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.

Biting and writing

Things and stuff, things and stuff. It's nice to be back here with my things and my stuff and all the Christmas decorations put away since I never put any out to begin with. Dash is at school and Mabel is napping, since she woke up at 3.30am thank you jet lag. I think I might bake something soon.

Speaking of which, it is an excellent idea to bake something just before you go away and leave it in the freezer so that when you come back and you're mainlining tea to keep awake, you have something nice and homemade to go with it just 15 seconds in the microwave away. The only thing I did wrong was to leave only six chocolate-chip pumpkin muffins waiting for us, because they didn't last long.

Other things you might have missed because I didn't mention them here include the fact that Dash lost his first tooth (not counting that one he knocked out as a baby, a mere month after it came in, great maternal trauma):

It (the bottom one - the top opposite is the gap he's basically always had) was wobbly, and wobblier, and I thought Santa might be bumping into the Tooth Fairy but it held on a few days longer and then he and Mabel and their dad and their cousins, but not me because I escaped to meet a friend and also had bashed my toe a la Amalah that morning*, all went ice-skating and when they stopped for an ice-cream break his father pointed out that his tooth was gone. And Dash said "Is it?" and so we think he swallowed it but maybe it's out there on the ice somewhere waiting to trip someone up.

Then there were some negotiations and a note was written to the Tooth Fairy (by me, which is a little ironic) explaining that Dash would like dollars, not euros, and also that he had swallowed the tooth, and I had to tell him that the Tooth Fairy had left her dollars in Dublin where we were not at that moment, so also that he would like to get his money tomorrow night instead. I think he was a bit jaded by the whole charade, but he wanted his dollars, dammit, and luckily for him the Metro ticket machine had given me dollar coins just before we left the country, so it all worked out. Though the writing notes to myself was a bit surreal.

........

I did some writing (elsewhere, to which I'd rather not link because it has my real name, but if you came here from there that's lovely and I'm thrilled to see you, please stick around) and got lots of nice comments and some off-the-wall ones that made me think about, well, how you can never tell the full story, I suppose. Maybe what I'm trying to do here is to make you understand me, but that's nonsense because there's always more, there are always qualifications, provisos, quid pro quos (thank you, Genie from Aladdin), ways in which I have to explain that I didn't mean what you thought I meant, I meant something else.

Clarity; I like clarity. That's why I'm an editor. I disambiguate. But eventually you have to just leave it alone and accept that you can't get everything across to everyone, and you wouldn't actually want to.

So I will continue to offer snippets of what the ex-pat experience is for me, and how Ireland feels and how America feels, and try to find words that explain how the cold hard sunlight outside my window parches the grass of the backyard in winter in an entirely different way from the soft air of my homeland, where you don't understand why they talk about how green it is until you go somewhere else and then come back.

........

Other items of note: I now have a Search tool (over there -> under the tag cloud), and you can sign up for e-mail updates whenever I post, if you like that sort of thing. And I made some tabs and put all the links to other people's blogs on one, so you should take a look at that.

And if I can gently remind you here that liking me on Facebook and/or following me on Twitter makes me very happy and gets you extra bits of wit and wisdom and cute photos sometimes, as well as links to new posts, I'll do that too.

........

Time to read a book and bake something and wonder when I have to wake Mabel in order to pre-emptively rescue bedtime.


* My toe was not actually broken. I wasn't limping at all by the next day. But still, ow.

Blog marching

If you scrutinize this page minutely every time you upload it, as I'm sure you do, you might have noticed a couple of new things recently. For one thing, I changed my ocean waves header to a dappled sky one, which is only a little more autumnal, but until I get a good photo of orange leaves or something, it'll have to do.

For another thing, I joined Twitter. This may or may not turn out to be a good idea. I don't have a fancy phone, so I'm only updating it from my computer, which I'm sure is Not The Point, but oh well. If you'd like to follow me, as I'm told people do over there, I'm @AwfullyChipper. I'll tweet a link to new blog posts, so it's another handy way to keep up to date. (Ooh, note to self: remember to do that.) Also, if you follow me, I'll follow you. Not in a stalkery way, of course.

But most importantly, there's a new logo over there --> proclaiming that I'm a proud member of the Irish Parenting Bloggers group. And so I am. If you're interested in reading some great Irish blogs, click Subscribe and we'll bring all the updates straight to you.

Right now, some of the group have come together to bloggily protest the proposed cuts to the Child Benefit allowance - so let me tell you what's going on with that. Currently, all Irish parents (/guardians/caregivers), regardless of income, are entitled to a certain amount monthly per child - in the same way that parents in the US receive tax relief for their children. The government of Ireland, as you might have heard, is somewhat strapped for cash right now, however, and they're proposing to take some of this benefit away to use it for something else.

At first glance, this seems pretty reasonable. From the US perspective, being paid for your children sounds somewhat - gasp! - socialist. Definitely liberal. Practically - excuse my French - French. Reducing the amount a bit, not taking it all away or anything like that, seems fair enough. Some people are saying it could be means-tested so only the people who really need it will get it.

Well. Lemme explain further. A lot of the election rhetoric in the US at the moment concerns the "squeezed" middle-income segment. The middle-income segment in Ireland is so squeezed right now that you could put it in a glass and call it lemonade. Very bitter lemonade with no sugar.

Now I've never been a parent in Ireland, so I don't really have a dog in this race. I left the country when times were still good, during the boom, before the bust had really got going. I didn't buy a house there, or even think about buying one, when the house prices were insanely high. I got laid off from my cushy IT-sector job, true, but I was planning to emigrate anyway and I got a nice little redundancy package, so that all worked out well. My memories of the children's allowance are of my mother buying me a pair of shoes, or maybe buying herself a pair of shoes, with it. I always thought of it as a nice extra, not something we needed.

But times have changed. Well-educated, fully employed, fiscally responsible adults with children in Ireland nowadays are often counting on that part of their income for more than just an extra pair of shoes. Maybe they're budgeting it for their children's only pair of shoes for the (cold, muddy, Irish) winter, along with their school uniforms and the exorbitantly priced schoolbooks. Maybe it's a vital component of their artificially inflated mortgage for the modest house they own in a regular neighbourhood. It might be the difference between a trip to the doctor and some antibiotics for a five-year-old with strep throat and just waiting it out with honey and lemon. It might just mean they can get dinner on the table every night and pay the electricity bill as well.

Here's the part of the blog post at The Clothesline that really shocked me:

My eldest daughter is on a waiting list for Occupational Therapy. Current waiting times 16 months. A private assessment costs €550. That is 4 months of child benefit I get for her. A private session of occupational therapy costs €80. Two a month and its over the amount of child benefit I receive per month. Our Health Insurance does not cover it.

My son was waiting 17 months for an out patients appointment to see an ENT. His appointment was in August. He was not examined. We queued and queued and saw a doctor who said he would bring my son in for a sleep clinic in the next few weeks. That was two months ago not a word from them since. He is also on a waiting list to see a Optomalogist. Current Waiting time 22 months.  The cost to see a consultant privately – €180. We have seen two at the cost of two months of his Child Benefit payment.

My youngest daughter had a problem with her teeth. She was just shy of two. The HSE dentist said there was nothing they could do. Full stop. Nothing. I asked could we go privately. She said the cost would be in excess of €10,000 as we would need a surgical team. No cover from our Health Insurance. We managed to get her sorted through a different route. The doctors we saw kept telling us how lucky we were that they were seeing her. I don’t think we were lucky at all. I do not think you should have to fight and fight and fight to get a medical appointment for a child under two. A baby.

I always said we'd go home if we could. I always said we're not in the US for ever. But reading the stories I'm reading makes me wonder if we'd be crazy to consider it, even if we had the opportunity. It's slowly dawning on me that maybe this is still the land of opportunity, in many ways. Here in the US, with health insurance, I can take the kids to the doctor for $15 a go, so I take them whenever I'm feeling iffy about something. If I had to pay 50 or 60 euros a time (because Irish health insurance doesn't cover GP visits), that would be a different story.

My son is in public school here, but he has music, PE, and art two to three times a week, with dedicated teachers. He woudn't get those extras in an Irish national (public) school, I suspect. Here, his books are paid for and there's no uniform and no "voluntary contribution", though we do buy school supplies and volunteer for the PTA and contribute to fundraisers. Irish "free" schooling costs a whole lot more. (Though I should add that Irish private schooling doesn't reach the giddy heights of expense it does here either, at primary, secondary, or even university levels.)

If my children needed to be evaluated for speech or developmental delays, or to recieve early intervention therapy, it would happen quickly, and at least some of the services would be freely provided by the county. Not so in Ireland.

The cost of living in Ireland is high, due to its geographical isolation, the climate, the small size of the country, the government taxes on everything... Cars are expensive, gas/petrol costs a lot, you have to heat your house ten months of the year, and the weather's often crap. It's beautiful, the people are lovely, and it's home. When you live there, you just battle on, because you've no choice.

I've never been a parent in Ireland for longer than our annual trips home, which is why I'm not making an official contribution to the "blog march" against cutting the child benefit. But if you're one of my Irish readers, or you're interested, I encourage you to take a look at the posts linked there from the parents this is hitting. What I'm seeing from these bloggers is that the whole system in Ireland - health, education, finance - is broken, and the child benefit allowance is an easy target. The ordinary people of Ireland are pissed off, because the bankers made a mess of the whole economy and every year in the budget, they're made to pay for the fat cats' mistakes.

I have no solution to propose. If I was trying to balance a budget out of nothing at all, maybe this would look like the least bad place to get a few shillings - shillings to put back into something that needs it even more, like the healthcare system, that is.

But my heart hurts for my country and its people - its nice, ordinary, good people - who didn't do anything wrong but will have to pay, one way or another, again.

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.

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

Fingerwalking

Sometimes you just have to click the button with the big pencil graphic on it and see what your fingers do.

Sometimes I don't think I have anything to say, but something comes out anyway. Sometimes I start out saying one thing and end up telling a totally different story. Sometimes I just put it away and don't publish anything that day, and sometimes I fall back on something funny somebody said, or what we had for dinner.

Sometimes I self-censor a blog post out of existence because it's too personal, or too uninteresting, or about money, or religion, or things maybe I don't want all those people I know in real life to read and be thinking the next time they see me at nursery school or a family gathering. Whereas in reality, they probably didn't read it anyway, and certainly won't remember it if they did. They have too many other things in their lives. But sometimes the post I'm not writing drowns out the post I might write, so that I'm left with nothing to show for it.

Sometimes one word borrows another and suddenly I'm knee-deep in reminiscences about schooldays or misspent youth, whether you wanted to know it or not. Sometimes I read another blog, one so piercingly written or side-splittingly funny, that I wonder what the point is at all. Sometimes I think my stats are all just a big lie told by Russian searchbots and nobody's reading at all except my two friends down the road and my ever-constant husband.

Sometimes it turns out that you really just didn't have anything to say today. Try again tomorrow.

Wish

I have no deep thoughts today. My children failed to provide me with material, parenting epiphanies were sorely lacking, and I didn't bake anything pretty. (Well, I made some muffins, but they were hardly original.) The fact that the clock ticked past midnight once again and a number turned over is not inspiring me to fill this page with insightful banalities.

So I'll just wish you a happy year, again, replete with simple - or exotic - pleasures, and thank you for reading.

If you're looking for a French lesbian tube, I gots nothin'.

This time I mean it

But first, some administrative stuff. Have you noticed my new thingy? Yes, it's lovely, isn't it? Oh, and also, I have a clever whatsit now that picks out four related posts, with or without pictures, and links to them at the bottom of every post. I'm not sure if it uses the tags, or possibly magic, but I love that it's giving some love to lesser-spotted posts, and personally I have found when I saw such a thing on other friends' blogs, that it drew me in and brought me to lots more interestingness, so I hope it does the same for you.

And then, when I was thinking about how to lure you people in and enmesh you in my fascinating word-tangles - I mean, how best to serve your needs as readers - I decided to do away with the silly and self-perpetuating "Popular recent posts" section in the margin and instead make a new page called Cliff Notes, which lists a few of my favourite blog posts and serves as a sort of potted history of what's been going on here and what I like to write about.

If you'd like to nominate a post to go there, I'm always open to suggestions, by the way.

(Cliff Notes, for my non-American readers, are those yellow-and-black-covered summary texts you can buy so that you don't have to read the whole book. Not that I've ever owned any such thing.)

See the link over there under the About Me section? There it is.

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That's enough of that.

I vowed not to mention this until we were at least a week in, but then I changed my mind. So what if I end up eating my words (again) in two days' time? Will you scorn me? And will I know? Will you stop reading entirely because I jumped the gun and blogged about something without giving it due thought and process? Well, fine, I never liked you anyway.

No, not you. Come back. You don't even know what I'm going to say yet.

On Sunday, which was exactly one month after her third birthday, I said to Mabel, "Let's put on your new dress for your friend's party," and she said to me, "I want to wear underpants." And I did not stand upon the order of my going, but went at once and fetched said underpants from the ranks of their brethern where they have been waiting patiently ever since June, being the last time she was potty "trained". I also took with us a spare pair, and a pullup, and an extra outfit just in case, because I'm not thick, me.

Luckily, the host is a wonderful, laid-back mother who greeted my news of an undefended bottom on arrival with "It's not a party until someone's peed their pants." Indeed. And Mabel successfully came to me twice and had me take her to the bathroom, before the third time telling me that she had indeed peed her pants just a little. That was pretty good going for a birthday party, and I certainly wasn't swooping down on her to check every ten minutes, because there was wine and spinach puffs and entertaining people to talk to and my son wasn't hiding under my legs like last year - he was happily playing with the birthday boy's brand-new robot and eating his weight in potato chips.

Yesterday I casually produced more underpants with the day's clothes, not sure how it would go down, but she was happy to put them on and tell everyone at school, at the top of her voice, that she was wearing underwear. She came home dry, wearing the same thing she'd set out in, and then proceded to motor through four pairs of bottoms in about two hours.

This may be the pattern for a while yet. Today I was all set to announce, in foolhardy manner, that this was it, no turning back, pullups for bedtime only... and then she took an extra-long nap, woke up soaked, and tearfully demanded a diaper for the rest of the afternoon.

Like I said the last time Ted, it won't happen again.

Verbose

If anyone knows how somebody visited this blog from the page of an engineering firm in Russia (this one, actually), I'd be fascinated to hear it. Blog stats are wierd and wonderful things, and I could spend far too much time obsessively refreshing them and wondering who my fan in the Philippines might be. (If it's you, hi! Stop by the comments and tell me all about yourself.)

In other news, we are in for a whole lot of trouble when Mabel gets older. (Okay, this isn't exactly news.) Her brother is as transparent as a sheet of glass - he is completely devoid of guile, and no matter what he's done, he'll always tell us about it. Mabel, in contrast, is full of shite, and I say that in the most loving way. She just told me that her granny just spoke to her on the phone and said that it's morning time so we can definitely turn on the TV. (She's not napping, and I couldn't get her to stay in her room, but at least, so help me, I can keep the TV off for an hour. Is that too much to hope for?)

B brought Mabel to school this morning, and drop-off was painless. When I picked her up at 11.30, though, she was a little teary. First she informed me, hiccupping, that "I'm not crying. My eyes are just a bit wet because I ... didn't get that little bike I wanted yesterday in the playground." Pure fabrication. Her teacher told me she'd spent most of the morning, once she got upset and decided it was time to miss me, talking about how Mummy hadn't done this, that, or the other. Miss L said, apologetically, "I do usually try to give weight to their concerns... but I think she's just... you know..."
"I know," I said."She just likes to talk."

She's playing with the dollhouse. Doll 1 just said to doll 2, wearily, "I don't have any patience for this." At moments like this, I'm really happy I don't give into my first instinct and swear like a particularly blasphemous sailor every time my kids drive me bananas.

A day late and a dollar short

I'm going to post a What's for Lunch Wednesday post, except that I didn't get the photos out of the camera till today, so it's not Wednesday any more.

(Mabel loves Thursday, because it's named after Thor, her favourite of the Avengers. Except when her favourite is Wasp, or Ant-Man, or Captain America. Last night she was very excited to hear that today would be Thor's Day.)

Other people who shall remain nameless always get their post up in time, so if you go there you can read more about yesterday's food and follow the links to everyone else's lunches.

I packed the big lunchbox for me and Mabel yesterday, full of good stuff that of course came back mostly uneaten. This is why I don't feed my children: they don't eat food. In our lovely green Goodbyn (that always gets admiring glances) I have apple slices, grapes - quartered because they were big fat ones with choking hazard written all over them - some watered-down red juice (V8 V-fusion), a mini yogurt, and quesadillas. Mine had black beans from a tin (well rinsed) mixed with a spoonful of chipotle salsa and some grated red cheddar. Mabel's had ham and cheese, because she doesn't like purple beans. All she ate was the yogurt.

Those mini yogurts, by the way, are called Danonino and are unappealingly labelled "Dairy Snack". But if you look at the ingredients, they have no HFCS and are mostly just milk, and have 19% of someone's required protein (I don't know if that's a toddler's or an adult's) as well as calcium and some other good things. In Europe we have tasty little pots of stuff called Petits Filous, or Petits Suisse, or simply fromage frais, but all those words are French and therefore would be frowned upon by Les Etats Unis. From the taste, these little guys are almost the same, a little milder perhaps, but clearly the Danone company is stumped to find a decent name for them.

So that was lunch. Mabel hasn't been eating much lately, but between the fact that she's been on antibiotics for almost three weeks now to make sure she doesn't develop Lyme disease - and it seems to be working, because the mystery rashies have gone away and the target-shaped one is fading nicely - and that she came down with the snurfles at bedtime last night and is currently streaming snot, I'm not too surprised. It's not like she's slowed down any with the nursing, I can promise you that.

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In other news, I'm painfully - painfully, I tells ya - aware that the banner graphic is horribly out of date, and I have a nice autumnal photo all ready to go for up there to replace the swimming pool we haven't been to since August. But Blogger tells me it's too big, so I'll have to wait for my IT advisor to come home and do clever things with Gimp to make it fit. I hate iPhoto. For an iThing, it's really annoying. [... Update: Done!]

While I'm talking shop, I have to say I'm very tempted to change Monkey's name to Dash. What do you think? He's just not a Monkey any more, and it also turns out that Monkey is a very obvious and boring thing to name your blog son. Mabel has been playing The Incredibles a lot - she likes to be Violet and look after her baby brother Jack Jack - and has taken to addressing Monkey as Dash. It's a good name for him, since he likes to show us how fast he is at every available opportunity. (It also fits the Halloween costume I picked up for him at the thrift store last week to a T.) Do you think I should? Would it be too confusing? Do you care? Etc.

Bloggity

See, as soon as I take my eye off the (blog) ball for a few minutes and try to write something else instead, in the shape of this crazy short story I'm playing around with that I think jumped the shark the moment I mentioned zombies, but I just ran with it and now I'm really quite enjoying the whole nutbally thing - as soon as that happens, then I have nothing to blog about and it just sits here all day and I realise that while it was extra super-duper nice of me to post on Sunday afternoon so that all those people who are bored at work on Monday morning will have something to read - wasn't it? because I used to be one of those people, so I do feel for you - that it doesn't really count as a Monday post, and what about all those other people who came along looking for something new on Monday and still haven't found it? Well, there's an extra long sentence just for you, that's what.

My most regular source of visitors, according to my stats, is a discussion board I happen to frequent that also has a portal where members can advertise their latest blog posts. Before the advent of things like Facebook, this was totally fabulous, because even people who hadn't bothered to bookmark your blog could go there and find the most recent post. Even now, with things like FB, it still sends me by far the biggest chunk of readers. But right now the portal is broken, so I'd like to extend a big thank-you to anyone who's still coming along to read even though they have to do it by a more convoluted route than usual. I'm really surprised my numbers didn't drop further, so I think some people are actually making an effort. And I do appreciate that.

Ugh. I just accidentally Febreezed my hand. You don't really want to know why.

You know, I'm very happy that the Internet came along in my lifetime, and that someone invented blogging and that it became a thing that people do. Because it's exactly the perfect thing for a person like me: a closet exhibitionist (I do cartwheels in the streets, but only when they're deserted) who used to subject her friends to ten-page letters and, later, e-mails that took way too much scrolling. This way (a) only people who actually feel like seeing me exhibit need to do so, (b) I don't have to write the same news over and over to different friends, and (c) I have an outlet for the constant stream of drivel that apparently comes direct to my fingers, bypassing my brain.

It's also good that I learned to type, disregarding the advice of my uncle who told me that if I did, men would only see me as a secretary. (I've been a secretary, and I was glad of the job and the fingerspeed that got it for me.) Times have changed.

In fact, now my uncle has a blog. I bet he has to hunt and peck to find the right keys.

Hello!

If you came here because of the BlogHer spotlight thing, welcome! It's lovely to see you and I hope you'll stay a while. Make yourself at home, take a look around, check out a tag or two in my pretty tag cloud over there ( -> , down a bit), and click the Facebook "Like" button, if you dare.

If you're looking for my more attatchment-parented-oriented posts, try the tags for childbirth, tandem nursing, extended nursing, lactivism and weaning. If you're looking for something amusing, I recommend the "Kids are icky," "Hilarity," and "Death and sex" tags. You can also read my birth stories, if you like that sort of thing, or find out more about who the flip I am anyway.

If you've no idea what I'm talking about but were going to be here anyway, thank you, faithful reader! You are most appreciated. I was thrilled yesterday to hear that I was going to be a featured blog on the BlogHer Family page, and indeed it came to pass and my stats count went up. Call me ridiculous, but that sort of thing makes me happy.

Also, they gave me a pretty piece of bling to put on my blog. That's the official term, you know.

Of the moment

My children have been playing nicely together for large portions of the morning. Frankly, I'm a bit confused about my role as parent here. What am I supposed to do? I looked in on them, and was told I could be the babysitter. Batman handed me an imaginary baby. I handed it back and went off to clean a toilet. It's all a bit strange.

Is this what other parents have? Is this what I have to look forward to as they get older? I don't know whether I should rush out and get a job or rush upstairs and get impregnated, stat.

Since we went away and came back, a couple of other things have changed. Some for better, some for worse.

Better: No more sippy cups. While we were away it became clear that Mabel is no more likely than Monkey, and possibly less, to spill an open cup. So the sippy cups are now mostly just for taking with us. If you're sitting at the table, you have an open (plastic) glass.

Worse: No more crusts, again. Before we left we'd just got to the point where Monkey would eat the sandwich and leave the crusts. Now he's demanding that I cut them off again. Bah.

I also seem to have worked my way through all the inspiration I had been harbouring, and have run out of posts written days before they would appear. It's back to seat-of-my-pants blogging. Woo hoo.

Not today's photo, as this is obviously Iron Man, not Batman.

On summer break

Taking a little summer break from the blogging. See you in August, probably.

Olive Oyl

Okay, so the tagging project took a little longer than anticipated, but apparently my inner indexer came out, and I am still not satisfied that it's the most perfectly representative, enticing, readership-broadening tag cloud it can be, but it's pretty good. There are some new tags (check out "Death and Sex": I wanted to include taxes, but I don't really have anything to say about those) and more stuff in old underused ones. It's a miracle of modern technology.

Speaking of: in my first "real" publishing company job (as in, not a summer job, but a pay-you-under-the-table temporary deal after I'd graduated), I once spent a week moving all the numbers in a book index nine pages to the left. And then we moved the photo section around again and I had to rejig everything before page 135 to fourteen pages later and everything after page 147 it twenty-eight pages earlier. (Or whatever. Numbers have been obfuscated to protect the innocent.) This was before the days of Word linking your index terms to the page numbers and generating everything itself: I had to do the math, mark it up on a hard copy, and input it to the computer. I started dreaming indexing, so I'd come to work in the morning having been up all night doing it in my mind. Not relaxing. And I'd be very surprised if the finished item was anywhere near accurate.

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As I may have said before, if you show me a bandwagon, I will consider it carefully for a year or three and finally jump on, just as it's leaving town forever. I am a sheep. (My sixth-class teacher used to talk about separating the sheep from the goats, but I was never quite clear which of those two I should aim to be. I mean, do I really want to be a goat?)

So when no fewer than two of my favourite bloggers, Linda at All and Sundry and Jessica at Balancing Everything, mentioned that they were washing their faces with oil these days, I decided that clearly I should do the same. (I can't find Linda's specific entry now, but here's Jessica's.)

Remember when you were 14 and you and your best friend would pester your mum to buy avocadoes, or purloin all the porrige oats, so that you could make your own homemade face masks as advised in the latest edition of Jackie, and you liked to think it was because you were all natural but really it was because you had no money to spend on fancy stuff? Well, I feel like I've come full circle. I'm so sick of perusing all the unguents on the CVS shelves and judging what to buy based on some spurious claims and pretty packaging, only to bring it home and discover that it smells like old lady and I can't possibly put that on my face every day; or else just buying the same old same old because even if it doesn't appear to do anything, at least I know it smells nice.

So now I have a jar of olive oil in the bathroom. (I need to find a prettier container, but for the moment it's a ex-peanut-butter jar.) Every morning I pour a little into my cupped hand, rub my hands together, and rub it all over my face, especially into the pores around my nose. Then I step into the shower to give my skin some time to marinate. (This might not work so well if I washed my hair every day, but I don't.) After towelling off, carefully avoiding my face, I wet a washcloth with hot water and put it over my face, steaming off the oil and the blackheads and the leftover makeup, and then wiping it all clean.

Then I moisturise with just a drop or two of oil, as Jessica advises. (The first day I overdid this and my glasses kept falling off my nose. I am more reticent with it now.)

I would prefer to do the routine at night, to take full advantage of its makeup-removal properties and avoid the moisturiser/sunscreen conundrum I've left myself with as the weather gets summerier, but for now mornings are better, given Mabel's appalling unpredictability any time after 9pm. Even if this morning she managed to come into the bathroom, wave at me through the blurry glass (thrice blurry, if you count its natural effect, the steam, and my myopia), pull some big and small bottles out of the cupboard to play mummies and daddies with, and then dump all the q-tips on the floor.

I have dry skin, and since I've finally got to that part of my life where the wrinkles are taking over from the zits (weren't we led to believe that there'd be a space in between? what happened there?), I haven't had any breakouts since I was last pregnant (or maybe post-partum, I can't remember), but the tiny blackheads around my nose had lately caused me to think enviously of Charlotte from Sex and the City admiring her perfect pores in her magnifying mirror. You'd have to pay me good money to get me in front of a magnifying mirror in daylight these days. And extra to open my eyes.

So I've been using extra-virgin olive oil, as Jessica suggested, since she too has dry skin, and because that's what's in my kitchen. The original web site she links to talks about using castor oil and other oils, and mixing up your own custom oil. Which is probably great, but the lure of this for me was that I could grab something from the cupboard and go do it.

I've been doing it for about two weeks now, every day, and I think my blackheads are less black, and my skin feels really soft. It certainly hasn't made my skin oilier in any bad way, so for now I'm going to keep it up and see what happens. And if it makes me feel 14 again, maybe that's a fun side-effect.

You'll tell me if I start smelling like a salad, won't you?

The birds, the bees, and the giraffes

Sorry about the radio silence yesterday: I was busy tagging all my old entries and fixing the paragraph breaks so that my new tag cloud - look! over there! - would be more representative of the blog as a whole, and to perhaps entice people to read entries that have never before seen the light of day.

So now it turns out that an awful lot of my entries are about pregnancy -  but that's just because it was seemed like an interesting thing to talk about at the time. Unsurprisingly, quite a number of others are about sleep. I'm still trying to refine the tags to make it a more useful tool, so it's still a work in progress, but at least every entry has some sort of tag now. Anyway, let me know if you have any opinions on the tag cloud - if you think it's useful/interesting/a waste of space, whatever.

**********

When I brought Monkey to school this morning his classroom was sorely depleted - almost half the class were out with a rampaging stomach bug, and I can hear the ominous strings of the Jaws music creeping up behind me as I type, sure that he'll come down with it sooner or later. We've had a good run of luck not getting puking things recently, and it's bound to end eventually. It's not so much the illness I dread, as the cleanup.

Usually when we arrive at Monkey's school, Mabel doffs her coat, I wash her hands, and she dives straight into the playdough or heads off to the kitchen area to whisk up a nice little something for the babies, before it's time to leave the big kids to their activities unmolested by two-year-olds. Today Miss B (who is her new favourite person, having looked after her on Saturday evening while we went to a fundraiser) headed her off at the pass with the lure of plastic animals rampaging among wood blocks, and Mabel was soon holding forth on what exactly was going on between the lion, the panda, and the wild boar. Then she looked underneath the giraffe, and commented: "He has a penis, like a boy baby."

Miss B looked startled, as she gamely agreed. In the universal signal of pride, I breathed rapidly on the kuckles of my right hand - hah - and polished them on my chest. That's my girl, letting no penis go uncommented upon.

Incidentally, if anyone knows where this gesture originated, I'd love to hear it.

Administrative issues

[Update: Okay, so it might take a couple of tries to get this to work the way I want it to. If you already clicked the button, but it looks as if you didn't, go ahead and click it again. If you like. Not that I want to pressure you into anything. But I had to reinstall it and it's gone back from 15 lovely people to 0 and I'm a bit sad about that...]

I am, I admit, a teensy bit addicted to Facebook. It began innocently enough, a couple of Novembers ago when we were trying to catch up with people we might see at home over Christmas, and a friend who is somewhat more on the cutting edge of technology than we are - I'm more trailing-after-the-bandwagon-still-considering-things than early-adopter - said thst B and I should get on Facebook to make it easier to keep up with friends. Before then I had assumed that FB was much like MySpace - something for the Young People and the Music People and People Who Were Not Me.

But then it turned out that Facebook was full of people who were me, or at least very like me in many respects. Since that time, of course, it's all gone to hell in a handbasket and people like my aged uncles and uncles-in-law are on it too, which I think might be going a bit too far when I remember who may have just read my thrilling update about an underwire having gone bendy in the dryer again. I try to maintain a respectful division of generations and I don't go round searching for nieces and nephews to befriend, but if one extends an invitation to me, I won't be rude and refuse. (Although I reserve the right to hide their updates, especially if they're overwhelmingly about Manchester United.)

Anyway, these days I spend far too much time obsessively refreshing to see if anyone has done anything interesting, or refining my bons mots and aphorisms (and petits fours and whatnot) in the hopes of igniting empathetic comment and witty discourse among my followers. I mean, friends. I mean, friends and "friends".

So, you might observe, if you're a particularly noticing sort of person, a new button over there on the right. I hope you're not offended by it. (If you are, look away again. Just pretend it's not there.) I just thought it might be nice to have a quick way for people to interact without having to comment, and a handy method of sending a link straight to anyone who might be interested in reading a new update. If you "like" the blog but don't want the updates, you can always hide them and I'll be none the wiser.

So go on, have a wee click there.

Don't panic

It's still me. I'm just experimenting with a different template, that's all. It might stay like this for another year, or it might look subtly (or totally) different over the next few days. But nothing else has changed. I still love you.

So long as you know where your towel is, you'll be fine.

Desperately seeking a sense of perspective

Or, how not to step away from the Facebook:

One day, after careful consideration, you may decide that world domination by blog is too slow in coming and that it's time to expand your readership a tiny bit. So you think you might use the privacy controls you've recently discovered in Facebook to send the link to a few carefully selected friends - just the ones who might possibly be interested in your parental ravings, and not, by any means, the ones who are your nephews and nieces or aged uncles or ex-co-workers whose friend requests you felt too guilty to turn down. Those people do not need to know about the current deployment of your boobs, which apparently is all you blog about these days.

So you carefully click on the Make Group link in the sidebar, and slowly, deliberatingly, you compile a list of those friends you think might possibly, some day, be people who might not mind being told about your blog. You run your mind over all your blog entries to make sure you haven't inadvertently insulted any of these people in a blog post at some point in the last five years.

There. You've made a group. Hmm.

Then, just as you're wondering how you do the next thing, you get an e-mail from one of those people saying she saw you put her in a group about your blog, and what's its address please?

You panic, thusly: Shite. Not a group, it should have been a list. How do I delete a group? Here? Here? Did everyone get a notification that I put them in a group called "People I might tell about my blog" or something? Now will they all get a notification telling them that I just removed them from a group called "People I might tell about my blog"? Arrgh.

You delete the group and post a hasty general update about how people shouldn't mix up groups and lists. Silly old you. Silly old Facebook. Ha ha ha.

So you take a deep breath, go back to the start, and make a list instead. You select the same people as before and put them on a list of your own. You go to your update box and type a carefully worded self-deprecating introduction to your blog and add the link. Your four-year-old wanders in looking for a cookie just as you press Share.

And you realise that you just shared that link with all 135 of your closest Facebook buddies.

You hyperventilate, remark calmly to the child that you've done something silly, and grope wildly (if you can grope with a trackpad) for the tiny x that brings relief. You click the tiny x and see the blessed words "Delete this update?" appear, to which you click in the affirmative. You look in vain for the "Turn back time so this never happened at all" button. You wonder how many of your friends were watching their Facebook news feed at just that moment, and what exactly they saw, and how long it persists for. The four-year-old continues to ask for a cookie.

Finally, you have managed to (a) give him a damn cookie, (b) retype the self-deprecating introduction, and (c) send the update only to the people on your list. You make another cup of tea to help the shakes dissipate. You are not cut out for a position of high-pressure and time-sensitive computer finagling.

And then you potter about updating your profile and blithely adding "Blogging" to your interests. All 135 of your friends are told that you have just done this, and at least one of them immediately comments to ask where they can find your blog.

You rest your head on the table and try to remember that this isn't nearly as big a deal as you think it is.

Metatember

I'm doing pretty well, this month. Compare, if you will, my 16 posts in 18 days of September with my pathetic showing in 2007 of 4 posts for the entire year. (I was busy having a one-year-old, or something. Lay off.)

I'm sort of practising for NaNoBloMo, which is when bloggy people try to write a blog post every day of the month of November. You get a sticker or something, if you manage it. I think they have to be real posts, not just knock-knock jokes or something (unless that was, in fact, the theme of your blog, I suppose), but I think you're probably on your honour to do it right if you're doing it at all.

But I feel a bit like the bloke in the other joke. The one where there's a competition in the pub to see who can down ten pints in one go, and he says, "Hang on a minute," and comes back five minutes later, sits down, and aces the contest. They ask him where he went, and he says he popped to the pub next door and had a quick ten there to make sure he could do it. (Obviously, he was in Ireland, where the idea of another pub next door is perfectly reasonable.)

So I hope I haven't used up all my words by the time November comes around.