My friend (hi, E!) posted about Jessica McClintock shuttering her business, and I was mentally transported back to 1987 when a certain little girl (who would be me) stood before the congregation as a Bat Mitzvah wearing the most exquisite Jessica McClintock dress in the whole world.  It had a full pink skirt with a crinoline to make it stick out a bit. (One needed to be careful with said crinoline that it didn’t get tucked into the back of your tights after you went to the bathroom, creating a bubble of mesh across your bum.)  And white lace over the pink top.  It was the embodiment of innocence.  I loved that dress hardcore.  I felt like a princess in it.  Even though I sat with my legs open on the bimah.  Such a lady.

There were other Jessica McClintock dresses, but that one is still my favourite.

I went to a Bar Mitzvah last year and was stunned by the clothes.  As Josh commented, there was more material in the sleeves of some of the dresses we wore to Bar Mitzvahs than these kids were wearing over their whole body.  I somewhat live in fear of dress clothes when the ChickieNob grows up.  It is easy to find modest, everyday clothing in mainstream stores.  LL Bean swim suits, for the most part, cover the body.  Their t-shirts are not cropped to reveal preteen belly.  Gymboree clothes look as if they were made for a child.  I feel confident that I have choices when it comes to casual day-to-day stuff.

But dress clothes?  That’s a different story.  Spaghetti straps for toddlers?  Black spandex contraptions for tweens?  I haven’t deeply explored the world of dress clothes, but at first glance, I’m fairly nervous about how we’ll get through Bat Mitzvah season with bodies somewhat covered.  I’m not asking for a lot.  Just kids looking like kids until they’re not kids anymore.

So I’m sad to see Jessica McClintock go.   At least, the Jessica McClintock of the 1980s.  Those big, puffy marshmallow sleeves!  And lace, lace, lace.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Dear Infertile Friends” (Where the *Bleep* is Our Stork?)
• “A Love Project” (Where the *Bleep* is Our Stork?)
• “Remembering the 1 Samuel 1 Woman this Mother’s Day” (Waiting for Baby Bird)
• “Friendship 101” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Constant in the Darkness has an amazing post about the insecurities she feels in the role of adoptive mother.  It’s the battle between what she knows rationally, down into her bones, and the irrational thoughts that skim her mind.  I love this line: “This all seems crazy to a part of me that is very rational.  But it all makes perfect sense to a part of me that is frightened, afraid to let go, afraid to give in, afraid to trust.”  And I especially love the place she gets to by the end of the post.

Slaying, Blogging, Whatever has a post that starts out about being a special needs mother, but morphs into a look at motherhood in general.  That life doesn’t always go according to plan, and part of the job description is flexing your expectations.  Changing the way you do things.  Taking a step back to notice the good moments even amid the stressful ones.  It was just a great Mother’s Day eve post.

No Kidding in NZ has a moving post, poetically written, waiting for surgery while half a world away, people celebrated Mother’s Day.  It’s a brief post — just two paragraphs long — but it packs a punch.

Lastly, Mrs. Spit has a post about feeling like an ugly duckling while comparing herself to another woman.  She admits that there is no good answer to someone saying that they feel this way.  That telling someone they’re pretty doesn’t help.  And yet, we all have that need inside of us to hear that we are pretty.  It’s a post that you will think about even after you’ve stepped away from the screen.

The roundup to the Roundup: Goodbye Jessica McClintock.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 9th and May 16th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

The twins had a writing assignment in school detailing how they see their life unfolding 20 years from now.  They were telling me about it over dinner.  Both started with the number of kids they would have and how they would each get to be an aunt or uncle.  The ChickieNob had even broken down her brood by sex.

“But where will you be living?  What will you be doing?” I asked after they spent a good five minutes explaining their whole family set up.

They had answers for that too, and yes, they will both still be living in my home (saves on babysitting!).  They had exciting jobs, big travel plans, homes in a multitude of areas.  (I guess they can afford it since they won’t be paying a mortgage on their main residence.)  The Wolvog had plotted out college, the ChickieNob skipped over that time period saying that where you went to college was no longer important when you were 28!

I used to love assignments like that, when every possibility seemed equally likely.  I could end up the lead actress in an eponymous sitcom: Melissa!  I could end up the author of several bestselling novels.  I could find the cure for all cancers; a single pill that cures everything.  I could live in a drafty estate in rural England.  All of it.  At the same time.

I took the ChickieNob to her art class and sat down in the waiting area to read.  I kept coming back mentally to their assignment until I found myself in the art school’s bathroom, crying.  I don’t even know why I was crying.  Because I’m turning 40 and imagining my life 20 years from now isn’t quite as exciting?  Well, I suppose I’ll still be doing yoga, that is, if my hips allow it.  And I assume I’ll still be working since we’ll never be able to afford to retire.  And I’m sure I’ll have a hearing aid by then.  On second thought, we’ll probably be living underground by then to escape the apocalyptic zombies.  So… maybe the hearing aid won’t be necessary in such small quarters.

Or was I crying because at 28, I was in the middle of treatments, trying to build my family.  I thought it would happen so easily for me, and when my family building endeavours didn’t unfold as planned in my eight-year-old mind, it was such a jolt.  Such a terrible tangent off that path of what should-have-been.  I could deal with the lack of sitcom, the fact that I didn’t cure cancer, and my dearth of British real estate.  But I could never quite reconcile that eight-year-old idea of parenthood with what was happening in reality.  I felt so sad thinking about my excited eight-year-old self.  How sure I also had been about reaching parenthood in 20 years — a length of time which felt impossibly old as a child.

No one writes that they’ll be infertile when they grow up.

Image: Becca.Peterson26 via Flickr

No one writes, Well, I’ll probably be struggling with money or in an unsupportive marriage or a dead-end job.  But I have friends who are living out those realities.  No one writes that they’ll be rejected from the college of their choice or in an abusive relationship or end up with cancer.  We write only happy, exciting things.

Are they wishes or expectations?

Or a little bit of hopeful thinking that if we write it out, it could possibly come true?

I am the Queen of the Post-It Note.  I have a secretary desk; the front folds down to form a work space and then folds back up when I’m done to put my books and such out of mind.  The inside of the desk — the part that folds up and disappears — is completely covered in post-it notes.  There are usually one or two on the front of the iPad case.  Those are usually daily to-do lists.  And a few scattered by my bedside table.  There are currently two stuck to the carpet next to my bed.  They’re really important, and I don’t want to lose them.  So I placed them on the carpet because that looked odd.  Therefore, how could I lose them if the weirdness of having two post-it notes stuck to the carpet was always in plain sight?

Please don’t comment on how I need a better system than post-it notes on my bedroom floor.

I tend to get everything done — very little falls through the cracks — but I never feel on top of things.  I spend all my energy trying not to forget things.

BlogHer had a post on bullet journaling yesterday, which I had never heard of before.  I watched the short video to understand what it entailed.

Something about it spoke to me.  Josh went out and got me a little red notebook.  I tweaked his format a bit to fit my needs.

I started out with the index page and the two month pages as he stated in the video.  But on the left-hand month page, I’m writing 1 – 10 words to define my day.  Just capturing a moment or saying how the day went.  Something I want to remember.  That will always be written in retrospect.  I’m using my actual calendar for events because I have too many to keep track of in a notebook, and things change all the time.  On the right-hand page, I’m writing long-term to-do items.  Such as on-going projects or things that I need to get to but not by a certain date.

THEN I added a page called “May Miscellaneous.”  It’s all those tiny thoughts that end up on post-it notes.  Like the name of a song in a commercial (“Original Don” by Major Lazer and the Party Squad — name that commercial!) or a funny name I made up and would like to call someone one day.  All the small, random things that have no other place to go but that I don’t want to lose.

THEN I started the daily lists on the next page.  I made a square box mean “task,” a dot mean “worry or thought,” a star mean “writing idea,” and an exclamation point with an acronym of the name of a current novel mean “a novel note.”

I put the May start and the May Miscellaneous page numbers in the index.  I’ll start a new miscellaneous page every month.

I love my little red notebook.  I’ve gotten rid of all the post-it notes, including the two that were stuck to the carpet.  Everything I have to do is in one place, and that book is never out of arm’s reach.  I can sweep up the novel notes and deposit them in my writing documents whenever I sit down to write.  I can always look down at the book and scan the stars, looking for blog post topics.  And I even have a record of random thoughts or worries; just so I can release them.

This thing is going to change my life.  I think.

Daily Dot covered a scary story last week about a move by the Russian government to crack down on free speech.  Bloggers with over 3000 daily visitors will need to submit their blog for monitoring by the government.  The post explains,

Referred to colloquially as the “blogger’s law,” it stipulates that any site with more than 3,000 daily viewers must register as a news site, and be held to the same legal standards. The act of registering requires those bloggers to give their full identifies, so the law effectively criminalizes anonymous blogging for any Russian who can draw that many readers … Russia has been keeping a tight rein on its bloggers in recent years.

It obviously struck me because it’s a story of government aiming to control speech, and I was concerned for Russian bloggers affected by the law.

But moreover, the number took me by surprise.  Because back in 2012, I wrote about how 3000 was this mental cut-off number for me that indicated that you had “made it” as a blogger.  And I need to say that I mentally set that as a “goal” somewhat arbitrarily in my 2006 brain.  It wasn’t based on research or a certain blogger.  I just started thinking about 3000 visitors as a goal.

So 100 sounded good. And then I wanted 200. Then I heard about people who had 1000 readers and that felt like a goal to hit. Then 3000. I’m aware that 3000 is an odd choice, but it felt like a threshold number to me at one point. When I first started blogging, there weren’t a ton of non-bloggers reading blogs, and getting 3000 people to read a post felt like you had major reach, at least by blogging standards. But would you say that 3000 daily visitors is a lot of people now? It all depends on your point-of-view: some would do anything to get that sort of traffic and others would freak out if their hits dropped that low; but I think we all can agree that 3000 visitors isn’t newsworthy. Not when Perez Hilton gets about 3000 visitors in the time it takes him to sneeze.

I guess it begs the question: what is it about the number 3000? How did Putin and I both come to the same number in determining the tipping point reach of a blogger? 

Do you think a person with 3000 daily readers has a wide-enough reach to deeply influence societal thought?  Or is 3000 a fairly low threshold, aimed to roundup a lot of bloggers?

And why have the threshold be visitors vs. page views? Page views tells us more about how the blog is read; whether people actually interact and look at the writing. Visitors can be logged by someone clicking over and clicking off moments later. Which matters more to you? Visitors or page views?

Can I tell you about my new toy?  Because I really really love it, and the potential it holds to really mess with the twins educate the people around me.  I love my new toy*.

I was talking with someone at littleBits and they told me they would send me their new space kit if I wanted to write about it.  Why, yes, I would like to try it out and write about it.  So I waited impatiently patiently for the toy to be delivered, hitting refresh on the tracking screen every two seconds drinking a cup of tea.  And then one day, it arrived.

Let me start by saying that though the age range on the box is 14 to infinity, I’ve already played with my friend’s four-year-old. (I bumped into my friend and her daughter while getting my mail so she got to be the first person to play with it.)  While she may not have gotten some of the larger concepts discussed in the accompanying booklet on light or sound, she certainly could follow the step-by-step instructions and construct the circuits.  And I guess that’s where I need to begin: the set is easy enough that an engineering-challenged middle-age woman a four-year-old can put the projects together, though it will be enjoyed on a very different level by women children eight and above.  Yes, I disagree with littleBits and would go as young as eight years old in using this set to understand concepts in science.  In fact, I’ve been using littleBits in our school for second grade and up.

The twins and I sat down and did some of the warm-up circuits.  We hooked up the microphone and speaker and spoke to each other in creepy, breathy whispers as if we were crank-calling each other across the table.

We hooked up the light reader, and the twins endured learning the amount of light in various parts of the room.

But my favourite warm-up circuit involved pulling together a remote trigger hooked up to my iPhone so I could turn on the music from any point in the room using the remote control from our television.  Can you imagine the fun I could have with this?  Record myself heavily breathing into a voice memo, leave it under their bed, and then hit play from the hallway?  I just realized that the only picture I took was when I had hooked up the remote trigger to the DC motor.  So imagine this set-up sans DC motor/avec my iPhone.

My favourite moment of play was when we created a wave generator and the twins could hear, feel, and see sound… all at the same time.  We first read the introduction to energy, and then we set up the circuit which allowed us to listen to Katy Perry’s “Roar,” touch a speaker to feel the vibrations, and finally attach a plastic spoon to the speaker and fill it with water so we could see the waves in the liquid.  We observed the waves becoming deeper and more defined as the volume went up, and then barely noticeable when we turned the volume down.  I wish I had taken a photo of the look on their faces when they saw the waves in the spoon.  That is science coming to life, becoming relevant, feeling tangible.

The kids have done many more of the projects on their own, including creating a spectrum and then dragging their friends into the hallway bathroom so they could see said spectrum.  And the Wolvog is eying the Mars Rover project to complete for next year’s science fair.

But forget the kids.  Can we talk about me for a second?  I came up with a great writing project involving the littleBits space kit; a science/writing hybrid project that our principal agreed I could bring to the school next year.  Because I believe that kids learn best when they have something tangible to manipulate, and what is writing beyond a circuit involving words?  Writing is a structured process with a flexible formula.  And how better to illustrate that than with a science project that kids can feel and observe?  Oooooh, I am so excited!

Thank you, littleBits, for giving me a chance to try out the set.  Because it not only gave me hours of entertaining ways I can mess with the twins the twins hours of educational play, but because you gave our whole school this really easy way to explain how to add depth to their writing assignments.  And yes, that is the next frontier: using littleBits to teach writing.  You’re already taking over the music scene; next you have to spread to words.

* I decided this one was my toy, but I’d let the twins play with it.