Dear LiveJournal…

We have to talk. I think it’s time I moved on.

We’ve had some great times, you and I. I still love my layout and I love my friends page. You’ve been good to me, but I don’t want to get into that too much because I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.

The thing is, I don’t like the way you handle comments. Not everyone who reads my blog wants to create an LJ userid and log in to leave me a message. I want other people to be able to leave me links to their blogs, so I can go and read them. And you just aren’t meeting my needs in this area.

So I’ve decided. It’s for sure. I need to find a new home.

But we’ll always be friends. I’ll be back for commenting. I hope things won’t be awkward between us.

I’ll be moving out as soon as I find a new place.

Love,
TurtleHead

Dear WordPress…

You’re cute and you have a nice package. I like the fact that I can import my old LJ posts. I like the fact that I could buy my own URL someday and have it redirect to you. I like the fact that I can create stand alone pages to go with my blog, like an “about” page and an “I love turtles!” page. I think you’ve been responsive to my flirting and we could really click.

But sadly, you won’t let me have TurtleHead as a blog name, even though no one currently has that blog name — someone is just using “turtlehead” as their log-in name, so you’ve reserved it. And you don’t allow dashes or underscores or anything, so I can’t even have Turtle-Head or Turtle_Head or anything like that.

I am annoyed.

I’m going to take your offer of a second date under consideration.

Love,
TurtleHead17

Dear Blogger…

Seems like everyone is partying over at your place and I could really pick up some swinging cool buddies over there. But again, you won’t let me have TurtleHead, even though it is owned by some guy who made ONE test post, back in two thousand and THREE. Which SUCKS.

Plus, you want to tie my blog to my gmail account, which means I either have to publish and reveal the gmail account that is my own first and last name — meaning my mother will find this blog — or I have to use my SnowBelly account, which is troublesome because when I log in as SnowBelly I can no longer view my Google calendar in a different tab, which I update about 20 times a day, so I’ll constantly be logging out and logging in and hell, if I wanted to log in all the time I may as well stay with LJ.

So I’m thinking it over, but don’t wait up for me.

Love,
SnowBelly

Dear TypePad…

Why oh why would I spend $150, US, per year to have a blog, when I can have one for free on several other sites?

What’s that? You say I could have…TurtleHead?

Interesting. Let’s meet for coffee.

Love,
TurtleHead

Last night we had pancakes for dinner, as we do every other Tuesday.

(I was going to use the word “biweekly” in there but I’m never sure — does “biweekly” mean once every other week, or twice a week? English is so hard.)

When it’s pancake night, we always have a wide variety of fruit on the side. I like to have at least four or five different fruits, even in winter. I like to have at least one fruit that is unusual and new and challenges the kids to expand their food horizons.

They always stick exclusively to the apples and grapes, though. Sometimes the pineapple will go. But watermelon and mango and kiwi are just too weird. And strawberries? Just try getting that crap past them. They’re on to you! They can tell just by looking that strawberries are like to rat poo!

Nice try, Mom.

At last night’s meal we had bananas, grapes, strawberries, mango, and raspberries. The older two were having…grapes.

Meanwhile I had a nice fruit assortment on my own plate and had just tucked in when I heard a little “Ah, ah, ah” sort of cooing from the high chair.

The Wee One was looking at me with an expectant look like, “Excuse me, but what is that bit of deliciousness that you thought you were going to keep all to yourself?”

And I said, “This is a raspberry. RAZZZZZZZberry. Do you want one?”

And she was all, “Do I look adorable in a teeny yellow raincoat and jeans? YOU KNOW IT.”

So I gave her a raspberry, and she bit into it, and squealed with joy. She also apparently loves mango. And bananas.

Oh, and strawberries. Yummiest food ever.

Where did we get this one? If she didn’t look exactly like the other two, I’d be worried about a hospital switcheroo.

Last week in the blogosphere there was a minor uproar about blogging about your kids. Heather Armstrong (“The Dooce Lady”, as she is known in our house) was on the Today show, and Kathie Lee Gifford implied that Heather’s writing about her daughter Leta was perhaps dangerous and perhaps exploitative and perhaps an invasion of privacy. Heather did not get any chance at all to defend herself due to time constraints and Kathie’s blathering, and so Mommy Bloggers Of The World got mad, and blogged about it.

I swore I wasn’t going to write about it because I thought it was a whole lot of fuss about nothing. Who cares what Kathie Lee — self-proclaimed computer hater — thinks?

But this week I found myself thinking about the whole privacy thing a lot more, because Captain Jelly Belly wrote a book.

His very own book. The front cover says right on it, “Written by Captain Jelly Belly, Illustrated by Captain Jelly Belly.”

The Captain is extremely proud of his book. He even gave up his traditional pre-bed round of Mario Party to work on it the other night. Once it was finished he read it to me, then to Sir Monkeypants. Then he put it in his backpack so he could take it to school and read it to his teacher.

I really, really wanted to blog about this book. I was so crazy proud of him and happy for him, to see him feel so excited about a project and so accomplished (he thought maybe they would want his book for the library, but I told him I could never part with it). I love him so much and seeing his eyes shine with joy that his teacher gave him a sticker for his good work on his book made my heart just about burst.

But in there with the pride and the joy and the overwhelming love…there is also hilarity. Oh yes. And there’s no way I could include page-by-page photos of the book — entitled, “Don’t Be Sad If You Lose Something” — without getting a giggle or two out of you. Admit it, you’d just love to see a drawing of me, trapped in a tornado with a microwave, wouldn’t you? And that’s not even rock bottom for the protagonist, not by a long shot.

The more I thought about blogging the book, however — the more I wrote a humorous page-by-page commentary in my head — the more I worried about the possible effects on the Captain. It would really make for a great post, but I just could not stand the idea that he would ever, ever, EVER think that I was laughing at him. ESPECIALLY about something so incredibly important to him. ESPECIALLY about something that I love, too, that I really, honestly feel so proud of him for producing.

I want him to know that I’ll always be a completely supportive and proud audience for his endeavors. That I’m always in his corner. And it killed me to think that someday, he’d read this blog and be so hurt that I made light of something so meaningful for him.

So I won’t be writing about it in detail here, I don’t think.

I always imagined that this blog would be a fun thing for my kids to read in the future. That one day, they’d be adults and they’d stumble upon it and they’d be curious to read my thoughts on being their mom. That they’d enjoy reading funny little stories about them as children. That they’d be happy that I had recorded our every day lives with such detail.

This book incident, combined with the Kathie Lee incident, was the first time I’d ever stopped to think that maybe one day they’ll just feel bitter and angry that I told the world about that time that they had trouble learning to poop in the potty.

Imagine how mad they’re going to be when I pull out the best of my blog posts to read at their weddings.

Anyway, I don’t intend to stop blogging or anything like that. More than anything else, I want to preserve certain magical and amusing and endearing things about my kids for my own memory, so I can look back with fondness and love and sentimentality. Already, if I have to look back in the archives to link to an old post, I find myself engrossed in reading about them, unable to stop, chuckling and getting a little teary eyed and desperately wanting to find them and hug them tight wherever they are or whatever they are doing. So it’s a good thing, this blog.

But I guess I’ve discovered that there is a limit, a boundary that I’ll be keeping. Because I love my kids, but I also respect them, and I want them to know it.

Future Captain Jelly Belly, who can read? I hope you know how much Mommy loves you. And your book. I’d definitely be sad if I ever lost you.

Andrea at QuietFish made an innocent little post yesterday about possibly getting rid of their extended cable TV, because it’s very expensive. Lots of people commented, almost universally to say that they either do not have cable and are living fuller, deeper lives for it, or that they have cable but meh, could totally live without it.

I was going to comment to say that we are slaves to our TV, but I felt myself getting INSANE, so I had to delete it. I thought I’d rant over here instead.

I recognise that TV is my personal hot-button issue, as a mom. I’ve noticed over the years — here’s a piece of wisdom for you soon-to-be moms — that it is so, so easy to offend another mother with a seemingly innocuous remark. Mothers have a real need to feel that they are doing a good job of raising their kids, that they are making the right choices, and anything that remotely smells of criticism will get you kicked out of playgroup with lightning speed. Every mom has their own little thing that will get their back up against the wall right away. For me, it’s TV. There’s nothing that pisses me off more, makes me feel more like a crap mom, makes me want to punch something and then run away to Jamaica, than other mother saying smugly, “We don’t let our kids watch TV.”

GRRRRRR.

We get well over a hundred channels, on satelite. I’m not always proud of this, but our kids watch plenty of TV. Probably in the range of two hours per day, I’d say. I don’t think I could maintain my sanity without it. A half-hour TV show gives my older two kids a half-hour of quiet time, calm time, time to stop hitting each other and to stop jumping on the couch. It gives me a half-hour to care for the baby or get ready for us to go out and do another activity or just to make dinner in peace.

At Christmas this year, we had dinner with some friends we don’t see very often. They were in Ottawa to visit their parents and their kids were glued to the TV which was showing…the news. I thought that was weird but my friend explained that her kids don’t get to watch TV at home, so they are excited when they go somewhere else that has a television.

I felt bad until further conversation revealed that they actually do have a TV, just no cable. And that her kids are allowed to watch DVDs. DVDs of shows like Lunar Jim and Wonderpets and Go Diego Do.

And I ask you, what the hell is the difference between that, and my kids watching those exact same shows on Treehouse? Treehouse — along with PBS, CBC, and TV-Ontario — offers hours of commercial-free, semi-educational programming for preschoolers all day long. My kids have a few favourite shows and that’s what they watch. We collect a few episodes of their favourites on our PVR so any time they want, they can sit down for a new Go Diego Go, or Wonderpets, or Lunar Jim. So the difference between their TV and other kids watching a video is…what, exactly?

We do try to use the TV responsibly. The kids watch mostly commercial free preschool programming (especially since the great failed American Gladiators experiment). They never turn on the TV by themselves — they don’t even know how to work the remote, except to pause the show so they can go to the bathroom. They’re only allowed to watch shows that I know, usually with me in the room. There’s a limit to how much they can watch in one sitting before they have to turn it off and get outside, or run around the house a bit.

I also try to use the TV they watch as a jumping off point for discussions and activities. The other day we were watching Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman — a science experiments show — and the kids on the show were testing various items to see which would float, and which would sink. That lead to a whole afternoon’s worth of at-home experimentation that made me feel pretty damn virtuous.

But I do not want to imply that I am all perfect mother all the time, so I will admit here that there are days when the Wee One has not slept, when I’m trying to make dinner with one hand while comforting a baby with the other, and Gal Smiley and Captain Jelly Belly are hungry and getting tired and thus are pushing and shoving and hating on one another…and on those days, the TV goes on and they watch whatever is on Treehouse for as long as they can stand it.

Those aren’t A+ days.

But we do survive them.

Before we had kids I thought I’d never use the TV as a babysitter, but I have to admit, there are times when it has done just that. Our days here are very long — especially in winter — and sometimes, there just isn’t anything left to do. We need a break from each other, the kids really need a break from each other, and watching a show gives us a nice, quiet, parallel activity during which we can all calm down and refocus and not strangle each other.

As for myself, I’d love to be able to say that I spend my evenings knitting booties for premature babies or raising money for the Third World or finding a cure for cancer. But I have three small children, and I still get up anywhere from once to four times a night, and I’m tired. So very tired. At the end of the day it’s all I can do to give the kitchen a half-hearted tidy, come up with a blog post, then collapse in front of some mindless entertainment for an hour before bed. I was a pop culture junkie before we ever had kids, and now that it’s so much harder to get out to movies and concerts and other events, the TV is my big excitement, my new hobby. It sounds sad I guess. But dammit, Lost is a good show. Watching Pushing Daisies filled me with delight. I love Don’t Forget The Lyrics (don’t judge me!).

There’s no way I could live without the TV, I know. So I’ll just sit over here, noisily grinding my teeth, standing up for all moms who deign to subscribe to Treehouse. Represent!

I am so very, very cranky this morning. It’s one of those days where I hover right on the edge of hysteria all day, I can tell. Every little thing is bugging me far out of proportion to the offense. Anyone who calls my house today trying to sell me something better WATCH OUT.

I really hate the fact that I never get any private bathroom time anymore. Someday I’d like to be able to shower and get dressed without being peppered with a million questions. “Why are you putting that on? What is that stuff? Can I have some? Why are you doing that? Why do you have big ones, and I only have small ones? Why do you have so much hair? Was that sound the sound of poo?” I feel desperately in need of a little personal space, so BACK OFF, kid.

I really hate the fact that our backyard is a total mess and we haven’t seen the patio guys in two weeks now. They lost the window of time they had set aside to finish up our patio due to the rain a few weeks back, and now they are tied up in other projects. We don’t know when they’ll have time to come back and finish our job. Even though we knew that was the deal when we hired them — they fit in jobs like ours around their main job, which is doing patios under contract for a pool company — we’re getting a little pissed. Actually, this morning, I am upgrading to a lot pissed. There’s tools and rebar and deep holes all over the backyard, which makes it very hard for the kids to play back there safely, which means we are stuck in the house every time the Wee One has a nap, and it may as well be wintertime for all the outdoor playing we are doing. All the crap all over is also making it impossible to take care of the lawn — we can’t cut it or fertilize or anything else.

And speaking of that, I really hate our lawn and all grass in general. Our lawn is a mess of weeds and bare patches and frankly, it looks like ass, but due to the patio work we can’t take any drastic steps right now. Personally I would like to rip it all out and then throw it against a wall and then stomp on it a bunch and then feed it through a wood chipper, and then pave over everything that used to be a dandelion field. But that’s probably just the bitchiness talking.

I really hate the fact that more than half the houses on our street now have pools, or are getting one this summer (three more going in on the street as we speak!). What the hell is this, Los Angeles? Actually, it’s not the pools themselves that I hate, it’s that I totally blame them for having standing water in the spring, which has led to there being approximately ONE BILLION mosquitoes on our street. The other night I walked out to get the mail from our Super! mailbox at dusk, and there were hundreds of mosquitoes swarming around my head. You probably think I am exaggerating but I am not — it was like a scene from The Birds only it would have been called The Mosquitoes. I was actually afraid to breathe because I thought for sure I would suck a few of them up into my nose, that’s how thick they were around my head. I’m trying to raise the kids not to have an irrational fear of bugs but I hate mosquitoes, they give me the heebie jeebies, and incidents like this do not help. On Wednesday I walked home from MyFriendJen’s house after book club, which is a distance of about six houses, and I got SIX mosquito bites in that time. Mosquitoes SUCK, and pools SUCK, and anyone else with standing water SUCKS.

At least it’s garbage day. And I have last night’s Don’t Forget The Lyrics on the PVR. Time to turn this day around.

I attended the Mother’s Day Tea at Gal Smiley’s preschool this morning. The kids sang songs and did a little dance, then presented us with a lovely gift, all while the moms were served tea or coffee, and cake. It was as sweet and adorable as you’d expect.

The funniest thing happened, though. These kids are all three years old — a handful of them have turned four already. During the little dance, one of the boys dropped his cell phone.

It was a real cell phone but I assume that it did not have service and was being used as a toy. Otherwise, I have moved beyond fogey and into Neanderthal Man territory.

Along a similar vein, tried to explain to the kids last week that when we were young, there was no Elmo on Sesame Street. No Elmo! The kids totally cannot understand that. Where was Elmo? Why wasn’t he born yet? Who did they get to host the Elmo’s World segment? Who would be best friends with Zoe?

When told them that Zoe wasn’t on the show either, it pretty much blew their minds.

And on another similar note, a couple of days ago I told Gal Smiley that when I was a little girl, my house had no computer. I realized as soon as it was out of my mouth that I sounded exactly like my own mother trying to make us believe that when she was little, her family did not have a TV. That’s just crazy! That’s so totally old school! Gal Smiley doesn’t really believe me, by the way. It’s so crazy to me that they’ll grow up in a world where the internet always existed and you’ve always been able to pause the TV when you need to pee.

News flash! I am old!

I like our neighbourhood, I really do. There’s lots of great families here and we’ve made some good friends, as have our children. It’s a friendly community where people wave hello to you as they pass you in their cars or stop to say hi and chat about the weather if you meet them while out walking — even if you’ve never actually met them before. People bring baked goods to new neighbours and get together for street parties and all that sort of thing.

So it’s totally incongruous, I think, that no one around here seems to engage in that age-old tradition of getting a fence in co-operation with your neighbours. Am I crazy, or did it used to be commonplace for people who got fences to chat about it with their neighbour first? Maybe decide on a style together, then split the cost? Invite some input, get together as a group of five or six houses to save money? Or at least give out a heads-up?

It seems that the thing to do, around here at least, is to just pick out a fence, then put it up all around your property, without asking first. To avoid having to ask, you can put it about three or four inches in from the property line. Then, it’s all on your property, and you’re paying for the whole thing, so your neighbours can just suck it, I guess.

This “three inches in” thing is so common that many properties have a six-inch dead zone between them, a narrow band between two completely different fences, where weeds grow and garbage collects. It’s ugly and a hotbed for allergy-causing plants. I really, really dislike the dead zones. It’s insane how many of them there are, too.

We have fencing on two sides of our backyard right now. Across the back we have a glaring white fence which we do not like and did not want. The guy who lived there two years ago — before the Princess Charming family moved in last summer — chose the fence and ordered the fence and made all the arrangements. Then he came by to “talk to us” one week before the fence went in, to ask us to pay for half of the back strip. We told him we wanted some input on what the fence was going to look like. He responded by — naturally — putting the fence three inches in from the property line, and putting up the fence he wanted anyway.

The good news is that after twenty years, we can claim that three inches as ours, because we’ve been the ones maintaining the grass on that side. So I guess, if he hadn’t have moved out of the country, I could go over there and tell him to suck that.

On the one side of the backyard we have a lovely beige fence that we picked out with the neighbours on that side, because we love them and they are reasonable and we both wanted each other to be happy, so we were easily able to find something we both liked.

Now we still have about 10 feet across the back to complete with a different backing neighbour, and then we have to put another strip of fence on the other side. We’ve been wanting to finish the fence for a while now, but the side neighbours just moved in six months ago, and we didn’t want to attack them with fence discussions. Like, “Hi! So nice to meet you! Here are some muffins, and hey, want to put up a fence so we never have to see you again?” That sort of thing seems unfriendly somehow.

But on the weekend, we came home from doing some shopping and hey, there are stakes on the side neighbour side! Outlining a fence! We like those people! We talk to those people! Were they ever going to mention this?

So goes over to ask them what’s up, and they said they’ve entertained a couple of quotes but still aren’t sure what they want. They’ll get back to us when they do know what they want.

Isn’t that a little late to be bringing us into their process? Is this going to be another, “We’ve picked out this, you can pay for half or else?” situation?

And just now, I was sitting with the kids having a snack when I glance out at the backyard and I see…our 10-foot back neighbours STAKING OUT A FENCE.

I’m sitting right here, people! I can see you! Are you going to tell us what the hell is going on? Anytime soon?

I fear that we are going to end up with four different kinds of fence all around our backyard. Which SO sucks, it will be SO ugly.

But I really, really don’t want to go out and get our own fence and then line the existing fence with our own PISS OFF WE DON’T WANT YOUR OPINION style of fencing, complete with dead zone all around.

BLURG!

We have good neighbours, we really do. So why can’t we make good fences?

The social interactions of five-year-old boys are very mysterious.

The other day I was walking with the kids to the park, and we had to pass by the house of Rocker, who is a boy in Captain Jelly Belly’s class. Rocker was in the backyard and saw us walk by his fence (he has a corner lot), and started to yell out, “Hi, Captain! Captain! Over here! Hi! Hi! Hi!”

The Captain just walked on by, looking around all, “Ho hum, nice day, I wonder what we’ll do at the park, and what is that weird yelling sound?”

So I said, “Um, don’t you want to say hi to your friend Rocker?”

The Captain turns around and casually, very quietly, says, “Oh, hi Rocker.” Then he continues walking like he’s Tom Cruise and a non-Scientologist was trying to catch his attention. No interest here, buddy! Move along!

On the way home from the park, Rocker had moved out to his front driveway. Again he rushes over to the Captain calling, “Hey, Captain! This is my house! Want to see what we’re doing? Want to play with us?”

And the Captain walks on by like he doesn’t even know the kid. I actually thought that I must have the wrong house, and this kid must be some random Joe who the Captain did not actually know at all, who just happened to correctly guess his name. So once we’d moved on I asked the Captain if he actually knew that boy, and what does the Captain say? “Oh yeah, that’s Rocker from my class.”

I felt terrible! Since when are we raising a snubber? Since when am I forced to describe my son by likening him to Tom Cruise?? We have a problem!

Today all the kids woke up really, really early, so we weren’t as rushed in the morning as usual. decided to walk with the Captain to school.

On the way they passed Rocker’s house. Rocker was already out on the road, walking on his way to school.

This time, Captain JB was all, “Hey! Hey Rocker! ROCKER!! Hi!!”

And Rocker was like, “Did you say something to me? Do I know you?”

So apparently, the Captain is nothing more than a normal five-year-old boy. And apparently, the proper way to greet a friend who is accosting you with HI! and HOW ARE YOU! is to ignore it, and pretend that it just never happened.

Who knew.

It’s almost 5 p.m. on Mother’s Day. Here’s what I’ve eaten so far.

• coffee with cream and sugar
• jam sweetheart cookies for breakfast
• a grilled cheese sandwich made with full-fat cheese
• half a bag of barbecue rice chips
• a glass of chocolate milk
• half a giant bag of cotton candy (for the love of GOD, will someone please pry the cotton candy from my hands before I go into a diabetic coma?)
• half a banana
• a Nutrigrain bar (sort of like a soft-shell PopTart)

It’s a very good thing I took the day off DietPower. I have a feeling my comments for the day might include, “Your daily sugar is trending far above target.”

I do the grocery shopping on Sunday mornings with the Wee One. I like to get to the Superstore right when it opens, at 8 a.m., so we can shop and get home in time for the Wee One’s morning nap.

Usually we have the place pretty much to ourselves.

This morning, when we arrived at 8:05 a.m., I noticed there was a decidedly unusual number of cars in the parking lot.

While I was loading the Wee One into a cart and getting my bags and list ready, at least ten different scruffy-looking men in baseball hats came out, each carrying nothing but one bunch of flowers or a potted plant.

Happy Mother’s Day!