cool beans

• Change the template, even if it’s just back to the swirling dots for now.
• Write about the wonder of cloth diapers.
• Respond to comments and email.
• Dig into the Bloggers’ Review package (which is HUGE!? If you didn’t sign up for this, go beg to be included. It is so enormous!) from Boca Java and get busy grinding beans and reviewing coffee.
• Catch up with my regular reads.
• Write about feeling better, stronger, empowered and happy.

The Canadians are a curious bunch.

Mike asked a bunch of questions regarding my employment and now Jamie asks:

I need to know about crafts. What sorts of craft type things do you do? Knit, crochet? scrapbook? Podging the cats? Do tell!

I don’t knit - yet. Learning to knit is on my list of things to do. It was a New Year’s resolution two years in a row and still, I’m not getting anywhere. I think part of the problem is that I don’t know anyone locally (you know, in real life) who knows how to knit, so I can’t get hands-on help. My mother and grandmother crochet and make lovely blankets. Recently, my mother crocheted a poncho for my daughter and my grandmother keeps herself busy making lap throws from scrap yarn for chemo patients at the local cancer center. Afghans are pretty and warm and when they’re made of scrap yarn, we all fight over them.

I can’t scrapbook because I don’t have the ability to keep myself organized and I’m terrible at making decisions. If I were able to decide I wanted to use X, Y, & Z for a layout, I wouldn’t be able to find all the pieces. The bigger problem for me when it comes to crafts? I don’t like having works in progress. It nags at me and drives me insane. If I can start and finish something at one sitting, I’m all for it. Otherwise. GAH! Can’t stand it.

What is podging the cats? Huh? Is this a crafter’s inside joke? I’m allergic to cats, if that helps.

And I would like to know more about cloth diapers! What kind do you use? Is the toddler in daycare? How does that work?? There really is something about a clean load of cloth diapers, isn’t there?

This deserves its own post for an answer, so I will try to be brief today. I use prefolds and flats and Snappi fitteds. Boring, basic, non-fancy pants. I’ve had two different daycare providers since we switched to cloth. Both sitters were happy to use cloth. Folding clean diapers is relaxing for me. Looking at a clothesline full of diapers is ridiculously pleasing. Because I’m a nerd!

This doesn’t mean I’m not still open to questions. I’ll entertain more if there’s something you’re itchin’ to know.

You can file this under ADDICTION.

If anyone recorded tonight’s episode of “24″ and would like to SEND IT HERE IMMEDIATELY, lemme know. The marriage you save might be my own. Muchas gracias.

The school carnival is done. The zoo trip was successful. I started the paperwork for enrolling my kids in our dayschool. The begging for tuition assistance has commenced. The cold or allergy issue I woke up with Sunday seems to have peaked this afternoon and might be getting better. Now I’m working on getting to bed at a decent hour. But first, Mike asks:

Do you… routinely work with power tools?
No. But I worked in a hardware store for a little under a year and used a DeWalt cordless drill (with features I could have rattled off to you way back when) on a regular basis. One day, I talked a customer into buying that same model as a gift for his father. Then I realized the display model was the only one left. I’d done such a good job selling the drill, he took the display. When it comes to talking people into things, I AM POWERFUL. Because of that job, I can also assemble chainsaws and drill presses.

Do you… find yourself around wet house pets on a daily basis at your place of employment?
There are no pets at my place of employment and even thinking about how to answer that made me feel dirty. This seems like a good place to share a fact about me that will surely show up on a 100 Things About Me list if I ever do one: I am allergic to cats. And sheep. Baa.

Do you… find yourself going from office to office delivering goods which do not belong to you, but rather are sent from other third parties?
Sometimes, but office to office in the same building. Not office to office via a big brown truck.

Do you… wonder how many people’s mouths you’ve had your hands in, on any given day?
Yes, but this it totally unrelated to what I do for a paycheck in the daytime hours. Muaahahhhahhahhahhaa!

I suppose this is a good time to open myself up to interrogation. What would you like to know?

1. The air conditioner at work finally kicked in and made wearing this light-weight sweater worthwhile.
2. The sun is shining!
3. We don’t have plans for this evening. Relaxation is right around the corner.

The Sarcastic Journalist wrote about being “out there” and asked her readers how much they share about themselves. She wondered how they determine what to talk about and how much to talk about it. Like herself and some of her commenters, I don’t have a lot of hard and fast rules about what I do and don’t say here. I generally decide as I’m writing and editing. Over time, I’ve found I’m comfortable following some basic guidelines regarding our identity, my husband and children, and my job.

When I started cool beans, my husband and I talked about how much we were comfortable sharing with the World Wide Web. My main question to him was, “Should we use names or pictures?” I wanted to use one or the other because I thought it would make readers more comfortable, more at home. It would allow you to put a name or a face with the people I’m talking about. We decided pictures would be okay but names were something we weren’t comfortable sharing. Mostly, we thought names would make us searchable and therefore findable. Pictures are a bit harder to Google.

So for a while, I had three tiny pictures of my kids’ faces on this page. At first, you had to scroll nearly to the bottom. For a short time after that, they were the header in my layout. Then, something creepy happened and I removed the pictures and renamed several images in my Photobucket accounts. I don’t know that anyone lifted the few tiny pictures I had on this site, but I didn’t want to wonder. I didn’t want that “What if?” knocking around inside my skull.

I’ve written about a fight with my husband and it’s still there in my archives somewhere. When I sift through the things I’ve written and I happen upon that piece, I don’t like how I sound. I don’t like the mental image of myself that gets painted in my head. That feeling stops me from writing about every little thing he does that drives me crazy. Also, he reads this website at my insistence. So I should probably be nice to him, huh? It is also better for my marriage if I learn to work these things out with him rather than running my fool mouth off at everybody else. Because what are you going to do about it? And I certainly don’t want to open him up to abusive trolls. He can get his own blog if he wants that.

Recently, I read a Leah Peah interview where Alice discussed writing about her child. I can’t say it better than she did, so I’ll quote her…

I try not to make the blog about Henry as much as it is about my experience of Henry.

To read that was liberating, in a way. I want to write about my kids because they are important to me and a lot of what I do involves them. But I don’t want to write about my kids in a way that would make them very angry with me later. I’m sure I’ve crossed that line in the past, but I am now conscious of it. Aware of it in a way I wasn’t before because while the idea was there, the structure necessary for formulating a plan or a rule was lacking.

Of course, I’m saying that very soon after writing about discussing puberty with my son. But I hope that I wrote that enough from my angle, through my lens and with compassion for his discomfort so that he would be okay with it if he were to read it as an adult. I think I did. I think I got it right. But just like the conversation about body changes itself - I probably won’t know if I did a good job until years from now. It’s one of those things we parents have to tuck away in our hope-I-didn’t-screw-this-up-too-much chests.

Aside from those things, I don’t publish our names or our location simply because I want to avoid surprise visits from people I know. I want to be in charge of that as much as possible. Keeping my name and state out of my text and comments allows me to feel I have some control. Some of you know where I am, either because I told you or because you’re not stupid. I’m okay with that because I can see you, too. Except for someone in California. It’s killing me. Comment or e-mail me, please. I just want to say hi! Or enable javascript, maybe? Pretty please?

The other thing I don’t do is write a lot of specific stuff about work. Partly it’s because I don’t want to get fired. If I have to work (and I do), I want to work where I work. But a bigger part of that is this: What I do to pay the bills doesn’t define me. I’m not a teacher or a lawyer or a doctor or a nurse or something else that I believe would be a big part of my identity. I go to work, I do my job, I go home. Some funny things happen at work and some NOT FUNNY AT ALL things happen that would be fun to write and read about. But I am confident that I can leave that out of my blog and you will still have a very clear picture of who I am and what I’m about and that you love me to teensy little bits and pieces.

______________________

Just before I hit “Send”, I remembered Mike wrote about this same topic here a few weeks ago. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re wondering how other people come to different conclusions or if you’re trying to decide for yourself. Or if you just really like Canadians. \m/

This week, my son told me, “Mom, my teacher sent home a note and you have to read it and sign it. It is important but I don’t know what it says because she told us not to read it.”

Stupidly, I assumed it was a note telling us some of the kids had been caught playing with knives, getting high, selling guns, making meth, or producing porn. Or something minor like that. What I read caused my jaw to drop to the floor with a ker-klunk because I wasn’t prepared for this note.

It was THE NOTE that gives the school permission to tell your child all about: “The New Improved Me: Understanding Body Changes”.

I started to chuckle at my initial reaction because really, this is no big deal. Except, it is a big deal if you are eleven and girls are icky and seeing women in bathing suits on the television is one of the grossest things that ever happens to you. It’s a big deal if you know that hair will someday pop out of your face, armpits and chest, but not if you didn’t realize it also grows there. But not exactly there and now you’re hearing your mother say “balls” and she’s not talking sports. It’s also a big deal if you’re the mom and when you said, “I want a baby. We should have a baby.” you kind of thought you’d be cuddling and nursing and cooing and playing peek-a-boo for eighteen years. You’re not thinking this far in advance. (Are you? Because if you’re currently making little children and you’ve already got this base covered, shut up. We aren’t friends. You might be able to make it up to me by buying some coffee.)

He asked if I was signing the note and if I was going to “make” him watch the video. I told him he didn’t have to, but that I thought he should. It might explain things better than I could and that he might be disappointed if I didn’t sign it and then he had to do something else while his classmates watched the video. So he said okay, but his nose was all wrinkled up in that “Oh this is really disgusting” way.

Then he had questions. “I want to be prepared, Mom.” I stood in my kitchen trying to imagine what the video would cover. Would they watch the girls’ portion of the video? Probably, so I mentioned breasts and periods and had to answer, “What’s a period? NO, wait. Don’t tell me. Is it gross? Okay. Tell me. NO! DON’T.” But I did tell him. I was happy to because I know how to explain that. But what do they tell boys? I knew they’d talk about hair and voice changes and maybe starting to like girls. Then I took a guess and tried to explain wet dreams. Holy crap, that’s not easy. Stop for a second and imagine how to describe that to your completely squicked-out son.

It is freaking impossible to be all smooth and shit if you’re going in unprepared! “No, it’s not pee, exactly. Do you know what sperm are? It’s the stuff that carries the sperm. It’s thicker. It’s like…watery silly putty? I think. Maybe they won’t even talk about that. But when it happens, YOU WILL KNOW. I promise.”

The next day I Googled the video title and found the company’s website. I was pleased that I covered most of what he’d see on the video. But then I saw there are two versions. One that mentions masturbation and says it’s normal and another version that doesn’t mention it at all.

Since he wanted to be prepared, I had to know if I needed to mention it. Not because I’m opposed to mentioning it and deeming it natural, but because my son would have flipped his lid if I didn’t tell him they were going to talk about that. So I called the school nurse. She said they use the version without mention (which is what I assumed and had secretly prayed for.) She also said they’d see drawings of The Bits. So last night I told my son they’d see pictures - not photographs, just drawings. And then he made that face again. I said, “I want you to try to remember it’s your body. Just like your lungs or your circulatory system. It’s a part of your body and it’s normal.” At that point, his younger sister walked in the room and said, “What’s normal?” To which I replied, “Your elbow. Your elbow is a perfectly normal part of your body.”

To my disbelief and to my son’s intense amusement, she said, “Oh.” and went on her merry way.

Thank God.