves just for a moment.

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I am between selves at the moment, I think. With the kids in camp for six hours a day, parenting is not the immersive experience it has been and will be for the rest of the summer, but I'm not quite sure what else it is I do; other than rush around getting last-minute things I might need for BlogHer. Once I'm there, I'll be a new self, or an old self - a new old self, perhaps. A professional amateur blogger, doing whatever it is such people do, in the company of many many others. A writer among writers, or a mommy-on-vacation. A woman among women (and some men, but not many, I'd say), without children.

Just me, Sheryl Sandberg, the Pioneer Woman, thousands of other women, and Queen Latifah too.

How to blog in the summer vacation

• Send the children on a treasure hunt. Forget to bury the treasure.
• Start a game of hide and seek. Don't seek.
• Blog one sentence at a time.
• Actually, just turn your whole blog over to your Twitter account.
• Recycle old posts from when nobody used to read your blog. Pretend you just had that baby last week.
• Send the children out to forage for food instead of going to the supermarket.
• Make the children cook your dinner.
• Drunkblog.
• Send them to camp.
• Send yourself to camp.
• Hire a mother's helper.
• Hire a ghost writer.
• Get all your friends to write guest posts.
• Ask famous people to contribute guest posts. (This entry actually written by the Dalai Lama.)
• Sacrifice your half hour of TV a night to a noble cause. 
• Or use that time to blog.
• Blog while watching TV. You won't be Jon Stewart's so funny distracted at all.
• Stop doing Sporcle quizes.
• Stop playing GeoGuessr.
• Embrace the chaos. Liveblog the children's fights.
• Photo entries. Lots of photo entries.

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.

And/or

What a relief! Summer went away and it's nice and cool and rainy today. I'm sure there are people out there complaining about it - and I'm sure I'll be one of them this afternoon when the children are all cabin-fevery and/or then I have to take Dash to baseball practice in the rain/mud - but right now my brain has switched back on and I can inhale deeply and I'm wearing my jeans and socks and it's good. All that sunshine was giving me a headache.

And I let Mabel's feet get sunburnt yesterday because I slathered her up nicely with sunscreen on arms and legs and face and neck but forgot that she would inevitably ditch her new purple sandals after ten minutes on the playground and leave her lily-white hoofers in the direct glare of the midday sun. Bad mother. (It's okay, they're not lobstered. Just a little extra pink.)

The pink and purple blossoms look positively luminous in the rain, too. It's very April-showery.

A little bloggy PSA and self-publicizing now. As you might recall, I'm going to the BlogHer conference this summer, which is very exciting/terrifying, and because I'm paying more attention to my e-mails from BlogHer I noticed that they are now accepting submissions for Voices of the Year, which is a way they recognise some of the best blog posts from the past year. Even though I always assumed the people who won these things were the "big bloggers," I thought what the heck, and submitted two of my favourite posts, because why not, and who else is going to ever notice your best work if you don't tell them where to look?

The main awards are decided on by a panel of readers, which is fair and means that the blogs with the big readerships don't scoop everything just because they have more people to vote for them; but there's also a reader's choice prize, and if you happen to be also a member of BlogHer, I'd be really delighted if you'd like to take a moment to go and vote for either or both of my nominations, if you like them. (You can still vote for everyone else as well if you feel that would be fairer.)

The page to vote for the first one is here, and the second is here. You can click through to the posts themselves from each of those pages.

And if you have a blog and are a BlogHer member, go and nominate your own favourite posts too and then tell me about it. (You can join BlogHer just to do it.) Share the love.

Increasingly long-winded thoughts on Twitter, which is why I'm not very good on Twitter

Thoughts on Twitter, from the perspective of one who came from Facebook.

• It's very good for my editing, trying to get what I want to say down to 140 characters.
• But it's a terrible way to have an actual conversation.
• The people, myself included, are more fickle. Because there's no mutuality, you can follow and unfollow guilt-free. I follow someone famous for a while, their too-frequent, or too-boring tweets annoy me, I unfollow them. I suppose in FB we just hide the status updates; unfriending is a lot more drastic.
• The people are more willing to listen to total strangers. On FB, generally speaking, I won't friend someone I haven't met unless I know exactly who they are and feel I have some sort of connection with them on a message board or through blogging. On Twitter a whole bunch of total strangers follow me. I don't even know why, but it's all very ego-stroking. (I mean, I don't know why they follow me. I do know why it strokes the ego.)
• And then, even more surprisingly, total strangers seem willing to engage with me in some sort of exchange. A usually frustrating one if I'm trying to actually impart information (see point 2 above) but not a bad one if we're just tossing quips back and forth. Or insults. Whatever.
• I've had a Facebook page for the blog for a couple of years now and it's just creaking up to 73 likes. I've been on Twitter since January of this year and already I have 80 followers. How does that work? And then some of my followers are corporate-type things that, what, think I'll just blindly follow them back? Does anyone do that? How is that good for business?
• And then, I don't understand how people can follow thousands of others. The Bloggess, to take a "famous" blogger, for example, has 320,000 followers. Lucky her. But she follows 19,000 herself. She can't read 19,000 people's tweets. Even if some of them don't tweet much. I doubt if she even clicked the "Follow" button 19,000 times, for that matter. So how does this happen, and what's the point? Do people just follow people to be nice, and then ignore them? I follow people whose tweets I want to see, but maybe I'm doing it wrong.

In summary, I'm finding Twitter surprisingly nice. It connects me with old and new people in the blogging community in an oddly different way from Facebook, in Ireland and the US (and elsewhere too for all I know). I thought it would just be covering the same ground again, but it's complementary rather than duplicatory. So, um, go click the button over there and follow me.

Words per minute

More times than I should admit to, I sit down here and have no idea what I'm going to end up saying. Sometimes it works out, other times not so much. Sometimes just sitting and typing will trigger a thought that turns into a decent post, and then I go back and delete all the drivel at the top that got me to it, and ta-da! it looks as if I had a plan all along.

If you don't know what to blog about, but you're fairly good at typing, I recommend it. (I'm not sure how it would work if I had to hunt and peck for each letter - my brain-to-finger motion is pretty seamless at this point.)

Though really. My mother had 60 words per minute on an old-fashioned typewriter, not even an electric one at first; probably with a sheet of carbon paper underneath and working from shorthand dictation. If I didn't have a Delete key up there within easy reach of my right little finger, this would be a whole 'nother ballgame. She was a proper secretary, like the sort they had in Mad Men. (I wonder if she's ever seen Mad Men? Must ask her. I bet she'd love the clothes but she'd spend her whole time telling me how it wasn't like that in The Bank.) (There is more than one bank in the country, but apparently not when you worked there. Everyone, according to my mother - that is, all the unmarried ladies in Dublin - either worked in The Bank or Guinness's. That's just how it was in the 60s. They were also all in either the tennis club or the golf club.)

I've used one of those old typewriters - my mum still has one at home in its own lovely wooden case. You have to bash down each key with the force of a concert pianist going for broke on Beethoven's Ninth, and you have to sit up straight and hold up your wrists too. None of this slouching over the kitchen table with my elbows all noodly, like I'm doing now. And I imagine it would be pretty hard to take your typewriter to bed with you and type on your knees, cosily wrapped up in a dressing gown, as I have been known to do. The people who habitually blog while on the loo would have a bit of a problem too, even leaving aside the problem of how to connect your manual typewriter to the Internet and how you might insert a hotlink.

I suppose what I'm getting to is that blogging is so much a product of this time, and I imagine it will be superseded by something new and improved in a few years, so that our children will read about it in the footnote of a history book and say "Oh yes, my mother used to do that," and they'll wonder how we managed when life was so hard and laptops were so unwieldy and you had to use all the fingers of all your hands to put words on a screen. Maybe they'll all be vlogging, or they'll attach electrodes to their brains and mind meld, and the whole Internet will be In Your Mind all the time...

If I had lived in any other century - or other few decades, I suppose - I might have filled diaries with my blathering, but I'd more likely just not have bothered. Blogging gives me a tiny, supportive audience - just enough to keep me writing, not so much that they become critical and put me off. The fact that I'm just one of bazillions of bloggers means that if someone doesn't want to read what I'm saying, they can easily go elsewhere. No harm, no foul; no money or time wasted; no skin off my nose. I get the validation that keeps me writing, I get the creative outlet and outside connection I need in these years when former at-home mothers would be isolated and inward-looking (back to Mad Men, and I've only seen the first season so don't go spoiling me). I get to feel like a writer, without all that character-building, soul-destroying rejection that "real" writers have to go through.

Because if you write, you're a writer. If you write for an audience, you're a writer. If you write a blog, or a book, or on the back of a napkin, you're a writer. If you write because there are words inside and you want to get them out, on paper or on a screen, or somewhere in between, you're a writer.

I blog because I want to write, and this is where I get to do it.

Lofty aspirations

I registered for BlogHer. See, I have a logo and everything. (Look right. Down a bit.)

I have no idea how that will go, but what the heck. There was an early-bird deal, so the actual conference ticket was as inexpensive as it could possibly be (unless I had sponsorship or something, I suppose). If I can't go, or chicken out, I can transfer the ticket to someone else any time before the end of June, and I'm sure it would be pretty easy to find someone to take it.

It's in Chicago, which is not exactly down the road, but a flight for one isn't going to break the bank. I suppose now it'll be in DC again in 2014, but if I'd waited it wouldn't ever be. I'll have to find someone to share a room with; I think there are forums to link up with people. If you're reading and you're going and you need a roomie, hi! Consider me! I'm quite tidy and I don't think I snore.

I don't know what I expect to get out of BlogHer. I know it's a huge conference. I know there'll be bloggers there I read but am too shy to talk to. I know there'll be bloggers there I'll start reading afterwards. I hope I'll meet some people who might start reading my blog. I hope I can manage not to die obsessing about what I'm wearing and how my hair looks the whole time. (Honestly, my hair usually looks good if I make any sort of effort. I'll be obsessing about how thin I am or am not.) I hope it will not be anything like high school.

Mostly, though, I want to go because more and more I'm identifying as a blogger. It's what I am, while I'm a mom and an editor (on hiatus) and an ex-pat and a wife. I don't want to put ads here at this point, and I'm pretty sure I don't have nearly enough traffic to bother, but I would love it a lot if some day this could become part of, or lead to, something that brought in a portion of income.

So I'm going to go to a conference, because blogging is my self-appointed, not-for-profit job.

Metapost

Normally, I try not to blog about blogging. It tends to send me down a rabbit-hole of introspection, which is very fascinating to me, but not so much to you lot. Maybe. Every now and then, though, I suppose I can get away with breaking my rules.

See, earlier today I wrote a post about going back to work. At least, about how maybe once Mabel is back at school, and five mornings a week this year instead of just three, I might look for some freelancing. Except I took a good six paragraphs to say it. And then I thought, "This isn't very interesting. Why am I writing this?"

So, why indeed? If my blog is just for me, it doesn't have to be interesting to anyone else. This post, for instance, will also not be interesting to many other people. And sometimes I just need to write things out to explain them to myself, or to get to the meat of what I actually meant to say.

In which case, I should then delete the first six paragraphs and then publish the meat, but these days I don't really have time to get there.

Which brings me to the quantity versus quality question. Right now, my fingers are clicking away as fast as they can because the children are upstairs with their father, who is overseeing the bath. Soon they'll be back, and then it'll be bedtime, and then I'll have another little while before I'm distracted by someone watching Star Trek Enterprise beside me, or possibly something else I'm more interested in. (Though actually, Enterprise isn't half bad. Sometimes I get sucked in.)

The way I see it, it's easier for me to update my blog almost daily than rarely. Because almost daily is a habit, and rarely far too easily becomes never. And by writing through the dross we sometimes arrive at the good stuff. I don't want you to have to read the dross, but maybe you don't mind either. Not every post can be a great one, and anyway, sometimes my most popular posts are the ones I thought I just threw up against the wall to see if anything stuck. (The one about packing, for instance, has proved surprisingly well-frequented.)

As an editor, all this dross annoys me, but I'm not going to go back and cut swathes through my archives, because as a writer, each individual piece of dross is my baby. Not my perfect baby, but nevertheless, born of my fingers and brought to the light of screen by nobody but me and the nice people from Blogger.

So what do you think (before they get out of the bath)? Are you willing to put up with the dross to get the meat? Have you a higher dross tolerance than I thought? Would you prefer I posted less often with more focused, pared-down, edited content? And at the end of it all, do I care? Because after all, is this blog for me or for you?

You tell me.

This and that

I'm not going to tell you any more about how Mabel's nights are going until they've settled down a bit and formed a - dare I say it? - pattern of some sort. Besides, I don't want to spoil the suspense.

I happened to look up the school website to see which day Dash starts back, and it turns out there's only three weeks of vacation left. How can that be? I almost (almost) feel sad about it, except for all the reasons it's a good thing. But he and his sister have learned to play together again this summer, in recent days she has come out of her hate phase and been heard to say "I love you" to not just me but everyone in the family, and things are delightful - at least around breakfast time when everyone's at their most happy and polite. (I'm pretty catatonic until I've had a bowl of cereal, but the kids are good.)

And I will miss Dash when he's back at school all day. These summers really are (barf, sorry) precious, because every one that goes by sees him demonstrably more grown up, more grown away, doing more and exploring further, and in no time at all we'll be at the summer where he goes off to Europe inter-railing for two months. Or whatever the kids are doing then.

Our guests get here tomorrow, and though they are the most low-key guests imaginable - my good friend and her six-year-old son, just for two nights - it's a good excuse to clean some things that never get cleaned, and throw out some things that have been waiting all summer to be thrown out, and organize just a tiny bit. Of course, it's a constant uphill battle against the children who know hilarity lies in throwing toys around for fun, but just maybe the floor will be vacuumed tomorrow morning.

This weekend, many people are going to BlogHer in New York. I think I might just make a resolution to go next year, assuming it's either there or in DC again - I don't imagine I'd fly further afield for it at this stage. But for the first time, I know some people (okay, one for sure) in real life who are attending, and it makes it feel like not such a ridiculous thing for me to want to do. I do blog, I am a blogger, I qualify, right?

Are you going to BlogHer? Would you go with me next year?

Christmas in July

Last Saturday we went to the National Harbor to see the Gaylord Christmas in July preview event, because now that I'm a DCMom I get to do all sorts of cool stuff. (Really, I just wanted another place to write. I wasn't thinking about events or freebies at all. But apparently sometimes those happen too.)

I hope you don't think I'm selling out if I talk about this stuff here too. I'll keep the proper reviews to the DCMoms site where they belong, but sometimes the experiences might be just too interesting to keep to myself.

Because I have to say it was a weird sensation - being marketed to, being handed a media packet even as my daughter insisted on being carried and my son demanded something or other, and knowing that these people actually wanted me to bring the children, so they couldn't complain if they were a little loud. It was odd to be anywhere in a sort of quasi-professional capacity, especially when that capacity was mostly being my non-professional parent self.

Some thoughts that occurred to my non-professional parent self, then:

• If you're going to hand out sticky green candy canes to keep the kids occupied during the presentation part of the goings-on, please provide some wipes as well. Otherwise, there may be tacky handprints all over your nice upholstered chairs that even the most assiduous parent can't avoid.

• I never turn down free food, but why put the candy and ice-cream first and the hot-dogs two hours later? Where is the logic in that? But thank you for including the fresh fruit. It was a nice idea, even if my kids scorned it.

Green-flavour cotton candy (that's lime, not mint).

• But ooh, pretty, unseasonal, Christmas. 

Soap-bubble snow

• Santa? Seriously? Oh well. Apparently, children aren't at all bothered by the fact that he's not supposed to be around in July. Mabel told him she wants a princess, and he said he'd get right on that.

They got Shrek ears. (I was wearing Mabel's.)

• Also, those pictures of giant ice-sculptured Shrek characters you keep showing us look unpleasantly as if they were made from enormous gobs of glistening snot. I am not attracted to them. Ogres look better when matte, not slimy.

Hugging Puss 'n' Boots. I hope I didn't miss Antonio Banderas in there.

We actually went to the National Harbor for the lighting of the tree last year - hey, I blogged it, even - and happened to walk through the atrium of the Gaylord where all their very impressive Christmas stuff was out in full force - gigantic tree, acres of lights, gingerbread houses to decorate, Dreamworks Characters being posed with. It looked great, though we scuttled past it all pretty quickly, denying the children things left and right. It was a lot of fun on Saturday to experience some of the same things for free, even if it was in a much smaller room and at the wrong time of year.

-------

After the indoor part, there was an outdoor part to showcase all the fun times one can have at the national harbor this summer. Sadly, the weather decided to make it Christmas - or maybe a dismal November - outside too, just for this one day, so I think it was far from what the planners had envisaged. They had a canopy that I'm sure was supposed to shade us from the blazing sunshine, but instead it could do only a half-assed job of keeping us dry. Every now and then I'd look out and think it was really coming down, and then the rain would kick it up another notch. Luckily, we'd brought the raincoats.

Grey skies, grey water

The kids got balloon animals and a really excellent face painter, as well as a stilt walker and a lady-clown-plate-spinner, so they were happy. The boat rides would have been lovely on any other day, but as it was, we all just kept to wet land.

A happy clown and a mysterious cheetah

Lovely weather for ducks, it was.

Branching out

Please excuse the radio silence of late, but I'm still figuring out how to navigate this two-children-all-day thing. I can check my Facebook and fire off a quick desperate e-mail or two in search of a playdate, but getting several minutes together at a time and having my mind in a suitably composed frame to put together a blog post is another thing entirely.

My plan was to blog in the evenings now that Mabel will be going to bed early instead of napping, but last night I was too tired to even pick up the detritus of a day's play from the floor and make my own post-prandial cup of coffee (mine's a decaf, thanks), let alone figure out how to entertain people all over my very small corner of the Internet.

Speaking of which, though, my little corner is getting a tiny bit bigger as of today, because I'm now also writing at The DC Moms, and I'm proud and delighted to be there. You'll discover, if you follow that link, that I'm not Maud, or even (not) Maud, over there - I'm Christine. But I'll stay in that amount of semi-seclusion for now, as while I don't want to pass up the opportunity to send a few more people this way, I'm not ready to go full on public. I like to retain at least the illusion of anonymity.

I hope I won't be blogging less here as a result of blogging there - I think the two should be complementary. The tone over there is less intimate and more journalistic, I suppose, so while my voice should be the same, and the subjects won't be very new, I'm hoping you won't find any repetition if you read them both. Should you be so inclined.

Right now the children are playing so nicely, so quietly and collaboratively - at least, they're close to each other and not fighting - that I almost don't mind the new mess they've created. I'm sure I just told them we were going to clean up so that we could test the new vacuum cleaner, but I suppose that will keep for a few more minutes, until they start jumping off the coffee table and hitting each other over the head again. Maybe I can even find us a playdate for tomorrow before that happens.

Simultaneous chaos and tranquility

Denouement

But the water bottle, you ask. What happened with the water bottle?

Funny story, actually.

That afternoon as we waited for our little darlings to exit, be-stickered and suitably exercised, from their dance class, one of the other mothers asked me "So, was the bottle there?"

First I had to recover from the shock of having someone from My Life Version A (real life, that is) reveal that they are also privy to My Life Version B (the blog) - not that it was a terrible surprise, since I have told a carefully selected group of my friends and acquaintances - the ones who have kids, whom I think might conceivably enjoy reading such things, and whom I can count on to probably not judge me too harshly in person - about the blog. Every few months I get crazy and publish a Facebook update to just those people, telling them about it and also how clicking the Facebook Like button here (have you noticed it?) will make fluffy bunnies hop all over their screens in an endearing manner or some such enticing nonsense. (It's true. Just try it and see.) It's called marketing, I believe, or shameless self-promotion, and like many other secret/semi-secret bloggers, I'm never quite sure how I feel about it.

Anyway, my friend had, in one fell swoop, payed me the compliment of letting me know that she read the blog that day and that she was engaged enough in the story to want to know how it turned out. So I told her that the bottle had still been in the playground when we went by a little earlier.

Our third friend wanted to know what on earth we were talking about, so I had to explain. The condensed version, for people who aren't waiting for me to fill a whole page with little black words:

"I found a water bottle at the playground, and I took it home because I thought I knew who it belonged to, but I was wrong so then I had to put it back, and it's still there." As I said it, a thought ocurred to me, but very slowly, like molasses, or perhaps a glacier.

"Like yours. You know, the expensive one your sister gave you."

At this point, you would think that I would have put two and two together. Not a hope.

We discussed further how fancy those bottles are and how my friend felt her life as a SAHM of two always-grubby little boys did not merit one. She lives across the road from me. Her son is in Mabel's class. I probably talk to her every day, as we watch our kids zoom around on each other's bikes or I return a purloined plastic frog to her playroom, that sort of thing.

Later that evening, I had a text from her:

"You know that water bottle you found - was it white? Because the last time I remember having mine was at the playground on Monday evening..."

You would think I might have mentioned at dance class that it was white - not just like, but exactly like the one her sister gave her. Apparently I hadn't. And she hadn't realised it was missing at that point - she assumed it was in one of those places things usually are, like the stroller basket or the car or being buried in the sandbox by some stray tyke.

So there you have it. She got it back. The blog saves the day.

Details

I think, speaking for myself and generalizing wildly (as I do), we have an endless fascination with other people's lives. I think this is why people read blogs. Because even when other people seem just like you, their lives are always different in tiny (or enormous) ways, ways they often wouldn't even think of as remarkable - and it's those chinks that make it so compelling to read about other people's doings. It's like visiting a friend's house, a friend you've known a while, and seeing their family photo collages on the wall, and poking around the books on their shelves, and considering the colours they painted their walls that you would never have thought of. (And then, I suppose, you either think "I'm so glad this cool person is my friend," or "Wow. Maybe I should ease gracefully out of this whole thing.")

And so I think I blog because, if you care enough to read this, and are interested enough to stop by every now and then, I'd probably like to invite you over to my house and have you ask me about my photo collage with its grainy, orange-hued 1970s picture of me with my grandparents (they had Instagram even then?) and the photo of me with my class in our white First Communion dresses ranged around the stautue of Mary in the chilly Dublin wind of May 1980, and the blurry one that looks all arty because my mum's disk camera was dodgy and you never knew what sort of double exposure you were going to get. And then, while I was making the tea, you could scan the bookshelves and ask yourself what sort of people have an ancient set of classics (in the original languages) on the top and far too many battered Dick Francis paperbacks in the middle and an entire collection of PG Wodehouse on the bottom, and discover many new and fascinating things about us.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. So please keep writing your own details, and I'll keep writing mine as best I can.

D

Happy significant blog-post number to me, happy significant blog-post number to me... etc. Blogger tells me that this is my five-hundredth post. If anyone out there who is not married to me has read them all, you probably deserve a lot more accolades for hanging in there than I do for blathering on at you.

But seriously, folks. I know you're not supposed to drink when you're on antibiotics, but is it okay to stuff your face with your children's halloween candy? Hypothetically speaking.

I started the blog out of boredom, when I had recently moved to the US from Ireland. I posted sporadically and had no readers. I've gradually upped the posting and come out a teensy tiny bit, first to people I only know on the Internet and then to (gasp) some friends and family in real life, and I'm sort of proud of the fact that I've been posting close to 5-6 days a week for over a year now.

As my life goes right now, this is the thing I do for me more than any other. It's my hobby, it's my release, it's my connection to the Outside, it's keeping my writing muscle flexed just a little bit, even if some days all I do is post a photo or recount something hilarious my kids said (which - be honest - is what you people like best). And somehow or other I get between 70 and 90 readers most weekdays. They can't all be married to me. (Unless B has rigged my stats. Maybe he has.)

So thank you for reading, whoever you are. If you don't object, I'll just keep on blathering.