Nervous about new experiences

I was really nervous about attending this mom blogger event, meeting over 50 people who all write for public consumption is quite a lot to take in at once.  And there was the matter of the clown jam.

On Thursday when I was in Manhattan to have lunch with The Husband, I went to the Gap and bought a new pair of jeans, dark blue so that my legs would look thinner.  I knew I couldn’t wear what I usually wear.  I had to step it up a notch to make myself presentable.  I don’t know why we do that, don’t go to the effort to look good all the time, oh yeah, it’s a little bit time consuming.

In the morning as part of my getting ready, putting together two outfits for two completely different activities, clowning and PR networking, I was also focused on making sure that the toaster, the bread, the peanut butter and the washed apples were clearly visible so that My Kid could feed herself if The Husband was otherwise occupied.  So when it came time to print the e-mail with the address so that I could be organized and have it in my purse and the printer was out of ink and wouldn’t print…I started to shake.   Then when I had to wait longer than expected for a train…I had say meditative phrases to myself.  And when I came up onto the street at Penn Station I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t go into the studio at all, I will be late and then I will have to leave early, it will be so disruptive I should just call with my regrets, I tried to do too much today.  It wasn’t working out. I didn’t want to be disruptive by both coming late and leaving early.  I was only 10 or 15 minutes late to a 3 hour studio session.  Even though I had brought the Girl Scout cookies one of the clowns had purchased from my daughter, with me in my bag, yet another item on the list, I wanted to cancel.  But, the message on my phone, so casual, the door will be closed but we’re in studio 1.  So I went.  It wasn’t a big deal.  It would have been if it had been a rehearsal, but it was just studio time.

Prep for Blog

So while My Kid is otherwise engaged with her piano teacher and lesson, I am looking at the blogs of the other moms who will be attending the brand/blogger event tomorrow and I am intimidated.  That’s nothing new.  I’m easily intimidated like by people from New York–and I live in New York–so it’s just something I live with.  Anyway, a lot of these moms have blogs that are a lot cooler than mine and have a lot more links than mine.  In the lead up to this event they are writing about how they have been to many of these events before.  This will be my first one!

So, now I am having some angst about having a blog at all.

I didn’t set it up to review products in order to get free swag, but now that that is a possibility I don’t object.  I love me some free stuff.

However, that’s not why I started this blog.  I started it as a writing practice.  It’s working.  If I haven’t posted in more than a week I know that something is out of balance in my life and I probably ought to say something.  Sometimes I just write whatever.  But, more often than not, I become cautious and don’t want to post something until I’m sure I’ve not said anything snarky (which for some is the whole point of having a blog) because I come from the Midwest where “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”!  That philosophy is the complete opposite of a lot of the really fun to read blogs that I can think of off hand.

So, anyway…

With that in mind,  I will commence anxiety about what to wear so I won’t look too old and frumpy.  How should I do my hair?  If I wear heals and perfume can will avoid arriving all sweaty and smelly instead of  “Red Carpet Casual”  ready to the event in Tribeca that I am going to straight from a clown jam at a studio in Midtown.  I’ll also need a red-nose clown ensemble that doesn’t take up very much room in the bag I be carrying around for the rest of the day.

Oh well, time to move on with the day, the piano lesson is over.

Branding!

Cirque du Soleil is one of the companies with representatives at the blogging mommies event I will be attending tomorrow.  How cool is that!  I think I’ve found my tribe!

4th Street Subway Stop

She was coming off the F train going downtown as I was getting on the F train going uptown, surprise, exhanging hugs and a hellos with a playwright I knew in Seattle, an exciting moment of fun in the middle of my day!

E-vite

I’ve been invited to an event for moms who blog.  There will be swag.  I’ve heard of these events but I’ve never been to one before.  I’m kind of excited about it.  Maybe I have a future as a product reviewer pitch person.  Some of the moms in the blogosphere do a lot of that sort of thing all the time, they even set up separate blogs just for different kinds of product reviews.  I’ve certainly spent more time shopping and considering the merits of various products ever since I got pregnant, with My Kid, more than I ever expected.

The First Step on the Road to Vegetarianism

The waitress had just set down my food, the vegetarian combination, and my husband’s Doro Wat when she looked at my daughter and told her, “I’ll be right back with your lamb.”  My child’s eyes grew large and filled with tears.
“I told you I don’t eat anything cute!”

It’s true.  My daughter does not consume the flesh of any creature that might appear as a plush friend in an Easter basket.

My husband had been so happy to find something on the menu mild enough for our daughter, so that we could come as a family to this neighborhood Ethiopian restaurant where she does not like the way the vegetables are prepared.

The first time my daughter tasted the meat off her father’s plate, he didn’t tell her what  it was. I wasn’t paying attention, I assumed it was beef.  The Husband told me later that it was lamb and he hadn’t told her because he wanted to be able to go back to that restaurant as a family.  I suppose I should have told him, that this would be perceived as betrayal.  But, I thought he knew.  How many episodes of The Simpson’s have my husband and daughter watched together.

How often does Lisa’s vegetarianism come up?  Why didn’t my husband see this coming?  

My own road to becoming a vegetarian began in elementary school the first time I refused to eat anything I had seen dead.  
It was not long after we had moved to Montana and my father shot Bambi and hung the corpse in the garage to cure before he and my mother butchered the meat like some kind of pioneers, or Sweeney Todd, or Hannibal Lecter.

Some kid argued with me, “You eat cows don’t you?”

“Not anymore!” was my answer as a 7th grader and I still haven’t.

When the waitress returned with the lamb stew, she took one look at my daughter, turned right around, and returned the Ye Beg Alicha back to the kitchen.  When we got our check it had been crossed off the bill.

I don’t know how this incident will to shake out for us as far as the timing of my daughter becoming a vegetarian.  But, I’m pretty sure we won’t be going back to that particular restaurant any time soon.

This is an original NYC Moms Blog post.

Childhood On Hold For Standardized Tests

I just got an e-mail from my daughter’s soccer coach.  He’s canceling Thursday’s practice because of the all important 4th grade math tests this week. God knows the kids don’t need to be wasting their time playing ball in the park in the perfect weather of early May.

They need to be home resting up for shading bubbles on Scantron sheets so they will get the good scores that will get them accepted into a good public middle school so they will have a chance to get into a good high school so they can get good scores on their SAT tests so they can go to a good college and get a good job and life will be perfect.

We all know it’s more complicated than that.  We know, now that our knees are getting tweaky and we go to the gym to maintain our weight rather than to play ball, that those days of playing outside for the fun of it are limited and it seems a terrible waste of the wealth of childhood to cut them short so that our children can focus on the test.

There will be so many tests in the years to come.  Why do we have to put our kids through this high stakes testing sham?   This test they are taking is designed as a diagnostic tool for the schools to assess the efficacy of the curriculum, not a test of an individual child’s achievement.  It’s a joke that the test is being used this way.  It should be a joke, but it’s not, because it is being used this way.

There really are middle schools in Brooklyn that will not accept any students that haven’t gotten the highest score of 4, on both the math and the English test.  This test is a snapshot of what a 9-year-old can, (or is willing to do) at a particular point in time, which may or may not be affected by the weather, the temperature of the classroom, the child’s unexpressed need to go to the bathroom, and whether or not they like what they have for lunch. For 4th graders in New York City, these high stakes tests are an unwelcome initiation to the world of Hoops That Must Be Jumped Through, even though they are ridiculous.

Last year, in third grade, My Kid got 4s on both tests.  I hope she gets 4s again.  But, I can’t be proud, because I know that the test doesn’t prove a thing except that my child was a good test taker on that day.  She got a better score than her friend who reads and writes at a much higher level.

But, her friend is creative and that is something that is no help at all to a child taking a standardized test.

Why are we all cooperating and teaching our children that play is a distraction and creativity is irrelevant?  How is that supposed to help them in the future when their employability will depend on team building and new ideas?

This is an original post to New York City Moms Blog.

Watch this space

I’m taking bets, that I will be up until the wee hours sometime next week putting together a show proposal. After all I did just speak with my puppeteer friend and she’d eager an excuse to get out of Vermont and head to the city to make some art…