Loribeth had a post about Elf on a Shelf that I featured in the Roundup, lamenting how intense celebrating Christmas has gotten lately.  She writes, “But these days, it seems the pressure to do more, buy more, give more gifts — on top of all the other pressures of modern life and parenting — just keep ratcheting upward.”  And while I’ve definitely noticed it with Christmas and I don’t even celebrate the holiday (starting with Christmas decorations up in October, continuing with the onslaught of Christmas programming and commercials going through January, and blowing this non-Christian’s mind with the idea that $224 is a small amount to spend on Christmas gifts for a single person), it feels as if it’s true with everything.

Meals are no longer food to enjoy in the moment or sustain our bodies.  They are photographic evidence of the deliciousness that went in our mouths (extra points if it looks amazing and complicated).  Don’t even bother cooking or ordering something that may taste great but doesn’t photograph well.  Decorations are no longer decorations; they are a statement of how much time we are willing to caress our hot glue guns.  Halloween costumes are over the top, Valentines go beyond the little paper card, and birthday cakes for three-year-olds are taking on the proportions, cost, and complications of wedding cakes.

I can rarely find simple recipes on food blogs anymore.  Instead I find posts with 25 images, each artfully taken, photoshopped, and cropped to walk you through how to chop up tomatoes for bruschetta.  Fine, the image tutorials help if you’re making something unusual and complicated such as… let’s say… turducken.  But scrolling through image after image of putting together a salad just because images are pretty and pinnable and we feel as if there must be pictures to keep up with the blogging Joneses?  That goes over my gratuitous/warranted line.

Here’s the thing: it’s all pretty to look at, but the volume has gotten way too loud.  It’s like when you go to hear your favourite band play, and at first you’re enjoying yourself.  But after a few songs, you realize that the volume is up so high that it isn’t fun anymore.  It hurts your ears to listen to your favourite band, and even though you’ve been looking forward to the concert for weeks, you’d sort of rather be curled up in bed than having your ears assaulted.

I think what Loribeth is seeing with Christmas is an offshoot of what we’ve been seeing all year due to social media.  You’re not just outdoing yourself or your neighbours for the holidays.  You’re now feeling the pressure from Pinterest and blogs and your Facebook feed.  You’re hearing tons of interesting ideas and want to try them out yourself (and that’s a good thing), but it’s also a feeling that you’re not doing “enough” for the holidays if you’re not doing it all (which is a bad thing).

After all, if that person can manage a nativity scene made out of Rice Krispies treats that she artfully carved alongside her beaming children with a hotly buttered knife, what does it say about how much you love your child if you don’t attempt to make a little, baby Rice Krispies Jesus on a bed of crumbled Chex?  Don’t you love Christmas enough to attempt cereal craft projects?

The same goes for the machine that is generating all this holiday angst: social media itself.  How many people have felt that their blog isn’t “good enough” when they hear opportunities others get or their traffic or see their pretty blog design?  How many people have felt that they must be doing something wrong if someone starts a Twitter account and instantly has 1000 followers while your three-year-old account still only has 67?

I certainly have gotten the sense that I’m not doing my friendships correctly when I see everyone else having fun on Facebook, and I do think about how I’m contributing to other people’s feelings when I post my own grinning face while out for the evening.

I’m not suggesting that we throw out the baby with the bathwater and get rid of social media, or even that people stop posting their pistachio flower tutorials and clever gender reveal cakes.  But I do think it helps to bring it into perspective when we think about how a bigness has taken over.  That too many people are trying to strive for quality and quantity at the same time, which is possible to achieve, but always at a cost.  I’m not willing to give up Facebook, even though it makes me feel like shit half the time when I see what I’ve either been left out of or missed.  Because there is always that other half of the time when I feel close to people far away, figuratively part of more people’s worlds than I ever could conceivably be without social media.

But I do need to complain about the volume just as I would if I were at that concert. (And yes, I am that patron at the movie theater who asks the projectionist to turn down the sound when the special effects are making my bones shake from the noise.)  On the off-chance that someone will turn it down a notch or at least commiserate to let me know I’m not the only person who thinks that everything has gotten too damn loud.

Image: Bobistraveling via Flickr

I have seen a number of tweets mocking Washingtonians and our inability to deal with snow.  We close our schools, we buy out all the bread and milk in the store, and we stay home blogging about how scared we are to lose power every time solid precipitation comes down from the sky.  There are those who blame our mentality on Marion Barry and his ideology for snow removal: “The Lord Giveth, and the Lord Taketh Away.”  But they would be remembering 1995… and 1996… or that time they hired private firms to plow the snow and they didn’t pay them and then those firms refused to plow until they were paid.  Anyway, a large chunk of Washington’s population flips over every year since our business is government, therefore I don’t think our attitude can be traced to the actions of a single person, but rather the depth of truth in John F. Kennedy’s observations about the capital:

“Washington D.C. is a town of Northern hospitality and Southern efficiency.”

We’re dicks AND we’re incapable of getting stuff done.

We ALSO have neither the temperate climate of the South nor the ability to deal with inclement weather like the North.  We are a city in between, bi-partisan in the greatest sense of the word, and because of our ambivalence, we are unable to actually work together with snow to get through it any more than we can work together as humans to pass a budget.

Fancy Yankees move to our capital and believe THEY can drive in the snow.  A case in point: Josh slept downtown last night after attending an event.  Being from New Jersey, he thought he could drive home at night.  Is he fucking kidding me?  I shrieked at him that if he didn’t get a hotel room and sleep downtown, that I would kill him once he tried to enter the house simply for driving over ice when the Capital Weather Gang (who are essentially our spiritual gurus in this town) cautioned that even SUVs were having trouble with skidding.

Even if former Northerners know what to do to travel over snow, the Southern transplants don’t.  It doesn’t matter if you are capable of driving if the people around you aren’t.

Snow gives Washingtonians a chance to stop and talk about something we share in common; our inability to function around it.  It is the ONLY time Washingtonians agree.  Are you really doing to ask us to stop bonding over the only ideology we share?

If the White House is the People’s House, then Washington is the People’s Town; a melting pot of all the other states.  You come here; YOU populate the city.  And for all of you who are watching Washingtonians in disbelief, know that the same thing would happen to you if you took a government appointment and moved to our town.  This is like the Bermuda Triangle of Weather Functionality.  People come here, capable of getting through rain, snow, sleet, and hail.  And once they sign a lease on an apartment, they lose whatever coping mechanisms they came with from their original town.  It disappears, only to return once you exit DC because your job is over.

I haven’t been out of my house in two days.  I don’t want you to think I’m disgusting.  I mean, I showered both days.  I just got back into my pyjamas after pulling my hair up into a bun so it wouldn’t drip on my freebie sweatshirt from a DC event.  Because it is practically ritual here.

The snow comes down; the city stops.

Now excuse me, Capital Weather Gang is telling me that we’re going to get snow again tomorrow.  I have to go get milk and bread to add to my milk and bread collection.

The conversation about GoldieBlox clearly touched a nerve with me, maybe because I am working so hard to instill the concept in my daughter that she can do anything without actually knocking her over the head with the idea that she can do anything.  Because once you do that, it works the other way.  She also receives the message that if it was important enough to convince her, it means that there are people out there who think she can’t do certain things.  And lest you think that kids don’t pick up messages underneath messages, consider the fact that it doesn’t occur to us to also tell boys that they can anything.  I know, I know, you believe that they’ll get that message inadvertently from society anyway.  But here’s the thing; they get that message because they are never given a different message.

I call it the “You Can Do Anything!” Paradox.  By telling them they can do anything, they learn immediately that if they need to be told it, they maybe can’t do everything.*

So I prefer to treat my daughter as I treat my son.  I don’t tell either of them that they can do anything.  I just let them exist and navigate, and I instill in them a healthy understanding that other people’s messages — good or bad — shouldn’t hold much weight.  Either their self-esteem comes from within, or we need to take the “self” out of self-esteem.  And really, once you do that, you leave your kid open to a host of other problems creating dependency on external validation.

But that’s not really the point of this post.

The conversation about GoldieBlox took place on this blog and Facebook and Twitter and email.  And one of those emails was from someone at littleBits, which I’ve heard called the “Lego of electronics.”  We were talking about gender-specific toys, and she asked me if my kids (both of them) would like to try littleBits.  She would send me a set**.

I showed it to the kids online, who immediately started throwing out ideas of what they would build with the littleBits.  And the ChickieNob instated a bunch of rules about the toy, claiming she got to play with it first since if this was tied to GoldieBlox in any way, shape, or form, she was discussed in my post more than her brother (and had been asked to watch the video to get her take on the toy) and therefore should get first dibs on this toy.  She may have also had a bunch of diabolical plans.  Either/or.

We watched the littleBits come toward our house by the tracking number. (One thing I will say for the company, they are beyond responsive and helpful.  That makes a difference in my mind.  Lego too pops up immediately as a company that has such great customer support for their electronic items that it’s worth buying them just because you know you’ll have the safety net if you can’t figure something out.) And on the day it arrived in town, the twins implored me to get the box before they came home from school so they could hit the ground running.

That is true toy excitement.

I met the kids at the school with the box tucked under my arm.  And the most bizarre thing happened.  I felt like the girl in a Brat Pack movie who walks through the school in slow-motion after her transformation and all the cool kids are suddenly paying attention to her.  Fine, maybe I was walking at a normal pace, but every kid who passed me and saw that box under my arm screamed out, “YOU HAVE A LITTLEBITS!” (Except for one child who inexplicably said, “no fair!”)  It made me feel so cool.

When we got home, the Wolvog had to practice guitar (and he knew he’d have an uninterrupted hour and a half with the toy while his sister was at art), so the ChickieNob and I sat down and opened the box.  We read all the instructions and cracked up at being congratulated for our analness.  I promised her that she couldn’t do anything “wrong” and electrocute herself, so she took a deep breath and dug down into the box to make the back massager.

The blocks are very easy to use — and I say that as a Geek Immigrant with no background (or comfort) with engineering.  They are clearly marked, the magnets only attach one way, and the instructions are very straightforward.  I won’t say “simple” because engineering isn’t really simple.  But they’re straightforward: you will not be able to mess this up or get confused.

The ChickieNob’s initial thoughts were that she really liked the colours (all the pieces are colour coded so you know your input from your output) and the fact that the instructions were written on the blocks themselves.  She thought they looked pick-up-able — they made you want to hold them.  I made her try out building the massager herself since she has a tendency to say “can’t” before she has ever tried.  It was worth it because of the expression on her face when she got it working after about five minutes of work. (It’s one of the first, easiest things to try out.)  She popped a muscle to show how powerful she felt, and she shrieked out, “I’m strong!”

LittleBits created a monster because later that night, after she was done with dinner, she informed me that she was going back to her workshop.  She had one moment where she called out that her drawer alarm wasn’t working, and I told her to figure it out herself.  A few minutes later, we got the happy shriek, “I did it!”  I love littleBits because they’re a toy that makes her feel empowered.  They are just on this side of being non-intimidating; meaning, they look difficult but kids can figure them out on their own.  And when they do, they feel cool.

We’re using the littleBits this week as a kick-off for each of my Hour of Code workshops this week. (Yes, Hour of Code begins tomorrow.  So do something computer-related this week!)  The ChickieNob is actually going to be the one to show the kids because she is finally getting the concept of how order matters when it comes to coding (and everything else in life).  The fine details matters.  One character missing can change everything.  Putting the littleBits in the wrong order is an easy way to convey to kids order of operations.

And I love that the ChickieNob asked if she — not me — could be the one to show the rest of the kids this concept in robotics.  Sure, babe, take center stage.

It’s expensive — most computer-related/engineering toys are.  But I think it’s worth the cost because the kids are still playing with it without being prompted.  That speaks volumes to me because a lot of times, they’ll play with something once or twice and set it aside until I remind them to use it again.  It comes with about 16 projects to build in the box, but if you go online, the box boasts 600,000 combinations, and the projects are limitless in terms of how people have used the littleBits.  It’s a very versatile toy that grows with the kid.  Right now, the twins are focused on making an electronic pet.  But I could see them using this well into middle school/high school to make all sorts of things that light up, make sounds, and move.

On a side note — littleBits is a company created by an M.I.T. educated woman — Ayah Bdeir — who had the idea according to the New York Times “of making electronics components into Lego-like bricks that could be used by anybody, even the technically ungifted.”  So, like GoldieBlox, it’s a woman trying to get more girls involved in engineering.  But does so without a hint of pink or a loud message that THIS IS FOR GIRLS!  Instead, she says, “this is for anyone, especially the technically ungifted.”  She does it without using the word “just,” which is essentially a put-down. (I was really turned off by the “more than just a princess” tagline from GoldieBlox since it places a value both on whatever that “more” is as well as “princess.”  We don’t need to be anti-something in order to be pro-something else.  Let’s support both girls who value engineering and girls who reject engineering and love princesses.)  And she doesn’t make the assumption that girls only want to play with other girls or that boys only want to play with other boys.  She just lumps us all into two categories — those that know circuits and those that don’t.  And I’m totally okay with raising my hand and saying, “no engineering background; so I’m in that category.”

* Think about it this way.  If I say to you, “Those jeans look great on you.  They don’t make your body look strange at all.”  Your first thought will be, “These jeans work.”  And your second thought will be, “Wait, does that mean some of my other jeans don’t work?  I didn’t know any of my jeans made my body look strange.  But if she’s bringing that up, she must think that some of my other jeans make my body look strange, but these are a good fit.”

P.S. If anyone knows where I can get a good pair of jeans…

Just kidding.

Not kidding.

** I never do reviews, therefore I haven’t paid much attention to all FCC update on disclosure, but hopefully sticking it smack in the middle of the post will make it clear.  She asked if she could send me a set.  She didn’t ask me to write about it.  I asked her if she was cool with me writing about it.  She said yes.  I wrote my honest opinion of littleBits.

My pre-Christmas gift to you is a copy of the post-it note I made myself to get through level 315 of Candy Crush.  Let me start by saying that this level frustrated me almost as much as the timed levels.  It involves sliding over two ingredients at least two spaces.  So four lateral moves in total.

You likely do lateral moves all the time without thinking about it.  But once you’re forced to slide over those hazelnuts, you realize just how difficult it is to line up the candies just so vs. have it happen by accident.

See, the hazelnut in the center is fine.  The one on the left and the one on the right will hit a ledge if they drop straight down.  So they need to move two over toward the center in order to be placed over an opening.

So how do you do that?

You look for (or create) one of these eight patterns:

The four on the left correspond with the hazelnut on the left.  The four on the right correspond with the hazelnut on the right.  The O is the hazelnut, and the X are three candies of the same colour.

In other words, if you want to move the left one over (toward the center, which means, toward the right), you’re looking for two blues above the hazelnut and a blue to the right.  Then you’d slide that hazelnut to the right, and the three blues align and disappear.  One move complete.

My advice is to play on a device so you can keep restarting without losing a life.  Look for a board that opens with two of the same colour below one of the hazelnuts, and either a third of the same colour to the right of the nut (if you’re trying to move the one on the left) or the left of the nut (if you’re trying to move the one on the right).  That way, your first move takes care of one of your four lateral moves.  Then it’s just three more to go.

Also make sure you use the coconut wheel early on so the nut in the middle doesn’t land atop it.  Once that happens, you can only use it left or right to take out one candy.

This moving ingredients technique comes up a few times in Candy Crush, but this is the first board where it is crucial; impossible to play without doing lateral moves.

So if you need a break from Christmas stuff and you’re feeling inclined to crouch in a darkened room somewhere playing Candy Crush while other people string their lights, this is my gift to you.  How to move ingredients to get past those evil boards.

Currently: I’m on Level 350, and I’m happy to go backwards and explain how I did any board before that. Sometimes it was stupid luck but other times, there was actual thought involved (here are the other advice posts I’ve written). Let me know the level you’re struggling with.

Josh and I were all ready to drop down over $100 for a small piece of tech this week.  I’m being purposefully vague because my goal is not to harm the reputation of this company but to point out an issue with brands utilizing social media.  So we were all ready to shell out the money, but I decided to ask a question before we plopped down the cash.  It’s my new canary in the coal mine: if I can’t get a company to answer my questions BEFORE I’ve given them my money, I have a good idea that they’re not going to be available to answer questions AFTER I’ve given them my money.  And for some of these obscure tech items we get the kids, there are such a small amount of other people out there who own the same item that if we run into a problem and the company itself won’t help us out, we’re out of luck.

So I write a quick question.  If I get an answer back in a reasonable amount of time, I make the purchase.  If I don’t get an answer back at all, then I walk away from the product.  So, for instance, the Wolvog desperately wanted a coding app.  It wasn’t clear that the app came with a tutorial, and it was a pretty expensive app.  It happened to be a coding language that the Wolvog doesn’t know, so I wanted to make sure that there was going to be something on the app to help him when he got stuck.  I sent an email in mid-October.  I’m still waiting for an answer.  In the silence, I told the Wolvog that I wasn’t willing to spend that amount of money to be frustrated.  So no app.  Instead we put that money towards an engineering toy where the person not only answered my first question quickly, but each subsequent one in quick succession.  That company is a keeper.

I think brands — especially small brands, just starting out — look at social media as this paradise where the customers are like low-hanging fruit.  There are just so many of us, and we’re all so accessible.  They can purchase ads and send it to our Facebook wall, tweet at us, slip comments into our blog posts.  They can throw up a project on Kickstarter and get tons of people to contribute small sums of money vs. going through the grant writing process (which is often an exercise in frustration).

What they don’t realize is that if do social media poorly, it hurts their brand.  It affects their reputation.  And social media is loud.  A single complaint sounds louder than it would in the face-to-face world.

Part of being a brand on social media (and perhaps some small businesses may want to think twice about joining in with social media if they don’t have the bandwidth to do it well) is engaging in that social part.  Not just talking at, but talking with.  Sometimes that means hundreds of people asking you questions.  If you’re asking them for money or support for your idea, that’s a fair trade.  Sometimes it means someone whining about your product, and you need to pleasantly respond and try to make their experience with your product better.  And sometimes they have such a fantastic experience with your product that they give you tons of free press, spreading that love across the blogosphere.  It works both ways.

So I sent an email that got no response back from this tech company, despite the fact that the company continues to tweet and Facebook and blog.  And yes, I sent them a message on Twitter letting them know I emailed just in case it went into spam.  Crickets.  They just keep tweeting, “support our project!”  And I’d love to.  I just want my question answered in return.  Especially since I got the email from a page that asked potential customers to email them with questions.

I know I’m hella cranky.  I should probably go drink a cup of tea.  Though I am giving them a week.  That seems fair-ish.

*******

The 2013 Creme de la Creme is trucking along.  There are currently 75 on the list and under two weeks to go until the hard deadline (December 15!).  So, are you on the list yet?  It’s wrapping up, so this is your last chance.

*******

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:

• “Raising Daughters: Smart and Beautiful are Not Mutually Exclusive” (Three Geminis and a Sagittarius)
• “Am I Just ‘Playing House’?” (Sweet Dreams are Made of This)
• “An Empty Place at the Table” (The Empty Cookie)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Processing Thanksgiving was a theme this week.  Birds, Bees, and Medicine had a post about her two Thanksgivings — one with kids and one without.  Both contained their moments, but it was her words about a family member’s Christmas present idea that gave me pause: “a family tree with the parents in the trunk, the four children in each of the branches with their spouses, and then all the grandkids as leaves with thumb-prints. I wondered if our branch would really look as sad and barren as it did my imagination and if there would be space for us to add our thumbs prints later or if this was her idea of the family being complete. ”  I especially loved the end of the post.

LittleLightLuke sat at the Thanksgiving table and remembered her son who should be here but wasn’t.  As they went around the table, stating what they were thankful for, her mother answered that she’s thankful that they’re all together.  She wrote, “My heart felt stabbed–We are all here?!  It is so glaring to me that we are NOT all here.  I know she didn’t mean anything bad by it and she misses Luke too, but it still bothered me.”  But the moment most moving was when the author brought Luke’s name to the table.

Lastly, the Road Less Travelled had a post about the elf on a shelf.  And I love love love this part: “But these days, it seems the pressure to do more, buy more, give more gifts — on top of all the other pressures of modern life and parenting — just keep ratcheting upward.  And who is benefiting here?”  I don’t even celebrate Christmas, but who hasn’t felt the volume turned up everywhere year after year?  Brilliant post.  Actually, I feel like I need to unpack it myself in my own post.

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s hard to be a brand on social media.  The 2013 Creme de la Creme opened: is your post on the list?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 29th and December 6th) 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.