March 2, 2006
February 25, 2006
January 26, 2006
Don’t forget to vote!
You’re too late to vote in Canada’s latest elections so comfort yourself with voting in the Bloggies…
January 21, 2006
Big Brother is watching you…
Google refuses US data request. 21/01/2006. ABC News Online
Good on Google for taking this stance.
December 19, 2005
We think therefore we are…
For the past 5 years since I first joined the ivillage April 2001 expecting club on the internet as a first time pregnant Mum, I have been on the Internet most days checking in with a wonderful group of women. The numbers have shrunk somewhat over the years, our discussion board has shifted a few times, we have even gone private to escape trolls. But we have formed an incredible cohesive group full of very different women due to that one main link: we all have a child that was due in April 2001. It has been a wonderul support network. The past 12 months has been notable for relationship breakdowns and separations and serious family illness in our inlaws. Sometimes all that is needed is for someone to give each one of us a voice…and the internet medium certainly allows for that. Because our real lives are busy and not all of us see many people with whom we can develop friendships such as these. In real life who wants to be phoned at 11 pm or worse 3 am? The reality is that these are the times when those burning parenting questions tend to hit.
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Moms find Safety Net from the Toronto Star at www.thestar.com.
In the middle of the night, something is stirring in Jen Lawrence’s house. Shhh. Listen. What’s that? Not the 4-month-old baby. He’s been fed and is nestled snug in bed. Not the 2-year-old. She’s slumbering, too.Clickety click click. Is that the sound of fingertips on a keyboard? Yes, there’s Lawrence, cross-legged on the bed, laptop perched across her knees, as the screen casts a bluish glow on the infant in his playpen beside her. This is the sound of Jen Lawrence, a 33-year-old Toronto mother, connecting with her community. She can’t see its members, wouldn’t even recognize most of them if they crossed paths in the diaper aisle. But they are out there in growing numbers. They are other parents, mostly moms, and Lawrence reaches out to them about four times a week on her blog, MUBAR, for Mothered Up Beyond All Recognition (to mama.blogs.com/mubar). These days, mommy blogs are multiplying faster than runny noses in a nursery school. They’re taking the parenting discourse to a new level by tackling touchy topics that few would dare to raise in a neighbourhood moms-and-tots group. And they’re doing it in prose that’s sassy and scintillating.Issues like how daunting it can be to bottle-feed in the era of “breast is best.” Moms confessing that even though doctors warn against it, because of increased SIDS risks, they put their babies to sleep on their tummies. And, can you really be a stay-at-home mother and feminist at the same time?As Philadelphia author and mother Andrea Buchanan recalls, it didn’t take long after she started surfing the mommy sites five years ago to realize that “people were all about the dark secrets.” Lawrence is among them. While the former banker and now stay-at-home mom is happy to riff about purses or potty-training or why Tom Cruise drives her crazy, she has also posted serious think-pieces that read more like cries de coeur and emerge out of ideas she has ruminated on for months.Her post in June titled “The Politics of Breastfeeding (or The One Where I Get My Ass Kicked)” was one of several essays she has written for women who, like her, have felt they were “less than” because of their child-rearing choices. She took pains to say she is not anti-breast-feeding, but against breast-feeding no matter what the cost to the mother — something she felt too vulnerable to say out loud in a moms’ group at the time.”I did not like how people questioned my feeding methods,” she wrote. “I did not like how I felt judged. I did not like how I was made to feel guilty when I chose to give up breastfeeding….”There is something very unsettling about being told this is part of a woman-centred, feminist-friendly movement.” Comments flooded in from grateful women who also had felt like pariahs.This fall, an online conversation about babies sleeping on their stomachs that had been conducted below the radar caught the attention of The New York Times. In an article about SIDS, the paper revealed that the blogging world is full of parents eschewing doctors’ orders and doing what feels right. The Times quoted Sarah Gilbert, editor of the Web log Blogging Baby (bloggingbaby.com) saying that once one parent admits it, others come out of the woodwork. Would that happen in a coffee klatch? According to Ayelet Waldman, California writer and mother of four who ended her own provocative blog, Bad Mother, this year, there’s good reason that women are willing to let it all hang out with other moms over the Internet.”They’re not women you have to bump into at school the next day or you have to compete with on a day-to-day basis over who makes the best cupcakes for Valentine’s Day,” she said in an interview in the recent book blog! how the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein. In a recent post on her site, Ann Althouse (althouse.blogspot.com) of Madison, Wisc., offered another insight. “By blogging, I can leap beyond this place and get affirmation for saying things that would only otherwise have gotten me glares and shunning.”You can also connect with other mothers whenever the spirit moves you. While many can barely pry their eyes open for a night feeding, that’s when Lawrence often finds she’s at the top of her prose. She remembers the first time she logged on in the wee hours. “The thing that amazed me was I posted something at 4 a.m. and at 4:10 I got a comment.”Blogs aren’t the only way that those with Internet access are making contact and fuelling debate. The past few months have seen the birth of several websites operated by Toronto mothers. Among them is Wee Welcome (http://www.weewelcome.ca), which got its start publishing guides to baby-friendly GTA establishments.”As a new mom, the Internet was incredibly important to me,” says Jodi Lastman, 35, one of the creative minds behind the site. “I went online instead of doing laundry.”Lastman, who has a 20-month-old daughter, says the response to Wee Welcome’s site launch last month shows that moms are desperate to find each other in cyberspace and then follow up in person. More than 200 members had joined in the first 10 days. And the online dating service for moms has resulted in the creation of 37 mothers’ groups that meet around the country.Lastman says women are sick of mothers being portrayed as two extremes: the thin and perfect Gwyneth Paltrow version or those struggling with post-partum depression like Brooke Shields.Being a parent, she says, is “not wonderful, it’s not horrible. It’s everything every day.”And, thanks largely to the Net, women are speaking out about the truth. “There’s something going on, a voice, a spirit, an attitude and leadership of `get out there.’”
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Jen Maier, founder of Urban Moms (http://www.urbanmoms.ca), which launched this summer, agrees. “We’re tired of corporations and advertisers telling us who we are and how we should behave,” says Maier, 34, and a mother of a 6-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter.”I’ve made decisions as a mom that I know were judged by others,” she says. “But what’s probably the hardest thing and the biggest thing is the guilt and judgment you put on yourself.” Her Urban Mom site, which includes a forum and essays from contributors across the country, including many who have their own blogs, is aimed at bringing together moms with different viewpoints and parenting styles.Parenting author Ann Douglas, 42, started her blog, The Mother of All Blogs, in May, 2004, and says it has given her a new window into what mothers are thinking. Douglas, who lives in Peterborough and has four kids, believes cyberspace is bringing together the polarized and defensive positions that have for so long been dividing mothers over issues like attachment parenting, Ferberizing and co-sleeping. Something about perusing the personal stories on blogs can open your eyes to new ways of doing things and help you understand attitudes you might never otherwise be exposed to in your daily life, she says.While there are plenty of blogs that read like scrapbooks and don’t go beyond the recitation of events or daily frustrations, Douglas says those can be useful to readers looking for solace rather than dissertations. There’s a flip side to how anonymity makes it easier to be honest on the Web. It’s also easier to be mean.That’s why some bloggers, like Lawrence, don’t post photos or use names of family members on their sites. It took her months to get up the nerve to activate the “comments” feature on her blog. Now, she likes the way the feedback has helped it evolve into more of a dialogue than a journal. But it can get a bit personal. Recently, a reader who took issue with one of her posts, scorned her for having “way too much free time to be babbling and babbling on your blog page.”One incident can also be a lightning rod for those with an agenda. “Moms can get very high and mighty in terms of what they believe and feel,” says Lastman. But on the other hand, controversy is the nature of the Web. “It’s supposed to be an interactive medium. It’s a community, it’s not a brochure.”On Wee Welcome, “the articles are supposed to be a beginning point for a conversation.”In blog!, Ayelet Waldman explains why edge is an inherent part of the online world. “There is a tone that you have to adopt in order to make your voice heard amidst the general cacophony,” she says. “You have to make it pop. And an easy way for it to pop is to make it snarky.” Though opinionated and diverse and far-flung, mommy bloggers stick together when the going gets tough.Last January, after a New York Times story referred to their blogs as an “online shrine to parental self-absorption,” they reacted fast and furiously.”Good morning, I’m humourless and resentful, as are many moms who blog,” wrote the San Francisco mother who blogs under the banner Fussy (http://www.fussy.org). “We over-scrutinize our children’s every excretion and whore out adorable anecdotes about them just to get attention for ourselves!”Suburban Bliss (http://www.surburban bliss.net) said: “In the end, what this article shows me, once again, is that we can’t win no matter what we do. If we aren’t worried about our kids, we’re neglectful. If we think (and write) about the things our kids do, we’re called hand-wringing obsessives. “Hooray New York Times for capturing the essence of mothering.”And at MUBAR, Lawrence mused about why blogging about parenting should be considered any more self-absorbed than blogging about a trip to the North Pole.Miriam Peskowitz, author of The Mommy Wars, captured the essence of blogging for many moms in a recent posting on her blog, Playground Revolution (http://www.playgroundrevolution .com).”On our blogs, we write about the work that fills our days,” she wrote this month, while in the final weeks of pregnancy with her second child. “It may read like boring trivia, but it’s the stuff of everyday life, and it matters. We have joys and regrets, happiness and anger. These lives don’t come with fancy names or titles, but they’re honest and they’re real. We’ve created an interesting and connected world. We’ve ended the awful isolation that can affect so many moms and dads. We’re here, we’re real, and we come from all walks of life.”
Andrea Gordon’s parenting blog will begin at thestar.com early in the new year.——————————————————————————————
December 1, 2005
Update your Firefox!
MozBackUp is the first program you should download if you haven’t got it on board already so you can save your Mozilla settings in case the new version of Firefox leaves a little to be desired with you favourite must-have extensions.
Then go to the Firefox page to get v1.5 which has some radical new changes.
