moving day

Bye bye Blogger. Hello WordPress. You'll find me over at ClumberKim.com from now on.

If you go soon you'll find my annual (at least on the years I'm not in New York) live blogging of the Westminster Kennel Club dog show.

thank your first commenter day

I'm seeing tweets about thanking one's first commenter. I had to look to see who the lucky winner might be for this blog. My money was on my sister Suzy but no, it was Matt, a former co-worker. Matt is responsible for my relocation to Pittsburgh, my husband's relocation to Pittsburgh (a month after me), and quite possibly, also responsible for us being together at all.

The post that Matt commented on first appeared on July 4, 2005, when Oliver was just 12 weeks old and the blog was a bit younger.

Matt has a food blog. Go see what he's making for Thanksgiving.

one oh oh oh

Here it is. Post 1000. I should look back and do a quick review but I really just want to move forward (and drink!). But a bit of looking back is apparently required. I offer here just a little. We're not going to be doing any of that wallowing thing. Ahem.

I started this blog on a whim a couple of months after the birth of my first child. Our families don't get to see the kids much so I thought it would be a fun way for them to keep up with Oliver (and later, Eleanor). It has evolved into something far less focussed than I planned, for better and worse, with more ranting and complaining than I ever anticipated.

Numbers seem to figure prominently around here. I offer just a few examples.

Here we have Oliver's weight chart (of misery and insanity). We were crazy enough to weigh him every day for far too long. Kids, DO NOT try this at home. No breastfeeding woman should have to do this. I was far too wrapped up in how many ounces I pumped and how many Oliver did or did not gain that I felt a lot of needless stress in my life. Once a week or two is plenty. Seriously.

In 2008 I did Blog365 and we experienced the 24 days of Daboo family Christmas. More insanity, on both counts, yet fun. There have been lists like this one, this one, and another one.

So, moving forward (feel free to drink again) is what we'll be doing around here, forward by getting back to where I started. Growing kids wait for no one.

enormous changes at the last minute

I've been a bad little blogger. Not that I haven't been thinking about it. This post has been rattling around in my brain for weeks. It started in late August when I knew the family was in for some schedule changes when Oliver started at his new school. I started trying to modify my sleep schedule, and the universe proceeded to laugh its ass off at my expense. We have yet to miss the 7:25 am bus but it has not been easy or painless. I am not getting to bed early enough and the kids and dogs regularly conspire to interrupt my sleep. This part of the change is not working well but I know that when I do get to bed by 10:30 I feel great. Scary great. I need to do this more.

My work schedule also changed to accommodate picking him up at either 4 or 4:30 pm. I love the extra quiet time in the morning. I typically eat some banana, shared with Eleanor and the dogs, before leaving the house and then have breakfast at work. My drawers are stocked with food (more on that topic later) so I eat at my desk. On Fridays, when most of my co-workers are off, I'm the first one in the office and it's utterly silent for nearly an hour. This part of the change is working really well.

Since I am a glutton for punishment, I went back to Weight Watchers a few weeks ago. I'm also participating in Sarah and Devra's Biggest Loser competition over at Loser Moms. I wish I could say I've dropped ten pounds but no, it's only 4 but I have learned a thing or two about weight loss and my own behavior over the last few years. In a nutshell, perfect isn't possible and imperfect is inevitable. An off day is no reason to get completely de-railed. I'm accepting my mistakes and forgiving them, as quickly as possible. I no longer think, "Screw it, tomorrow is another day." Now I think about the next meal or snack and get back on track faster. I wish I could say this is all my doing but my leader is a genius. She gets me. This part of the change is going okay. Lots of work left to do but moving in the right direction.

Now, for proof I have lost my mind entirely, I said, "yes" when asked to be the Room Parent for Oliver's class. I did not know at the time that I would be responsible for hosting the Parent Social, a parents-only event. At our house. Where my children live. I think we worked that out but it's going to be interesting. The school has also asked me to be a parent ambassador, fund raiser, and a few other things. Love the school but they are trying really hard to occupy nearly every day of my life. I'm learning to say no. Apparently not fast enough, however, since I also said yes to chairing the Finance committee for the Girl Scout board of directors. Thankfully, the third volunteer-y thing I said, "yes" to didn't pan out or I would have been well and truly screwed. This part of the change is definitely a work in progress.

Since I'm changing just about everything, say hello to my new blog look, courtesy of NapWarden who worked her magic for me once again. For someone who had never hear of, let alone seen, a Clumber spaniel until the last couple of weeks, I am insanely impressed.

recovered

Much as I wanted to hold them hostage in my backyard (with beer, of course), Sarah and Devra went on their merry way to Canton this morning. Last night's meet up at AlphaLab, hosted by iTwixie with produce donated by Isidore Foods, cupcakes from kdiddy, blueberry zucchini fabulousness from Abby, and pastries from....I dunno. The HoHos and lemon meringues must have put me into a sugar coma.

Having my own private little BlogHer actually helped to ease some of the bitterness. I didn't have to fret about packing, what to wear, who I was or was not seen with, or which parties to go to. I got swag, and the only cute shoes I thought about were Eleanor's.

As we walked to the bus stop this morning Oliver was asking why our guests were getting in their car. "I want them to stay for 10 years!" he said. Me too, Bunny, me too.

INCOMING!!!!

Crawling out of my foxhole kitchen just briefly to update you on a little get together scheduled for tomorrow in Pittsburgh. Two fab bloggers, Devra and Sarah, are visiting us as the first stop on their roadtrip to BlogHer. (I'm not bitter. I'm not bitter. I'm NOT bitter.)

In less than 72 hours, kdiddy and I organized a little meetup/tweetup for them, tomorrow at 6pm. We have an awesome host, iTwixie, and got some wonderful fresh produce donated by Isidore Foods, and the terrific AlphaLab is letting us invade their space on Carson St in the South Side.

My kitchen is in high gear, especially since I have two short windows of opportunity (aka Kid Nap Time) to get it all done.

If you're in Pittsburgh, you really want to join us. This is NOT an event just for MommyBloggers. These ladies are entrepreneurial bloggers operating in the stratosphere. We have a lot to learn from them. And I have it on very good authority that Sarah likes beer.

So join us. Let me know with a comment, an email, a smoke signal, a tweet...whatever method you want to use.

[UPDATE: Someone else is cooking for the meetup too. And she's bringing Twister!]

milestones

We hit two milestones today. Eleanor started talking about bedtime while we were in the car tonight. That should have been my first clue. When she starts says, "No bath! No bath! Brush teeth!" she is thinking about bedtime. She said she didn't want any dinner. She says a lot of things that are not true these days so I didn't think a lot about it. Then she barfed. No biggie. Every few months she barfs, usually at school. She falls asleep soon after and is fine when she wakes up. I tried to get a little dry toast into her but she was having none of it. I put her to bed and she conked out immediately, without any of her usual chattering.

She woke up when I checked on her about 90 minutes later. And promptly barfed again, all over her bed. As I was trying to comfort her, she barfed one more time. All.Over.Me. That's our milestone, the first barf on mom or dad. Since we have six kid years under our belts, we should probably consider ourselves lucky. The funniest moment? Eleanor telling me to clean up the "crumbs". No, dear, those are "chunks" but close enough.

Within a couple of minutes she was asking to go to the dinosaur playground so I'm thinking she's got it all out of her system.

And the second milestone? That's easier. This blog is 4 years old today.

not dead, dormant

Reports of my death have been slightly exaggerated. In fact, I'm back and ready to blog regularly again. I didn't realize how much Blog365 took out of me. I don't think of myself as a "real" writer. I just open up the Blogger window and spew. I don't agonize or even edit very much. (Yes, I know it shows. Thanks for mentioning it.) So the thought of burn-out didn't occur to me. If I'm not doing it for real, I couldn't possibly burn out. Blah Blah Blah

Anyway, I burned out. Feeling better now.

Part of why I am feeling better is that I have scratched and crawled my way back to the Weight Watchers wagon. I didn't stop paying them, and I didn't stop going to meetings entirely, but I did stop writing down everything I eat and for me, that's where it all ends. I hate doing it, but damn it if it doesn't work. On Wednesday, when I started journalling in earnest, I weighed 171.8 pounds. Yesterday I was 169.6. Today 168. That's 3.8 pounds in two days of being careful. Though I know it's mostly from drinking more water, I know it's also from not eating anything from the basket of cookies in front of me at a meeting too.

Twice I have lost about 25 pounds on WW, and both times I got pregnant at about that point. I have never been at goal, though I did get within 7 pounds once. It's really time to solve this problem, and it's not going to get any easier as I get older. Since I would like to live long enough to see my grandchildren this is something I can't let slide any longer.

I'm aiming for making 1-2 habit changes a week. This week, I will eat a good breakfast every day before I leave the house, and be in bed before midnight (with a trend towards being in bed by 10:30pm eventually). Next week I will focus on adding regular exercise. That tends to be my biggest problem and it will require a creative solution. My hunch is that solving the sleep problem will also solve the exercise problem. If I can get to bed at a reasonable hour, getting up to exercise before I shower should be easier. I already trained myself to get up before the kids so I can get a shower. I just need another half hour. Piece of cake. Or maybe tofu.

second prize is three days in Philadelphia

As Blog365 winds down, I'm looking ahead to January and to taking a break from blogging. I'm also taking a break from everything else and going to a dog show. Chances are excellent that trip will provide some blog fodder. There's usually a train wreck or two that could prove worthy.

My blogging plan for 2009 is simple. Don't suck.  I got through Blog365 by setting the bar low, even for me. That wasn't a lot of fun for readers, and wasn't much fun for me either. On a typical night, 10pm would roll around and I would remember I needed to blog. I would fire up Blogger and see what happened. Frequently an idea would come, one that would benefit from some percolation, and I would hit the publish button whether the idea was fully developed or not. In 2009 there will be no reason to hit publish if I don't want to. There will be no blog before its time.

24 days of Christmas, or why I don't have to worry about surviving Blog365 anymore

My sister Suzy has a long history of extreme generosity, yet she still manages to surprise me regularly. A large box from Suzy arrived on Wednesday. I opened it and saw it was filled with wrapped presents. Thinking I should probably leave it as she had packed it until Christmas, I closed it again. Fortunately, I told Suzy I had done this when I let her know the package arrived. She said no, open it, look at the tags. I found each package had a name and number, and found a calendar at the bottom of the box. The calendar was titled "24 days of Daboo Christmas" and, not surprisingly, begins and ends with Oliver.

So the first 24 days of December will feature a daily photo of someone in the house, or possibly the dogs as they were included too, opening a present. I may have other things to say, of course, but I can  now see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm reasonably sure it is not an oncoming train. Thanks Suzy!

NaBloPoke me in the eye with a sharp stick

After two years of doing NaBloPoMo, and surviving reasonably well, Blog365 seemed like the next logical step. Hey, I love a challenge. Okay, maybe not so much, but it didn't seem all that daunting when I started.

Here it is, day 301, and I'm still going. Just 64 more days. Piece of cake. A little thing like NaBlo really shouldn't be freaking me out, right? Right. Once again, I keep thinking I should have a few posts in the tank, just in case, yet only twice in the past 10 months have I queued up a post in advance. The odds my doing anything differently this year are somewhere between slim and none.

So what do you think? Should YOU do NaBloPoMo? Absolutely! In the words of Annie Savoy, "Total exhaustion can be spiritually fabulous."

new look, new name

Huge thanks to NapWarden for my spiffy new look. Pop on over there. Say hello and wish her luck with the marathon on Saturday. How she managed to fit in my makeover with her training I will never know. 

You'll also notice "three dogs and a baby" has finally been replaced. We haven't been three dogs for more than two years, and we haven't had a baby for a while either. The change was long past due. I've been known as ClumberKim, both on-line and IRL, a good long time and that's not likely to change, so here we are.

Eleanor's new words:  burp, poop (both used in entirely appropriate contexts!)

there was a post in here somewhere

Since I seem to have, um, misplaced (in my brain) the post I had planned today, here's what is going on:

After no poop for 72 hours, we have ignition. In the potty even. Three times! There's still lots of "I'm not feeling well" associated with the poop, but I think we're making progress. Oliver woke up an hour after going to bed and asked to go to the potty. Once there, he said he needed to poop and that I needed to go away for a little bit. He asked me to come back before he finished so I'm not sure what is up with that, but I'll do anything he asks at this point. I did take the opportunity to explain that if he pooped a little bit each day we wouldn't be having all this drama.

The social calendar is heating up. We have a sitter tomorrow night so we can go to a reception and concert. This weekend we have a few families coming for brunch, a date night to celebrate CD's birthday, and a baseball game on his actual birthday. We're also plotting for a regular date night with one of our sitters. I'll be shocked if we pull it off, but it's a worthy goal.

I finally contacted a professional about a blog re-design. Shut up...I'm really doing it this time. Stay tuned.

Eleanor's new words: chair, wow

a t-shirt, a book, and some toilet cleaner

Now that Oliver has stopped barfing, we can move on to far more important issues, like my biggest pet peeve with blogs....giveaways that really are not. Maybe the bloggers mean well. I would like to think they do. But regardless of their intentions, it fries my bacon (ahem) when the goods never materialize. Unfortunately, I know how to hold a grudge. I have never forgiven the family for not taking me along to the seventh game of the World Series in 1975.

Three cases in point:

DaddyTypes:  Two years ago, I was a lucky "winner" of a DT t-shirt in the Bizarre Book contest. Here's my entry and here's the post that says I won. As instructed, I sent my size request and mailing address to the blog owner. Nothing ever arrived.

NinjaPoodles:  Another one that's almost two years old. Here's the post that announces the contest and here's the post that says I won a book. That's Oliver and Penguin right at the top. I sent my mailing address. No book.

Mod*Mom:  This one is more recent, April of this year. Here's the post that announces the contest and here's the link to the comment she left on my blog saying I won a set of Method toilet cleaning products. After my earlier experiences I decided to pursue this one a bit more carefully. I have sent Mod*Mom three e-mails with my mailing address. I included all the links in my last message to her. No response.

The products themselves are irrelevant. I get along just fine without them. Though CD would look nice in a DT t-shirt, he's got an entire drawer of shirts he's never worn. I was just hoping for a change of pace from the standard fare of computer geek shirts. No, it's the principle here. If something happened and you are no longer able to deliver the goods, just send an email, or put something on your blog about it. Stuff happens. Big deal. We move on. But tell me.

In the interests of full disclosure, I recently held a small contest to guess the date I would get my first piece of spam in my new work e-mail account. Only one person seems to still be in the running to win the $25 iTunes gift card, and that's Allison of AllisonSays. All the other dates have passed with no spam so Allison's guess of July 29 is the winner. Just to keep it fair, I'm going to wait until the 29th to send her card.

And finally, huge props to CoolMomPicks who sent me the incredibly useful ponch-style bib I won from them. I liked it so much I ordered more. Too bad it looks like these are no longer available. Thanks Cool Moms for delivering on what you promised.

that time of year

You know the time...when everyone is packing for BlogHer but you. Two years ago it very nearly overlapped with WWDC. That would have been amazing. CD, Oliver and me all in San Francisco. The adults enjoying hanging with their peeps (or in my case, the women I wish were my peeps) and Oliver meeting some new friends since BlogHer is a conference with childcare. (How cool is that?) Alas, the scheduling was off by a few days so Oliver and I stayed home.

I have set my sights on BlogHer's Reach Out tour in DC. After a few months of being back at work, and surviving the craziness that is the beginning of a semester, I will have more than earned a day away. I may even try to stretch it into two days, but CD has yet another geek fest the week before. Since it is on the west coast, he will probably not get home until Saturday. That means I can probably leave early Sunday. If I fly, which will cost way too much, I would have more time to play in DC. Or I could do Amtrak for about $75 round trip. I like trains. That has possibilities.

Of course, all this thinking and planning could be for naught if CD's employer decides to keep him a few extra days, as they like to do whenever he is in their general vicinity.

pry-va-see or pri-va-see

You say to-mah-toe, or just mah-toe if you are Oliver. (Look here for more on British vs American pronunciation differences.)

Anyway, thanks to a wsj blog entry about blogging your kids' lives in (sometimes excruciating) detail, blogging and family privacy has been a hot topic this week all over the blogosphere. Most of the commenters on the WSJ blog were telling the author to password protect everything, or not put anything about the kids out there at all. The reasons ranged from worry about all the pervs to worry that the kids will hate their parents for being so open to nobody cares but the grandparents. Oddly enough, the commenter I identified with most is the one who suggested those promoting password protecting one's photos and blog had never seen elderly grandparents try to get over that sort of hurdle. If it's not easy one click access, my mom would probably never read "the blob" (as she calls it).

In our case, adding passwords now would be closing the door after the animals were all out of the barn. I have blogged, flickr'd, and twitter'd about the kids, starting a few months after Oliver was born. Even the usually very private CD uses our kids' names, and mine too, in drafts and other text he writes for the IETF. I recently became elevated from his "assistant" to family member. Woohoo! He's also set up our family website such that it is easily found by Google if you look for any of our names. 

And here I am this weekend, twittering endlessly as we try a more intensive effort to potty-train Oliver. I reported on the wet underwear (5 pairs before noon) and the triumph of a little pee in the potty after dinner. Yeah, he will probably hate me someday, though at the moment I am still wondering if he's going to still be in diapers when he leaves for college. Sorry, little bunny.

two days late

I'm two days late on my three year blogiversary. I thought about it a couple of weeks ago, but didn't bother looking up the exact date. Then tonight, while looking up the details of Oliver's experience with hand, foot and mouth disease for another blogger who is dealing with it, while trying not to compare what Oliver was doing at this stage of development with what Eleanor is doing, and stumbled upon the date of my first entry, 26 June, 2005.

Happy birthday, little blog.

unearned hangover

In spite of not drinking anything but fizzy water and decaf last night*, I have felt hungover all day. Kids got up way too early. Then we had a crazy double-bill of a birthday party in the park. After naps (a rare two-fer) I dragged kids, one of them exceedingly grumpy, to a playground. After much whining to go home, the mr grumpy-puss made a new friend and suddenly could not imagine leaving. Once I dragged him home there was baseball and dinner. To cap off the night, we made our way to the airport to fetch CD. I generally make him take cabs when it's too early or too late but this was on the edge of bedtime (would have been closer to the edge if his flight had been on time) and it's the weekend. This meant kids got to bed close to 8:30, about an hour later than usual. We'll see if we end up paying the price tomorrow, or are granted a very rare lie-in. Place your bets.

* For more comprehensive coverage of the bloggers' night out you will want to check out these blogs:

Jayesel
My Very Last Nerve
Our Piece of the World
The Rocking Pony
Burgh Baby's Mom, our intrepid organizer

Present, but not yet accounted for:
From Here to There and Everywhere
One Woman Show
Allison Says

It's the blogging 'burgh moms!

This was before burghbaby's mom ate a piece of carrot cake bigger than her head.

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it only took six months

I'm just another mommy blogger, raking in the cash.