I believe that if one always looked at the skies, buy one would end up with wings.
-- Gustave Flaubert
(Or an aching neck, but whatever. His point is still well-taken.)...
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26
Jul
I take a lot of photos of my kids. A lot of photos of my kids. More than I know what to do with. More than I can fit on my blog or in a Twitter stream or on my Facebook page or even in a good old fashioned hold-in-your-hands photo album. My life is, to borrow from Intel’s wonderful tag line, a truly visual life. (I put this mom to shame. Seriously. I’ve never cried over missed photo opps, but that’s mostly because I never miss a photo opp.)
And ever since I discovered Instagram I’ve been taking even more. I didn’t think that it was possible to live more visually than I already was, but it is. It’s totally possible, and then some.
I think that it's important that you all know that when I shot this video, the plumber was just up the stairs finishing the installation of our new bathtub. That I was not remotely...
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23
Jul
For a long time, I used a diaper bag for everything. It was a pretty cool diaper bag, one that cost way too much money – like, designer-handbag-too-much-money – and I figured, if I spent half a mortgage payment on one bag, I’d damn well better use it. So I did. I used it for diapers, of course, and wipes and snacks and toys and the like, but also for my camera and for my laptop. Diaper bags, as you know if you’ve every used one, come really well-padded and are virtually indestructible, which are exactly the qualities that you want in a gear bag as well. And seeing as most gear bags aren’t as pretty as some contemporary – pricey – diaper bags, well, might as well go for the diaper bag. My friend and fellow Intel advisor Shalini does this too, because it just makes sense (great minds, etc, etc.)
22
Jul
So we’re headed out to the backwoods again, because we love peace and quiet and mosquitoes and space for our feral offspring to run around just that much. Any last minute advice on how to kill bears, catch fish with one’s hands, get the conch away from the tyrannical preschooler, etc, etc, would be much appreciated.
Oh, and e-reader recommendations. I am totally taking my Kobo this time – risk of e-reader drowning be damned – and I need to know what to fill my library with. Nothing featuring forest-dwelling maniacs, please, or anything by Jon Krakauer. Although maybe a witty survivalist manual might come in handy. Are survivalists capable of wit? YOU SEE THE THINGS THAT I WORRY ABOUT.
I’m generally not a fan of mashed up hybrid neologisms; you know, those words that are created out of two unrelated words, like ‘freegan’ and ‘Brangelina.’ But in some cases, they can be useful – fun, even – inasmuch as they allow us to describe something for which there hasn’t previously been a proper name. ‘Mompreneur’ is one such word. The thing about a word like ‘mompreneur’, though, is that its use needs to be appropriate and relevant to what it’s describing, otherwise it very quickly becomes ridiculous.
So when is it okay to use the word ‘mompreneur,’ and when is it not?
So, remember how I got new glasses, and then freaked out a little bit, because, hell, they totally changed the look of my face? I'm over that now. I love my glasses. So much,...
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The other week, we went camping. Like, in the woods, which is where you expect to go camping, except that this was really in the woods, the kind of ‘in the woods’ that you only get if you get in a canoe and paddle for two hours. Yes, we did this with two children under five. Yes, we’re crazy.
The craziest thing about the whole exercise was not, however, the fact that we wandered into the woods with our wee rabid honey badgers (the biggest concern there being, of course, that they’d recognize their true home in the wild and revert to their feral natures and overpower us. That was a very real possibility, do not doubt.) No, the craziest – the totally batshit crazypants craziest – thing was that the whole exercise required us to go more or less completely off the grid. There are, after all, no electrical outlets in the wild, no charging stations, and certainly no WiFi. There was, if we paddled out to the middle of the lake, a faint 3G signal, but that required taking electronics out onto open water, and iPhones, as we all know, don’t swim. So, yeah. We were unplugged.
What follows is part of a post from a few months ago. Read to the bottom and you’ll see why I’ve reposted it. IT WAS THE BIRTH OF SOMETHING. SORT OF.
Here’s something that you might not know about me: I’m a professional blogger. A professional mom-blogger. Which is to say, I earn a living – a good one – from the business that I’ve established around this blog that deals primarily in discussions related to motherhood and parenting and – I should warn you, this will be the first of many words that some consider unladylike – the brand that is associated with this blog.