The perfect postcard pic: “Wish You Were Here!”

Just back from two weeks visiting my parents. It was a great trip, with a little bit of everything that makes a wonderful holiday. A few day trips, a few quiet days in, some busy family visiting days and staying up late drinking wine together. Claire cut three molars in four days halfway through our trip, which meant that most of a week was spent nursing 24/7 and tending to a sick, feverish, sad toddler. But she’s over it now, and at least I had some extra hands around to help out.

Roll on, summertime!

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Our neighbourhood has a great tradition of giving away unwanted stuff on the boulevard, that scrap of grass in between the street and the sidewalk. All kinds of stuff appears and disappears on the street – appliances that need slight repairs, old clothes, mismatched kids toys and dog eared paperbacks. I love the community and karma aspects of this, and it never ceases to amaze me what people will pick up and take home.

In the past week, we have given away:
- a half-broken toaster, missing a handle and with only half the elements working (complete with a post-it note explaining all these things)
- a coat with cat pee on it (the cat pee appeared once it was put out, but still)
- a box full of random crappy plastic toys
- half a dozen old handbags
- a bottle sterilizer
- a broken electrical composter

One item remains stubbornly abandoned beside the sidewalk:

- a copy of the Walrus magazine with a huge picture of Stephen Harper on the cover.

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It never ceases to amaze me that babies can go from a tiny, wrinkled, slightly bruised newborn:

To a nearly-walking little person with the ability to communicate in invented language and gesture:

All in the space of only one year.

No wonder she looks proud of herself!

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family, journaling by michelle

1. Borax takes out breast milk stains. Like, totally and completely gets them out. Thank you to Kirsten for sharing this great tip with me.  My wardrobe has now retained eight t-shirts that were otherwise going to be binned.  There comes a point when I cannot bear wearing another item of clothing with a milk stain on it.

2. Yesterday I went without the internet at home ALL DAY LONG. This sounds like it shouldn’t be a major achievement, but it was pretty remarkable for me. This makes me think that perhaps I really do have some issues with internet addiction, and I am thinking about ways I can get it under control. Right after I finish this blog post, of course.

3. Some friends were talking about perfectionism while we were at the park today, and it got me thinking about the statement, “perfectionism is boring.” I think it’s true, for lots of different reasons.  What does it mean to be an imperfect parent?  I think this idea will evolve into a post of its own.

4. The sun has finally come out and I can feel summer coming. Bring it on, I say. Bring it on!

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I’ve been thinking a lot about earthquakes lately. I’m sure lots of people are thinking about earthquakes after all the recent rumbling and shifting that the earth’s crust has been doing. Living on a fault line doesn’t exactly help my earthquake anxiety either. So, as a way to alleviate my anxiety I have taught Beatrice what to do if an earthquake happens, and we have talked about what it would be like, where to go and what to do. The day before yesterday we did an earthquake drill – a spontaneous one. I saw Beatrice with a funny look on her face and when I asked her what was up she replied, “I’m pretending there is an earthquake!” So we pretended there was an earthquake together, and ran to hide beneath the oak dining table and imagined everything rattling around. I think about earthquakes just about every day. I suppose now that swine flu has blown over my anxiety needs something to fix itself onto.

Anyway, amidst all my thoughts of crisis and emergency, in between wondering where we might be when the big one hits, life continues on. Seedlings sprout, bumblebees bumble by on their way to pollinate the blueberry bush and the apple blossoms. Beatrice plays outside in the garden, picking little white sorrel flowers and arranging them into plastic ice cube trays. The sun shines, the earth remains still and silent beneath our feet.

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first beach day of the year
sandy toes
sunburned neck
naked kids running around
laughing and shouting
time stretching out like taffy

hello, summertime

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With the launch of The Parent Vortex I have discovered many new things! Behold my new discoveries gleaned by incessantly trawling the interwebs in order to learn about how to blog in the public eye:

- Gravatar is a free service that gives you a globally recognized avatar, so no matter what kind of blog you’re commenting on it will show your lovely mug. This makes commenters more recognizable, saves everyone the hassle of creating a billion user profiles on a billion different blogs, and it is easy and straightforward to add more pictures or more associated emails.
-Google Analytics is also free, gives you shiny lovely graphs and pie charts to display your blog stats, and integrates seamlessly with Google AdSense. I still like and use Statcounter, which is also free, easy to use and seems to be a bit more up to the minute on the stats.
- The boggling array of WordPress themes, both free and paid. There’s lots more than you see in the default Themes folder! Astounding!
- Twitter is way more useful when used with a focus in mind. Also more addictive, educational, social and yet still kind of banal.
- The somewhat seedy world of blog monetization and affiliate marketing. I’m still just dipping my toes in here, but there’s sure a lot of ways to make (next to) nothing on your blog.
- URL shorteners like bit.ly track the stats for your shortened links, letting you see when they’ve been retweeted and passed on from user to user. Nifty!

As someone who’s been blogging for ten years now I feel somewhat like a kid who’s just come out of hiding in my room to discover a huge party in my house. Blogs are massive. Twitter is massive. And hey, it’s kind of fun heading out into that party and grabbing a margarita.

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nuts and bolts by michelle

I went spelunking.

Today, I read that post and didn’t remember those dreams. I do remember that trip into the caves, though, and it was just as magical as I described it.

That magic and wonder – I wish I could have a little more of it in my life right now. I don’t want to sound miserable and ungrateful, because I’m really not. I do love parenting and I believe that I’m on the path I am meant to travel, but right now my days are so much more about preventing Claire from chewing on the toilet brush and reading entire Magic Tree House books from cover to cover for Beatrice than they are about exploring my own uncharted territories. Perhaps this is inevitable: this is adulthood. If I wasn’t at home with the girls I would be slogging through the daily grind at a job. Or this is just life with small children, and the space and time for my own adventures will open up again in a few years. Or perhaps everything in life has a season, and the season for carefree adventures has passed. Now I really do care, and I have to make sure everyone is wearing their mittens and wellies and isn’t eating any small, inedible objects, such as hair elastics, old dirty stickers or cat food.

In any case, I think I might go back and read some of my archives, just for the fun of it. Pretty soon there will be ten years of content there. TEN! That makes me some kind of ancient, largely undiscovered cave-dwelling blogger, I think. I’d like to go speluking again.

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self-analysis by michelle

For those of you who get clearbluecup updates via RSS, what syndication tools do you use? Have you had problems getting my RSS feed to work properly?

I suspect there might be problems but I have no idea how wide-ranging they are.. : /

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