I've finally figured out who Carl Paladino looks like

A vote for Carl Paladino is a vote for hating Christmas. And that's all I have to say about that.

Losing my community

When Thalia started preschool, I worked mostly from home. It allowed me to drop her off sometimes, pick her up sometimes, and through that process, connect with the other moms (and the occasional dad) of the class. We traded notes about our kids' tantrum phases while they ran around on the front lawn together, or gossiped about which mom was hosting which extravagant 3 year-old birthday party.

While I was never the stay-at-home parent who could run the fundraiser and bake nutritious, gluten-free whole wheat organic brownies for the class and host the Halloween pumpkin decorating party, I was there. At least long enough to say, "good job on the brownies! Don't ever ask me to make them."

With Sage, it's a different story. Because I am a full-time working parent.

I take her to early drop-off, and I've yet to pick her up. I don't know the parents. I wouldn't recognize her classmates on the street. At night she tells me about her day, describing children I have never heard before. I feel oddly, uncomfortably detached from her world in a way that I couldn't have imagined.

It seems unfair somehow that she even has a world without me at all. She's three.

I feel like That Mom, the one who works. You know, the one with the medium-length brown hair? And the black boots? Oh, you might know her if you saw her. Maybe around the neighborhood.

Tomorrow night is her class potluck. I'm picturing myself in a room of strangers who already have connections, awkwardly injecting myself into the conversation with shallow banter over cheese cubes. They plan after-school playdates and weekend lunches, and I hand out my sitter's number, assuring them that she'd love to get Sage together with your daughter, any time at all! 


I love what I do. I can't imagine not working. But there are times the balance just seems off.

Can the NY Times write about mom blogs without snark?

Rob Walker did this week.

Read Monetizing Motherhood in the NYT Sunday Magazine column Consumed, my totally favorite favorite-est column. (Although I do adore Virginia Heffernan and Amanda Hesser and God, I love Randy Cohen.)

His point:

Mommy Blogs +
Product Reviews +
Ads +
Disclosure of Gifts or Payment =

Sponsored Empowerment.

At least I think that's the point. There's a [-] before Disclosure in the visual but that doesn't support the article. Or all the excellent quotes from my personal hero, Lisa Stone.

I think overall, it's a great piece. What do you think of it?

National Thank a Blogger Day

This morning I woke up to about the nicest thing ever. Especially compared with Nate snoring next to me, and the dog farting in the living room. It was a note in my inbox from a reader (hi Elaine! Link fixed now!) simply thanking me for my blog. For no reason at all except she felt compelled to write it.

I kind of want to cry.

Lately, it's been hard to keep up with posting, let alone responding to comments, reading other blogs more, and connecting with the people who come here and make this more of a community than a blog. I've been feeling overwhelmed and guilty up the whazoo. Not just because I feel I owe it to my readers, but because I owe it to myself.

It's a luxury to find time to simply write about what I want in this little space; something that isn't dictated by a client, isn't compelled by advertising, and isn't going to be edited by someone who red-lines my overuse of em dashes and parentheses.

(See what I mean--em dashes and parentheses. My favorite!)

In a lot of ways, this blog keeps me whole. As my mom has always said since I was little, Liz can't not write. And so a private email sent simply to let me know I'm connecting with someone through my writing, well, wow. That's a really powerful thing.

Then I realized, I should be doing it more. I should take a minute and go out of my way tell a blogger thank you.

There are so many I could choose, but right now I want to pick Rebecca Woolf of Girls' Gone Child. When I think about bloggers who are Writers, I think about her.  I think she blogs for all the right reasons. You can tell how much time and effort she puts into what she does, from the photos right down to every exquisite word. She is talented, she is consistent, she is beautiful inside and out, and she is bursting with love as a parent which explodes all over her pages in inspiring ways.

Above all, she makes me want to be a better writer.

Is there a blogger you want to thank today?

---
edited: Hey, look: we got a hashtag! #thankablogger if you're doing it on twitter.

To anyone who has ever complained about not getting the birth plan they wanted

This morning, I woke up to the BEEP of a text message, and wondered who the heck was texting me at 6AM.

Turns out, it was Kristen Chase, directing me the best Twitter stream ever, starting about 9 last night and ending around 2.

 

If you know Kristen, her amazing sense of humor (even in a crisis, clearly), and how she's about the best friend, business partner and human being that anyone could ever want in their lives, you'd be shedding copious joyous tears right now too. 

The world needs more awesome, committed, loving mamas in the world, and once again, we have one. So here's to Baby #4 Kristen. I vote we name her Vesta. For the firemen who delivered her.

What? Blindsided!

The first day of school, I was so proud. Maybe even as much as Thalia was. I packed her lunch, I got her fed and dressed in weather appropriate clothes, I walked her down the street singing, I ushered her into the classroom (on time), I kissed her goodbye, I chatted with some parents, I hopped on the subway to work.

A new routine. It was--dare I say it?--fun.

A week later, I got Sage off to school for her first time too. Again: Pride.

Gushing, flowing pride, oozing out of every pore of my body.

But suddenly I've come to the crazy realization: I have to do this every freaking day. EVERY FREAKING DAY. No one told me this! How could this be so unexpected?

I have to pack a lunch every day. And find two outfits for them to wear every day. And fight about who gets the pink spoon in the oatmeal every day. And make a sandwich every day. And. And. And.

Exhaustion. Gushing, flowing exhaustion, oozing out of every pore of my body. 

I think I'm just going to sign a stockpile of tardy slips at the office in advance. Might save us some time in the morning. 

The encyclopaedic 3.5 year old

Where milk comes from
You put vanilla and you put it in a cow and then you milk it and then you get milk.

Where babies come from
Your tummy.  It grows inside the mommy and then it goes into the daddy.

Where rain comes from
The sky

Where electricity comes from
The computer

Where shooting stars come from
It just pass by you and you see it and it comes from the sky when it's the nighttime

Where doggies come from
The house

Where kitties come from
The house

Where bunnies come from
Outside

Where apples come from
The bowl with holes.

Where grandmas come from
The house

Pondering life's great mysteries and the alchemy of vanilla milk.

Healing.

Yesterday, Nate and I got word that a relative of his had committed suicide together with her boyfriend. She was 23.

She's someone I had only met once. I had no relationship with her. Nate had no relationship with her. But people who care about her are people we care about. 

Writing that condolence note to her parents just about near broke me.

You know you're a mother when you put yourself in the shoes of every parent who loses a child.  I can't help but think that she used to be a baby in someone's arms too. A toddler who took her first steps for the camera too. A little girl who went to her first day of kindergarten too.

All I wanted to do yesterday was get the hell out of the office, go home and hug my kids.

We watched Nickelodeon together. We sang songs. We talked about school and birds and bullies and magic tricks and ravioli. Sage fell asleep on the couch at 7:30. Thalia stayed up way too late.

God, I love them.

On ethics and integrity. The real kind, not the pretend kind for your media kit.

I don't get in "blog wars" on this blog. Never have. Well, maybe once I kind of did, and it was political, and I semi-regret that but not for the reasons you think. Mostly because I emerged with my favorite shoes scuffed and I broke a nail and missed the first ten minutes of Sopranos over it.

I am passionate, I am feisty, and I am opinionated--but I always have always encouraged thoughtful discussion and dissent. I can't control my readers entirely, because I think they have a right to strong opinions too--however I do my best to set a respectful tone in comments and to encourage people to attack the idea and not the person. I fail sometimes. But I try.

I can see why the some of the bloggers participating on the Corn Refiners Association Blog Tour were hurt this week. Now, not all of them were. Several commented here or emailed me and kindly thanked me for the way I handled my post. (Gracias MomStart.) Some others just felt beat up or were attacked on their own blogs. That bums me out.

However feeling attacked is not the same as being attacked.

I never told people to take down their posts, or to pull out of Mom Central (although several bloggers did of their own accord after receiving the CRA pitch), or to boycott HFCS even.

If you think I did any of those things, I'd encourage you to please read my post carefully.

My point, aside for not being on Team HFCS, is simple: We must own our words, particularly in our brand relationships. And in order to do so we should make sure we're informed to the degree we can be. 

Part of that is recognizing that when you participate in a controversial campaign, whether it's promoting HFCS "facts," vaccinations, circumcision, formula practices or politics, you have to be prepared to potentially take some heat and face some dissenters. People like Mom Slant, PHD in Parenting, Queen of Spain do that every day.

That's the crazy thing about the nature of controversy.

It's...controversial.

In any case, I feel terrible for the participants who feel bad the same way I felt terrible for the Nestle Family bloggers. I don't think they're all whores and sell-outs, and I will never condemn them for what they put in their bodies or in their children's bodies, or even for what they choose to endorse if they can stand behind their decisions. Should I need to extend an olive branch, I'm doing it now.

Now this is where normally my post would end.

Bye! Have a great day. Be back tomorrow with a funny story about my kids.

And then I read this last night: A post by Stacy Debroff, CEO of Mom Central, who, understandably dismayed by the level of animosity towards her client and this campaign, takes me on by name, attacks me personally, calls me a borg (yes, a borg), and attributes all sorts of things to me that don't sound familiar at all.

Let's just say, ask me about the Lindberg Baby sometime.

Skipping past the cute passive-aggressive digs like how I'm a good mom "by night," I really had half a mind to ignore it.  It's all such a load of garbage complete with convoluted Star Trek metaphors, and can be easily put to bed just by clicking to my actual post (should she have had the integrity to link to it in the first place). I decided to sleep on it.

I woke up clear-headed, with the idea of going there, leaving a thoughtful comment to ask readers to decide for themselves whether her accusations of me were true, reasserting that I never once pressured anyone to take down their posts despite her accusation to the contrary, and moving on.

Turns out some bloggers had already said those very things.

That's when she started deleting any dissenting comments. 

Like these from Crunchy Carpets and MilehiMama.

Plus one by Clark Kent's Lunchbox that was pretty funny. One by backpacking dad. And who knows what else that was posted after I went to bed.

And then Stacy Debroff closed comments on her post completely, leaving up only the two that agreed with her.

So.

Wow.

To recap:

On a post all about accusations of group-think and first amendment rights and encouraging dissent and not attacking bloggers, she attacked me, attacked any blogger who shared my views, took down dissenting comments, then closed the discussion.

This all from "America's most trusted mom."

The deleted comment that really angered me the most was this one from Mindi Cherry of Moms Need to Know, a woman I've never met, but who seems reasonable and smart. She was a former Mom Central reviewer who decided to pull out of the network after receiving the CRA pitch.

[edited to add: Stacy has since amended her blog post with a note that reads Of note: late last night I regrettably had to close and take down all comments to ths blog post as it came under sustained attack along with profanity and trash-talking by those supporters of Mom 101 and HCFS. 

Three of those comments are posted here. They are neither profane, nor trash-talking, nor were the other two that I saw.]

In any case, whatever accusations are being lobbed at me, I continue to own my words. I'm proud of my post yesterday, and 99% of the comments that it generated too. I'm proud of how the discussion unfolded, and how even dissenting commenters and representatives from the CRA were allowed to speak their minds. I'm proud of remaining intellectually honest and refuting junk studies, even ones that support my POV.  I'm proud that the word "douchebag" didn't come up once, not even by me. (A record!)

I'm proud of how we as a community, through discussion and debate, can grow and learn and maybe come out smarter. Not just by talking about how we should allow dissent, but by actually allowing it.

I think that's the real meaning of integrity in blogging. And that's the best of what the community can be. 

If that makes us a Borg, then nanu-nanu.

Or whatever.

I never watched Star Trek.

Brands and blog tours - not always so sweet.

I guess I'm super behind the times in just having learned that there's a promotional mommyblog tour right now for the Corn Refiners Association via the marketing consultancy, Mom Central. A few dozen bloggers, paid in gift certificates, listened to a webinar and then posted the promotional information disseminated by the CRA and their paid experts.

Gah.

Although in fairness, the CRA twitter feed informed me that it was not promotional.  It was educational.

You know what's educational? This New York Times editorial by Michael Pollan.

And this one.

And this one. 

I am totally not down with high fructose corn syrup (or Corn Sugar or Mercury-Laced Sweetener or whatever they call it now) and have been writing about it for a while now. You can thank Nate in part for that. He's my agro-idealism hero.

If you don't believe that HFCS bad for you, then believe it's bad for the environment. If you don't believe that, then believe that the corn subsidies are bad for us economically.

So while I can't blame an industry for trying to stay in business in the face of oh, pretty much anyone with half a brain who knows that foods processed within an inch of their lives are killing us slowly and that there's no need to have HFCS in bread, ketchup, or canned peaches--I find the CRA's entire campaign predatory and misleading. Case in point: This (infuriating) "advertorial" [*link fixed] on Mom Central, (also covered at BNET who doesn't like it much either) which includes claims like High fructose corn syrup, like sugar and honey, is natural.

Natural? Last I checked, there was no High Fructose Corn Syrup Tree.

All this said, I'm not a scientist. I'm not a nutritionist (or they'd kick me out of the club for malpractice) I can't cite as many sources as a lot of you can to defend my distrust of high-fructose corn syrup.

Also, I love Coke. And Pepsi. So full disclaimer: I'm a total hypocrite.

But.

This whole thing is raising all sorts of questions for me about blogger-brand relationships, once again. Because it used to be that it was just some KY Jelly product hoping for a mention. I feel like this kind of lobbyist-created advocacy changes everything.

Alas, I can't change the world. All I can change is me. (Or us?)

So I ask myself, what's our personal responsibility when we accept campaigns like this?  What's our responsibility to our readers beyond the little FTC disclosure bit (speaking of which, some bloggers disclosed compensation, some didn't).

Is a review the same as an endorsement? Is reprinting press materials verbatim the same as a "review?"

If we are to engage on blog tours and brand tours and sponsored posts, what do we owe our readers, exactly?

Then I wonder, what's a consultant's responsibility in disseminating the information to the bloggers they work with? I was saddened to learn that on the Mom Central advertorial post, the author is identified as an MD, but not as a paid consultant for the Corn Refiner's Association, which the BNET article revealed to me.

I see that as intentionally misleading. I don't like it.

It makes me think about the big ol' Nestle Family twitstorm earlier this year. What was Nestle Family's obligation to their guests when Nestle boycotters took issue with the event and started challenging the bloggers there? If we use a hashtag or accept a free trip--or even a gift certificate--are we now spokespeople for the brand?

Really, what is the marketer's obligation to protect us as publishers or marketing partners, even as they are trying to sway us as consumers? And how can we insist on it?

Too many questions, it's hurting my head!

Personally, I would start with just making sure a blogger understands the outreach to begin with. One blogger on the HFCS tour wrote (no link out of respect)

The professional speakers used a lot of technical scientific terms and words that rather confused me,  but ultimately the important message I learned from them is that there is no significant difference between HFCS and table sugar. 

Judging from quite a few of the other posts I read, they also didn't seem to understand much more than the simple talking point "HFCS and table sugar are the same." And they didn't seem to research the issue much beyond what they were told by the paid endorsers before creating their posts.

One blogger confessed apologetically on her blog after her comments got heated:

We only know what we [were taught by the CRA]. I actually was thinking about doing more research after doing my post as I am not educated enough on this topic to really say how I feel about it in all honesty. 

Educational indeed.

Now surely a blogger can't be held responsible for every action of every company we recommend. We all have different levels of understanding of brands and products, and different things we care about. I always feel defensive when I see bloggers being attacked in comments for whom they choose to endorse. Frankly, dig into most multinationals and there is some skeleton in some closet somewhere. If not right in the foyer. We have to pick and choose our battles, and my battle may not be the same as yours.

But--and I've said this many times before--I believe we all need to own our words.

And I do think we have an obligation to understand what we're posting about and who we're advocating for--not just when it's paid, but especially when it's paid.

This week, a whole team of bloggers got paid in gift certificates by a multi-million dollar lobbying organization so that when concerned parents hit the web and Google High Fructose Corn Syrup, they'll get a bunch of posts from "trusted moms" saying HFCS is just like sugar! Don't cut it out any more than you cut out honey! It's fine! It's NATURAL. Doctors told us so.

I hope it was a really good gift certificate.

-----

For the follow up to this post, please see On ethics and integrity. The real kind, not the pretend kind for your press kit.

Yo Grabba Grabba

Last night I took the kids to the super expensive but totally worth it Yo Gabba Gabba! Live show at Radio City. Brobee! Foofa! Drea de Matteo! Wine for the adults! Really, what's not to love?
Until the balloons came down.

The balloons that my girls had stared at through the entire first act once they noticed the giant nets tethered to the ceiling, just hoping that one might come their way.

"They won't make it to us," my dad said, calculating the trajectory from the center of the ceiling to the far reaches of the left aisle where we were seated.

"Depends which way the fans are blowing," I mumbled, trying to scrape up some optimism.

While the balloons cascaded down, I did the math - there were plenty balloons for all the kids in the orchestra seats. Until I realized that parents were grabbing AS MANY BALLOONS AS THEY CAN! GRAB THEM! GRAB THEM ALL! TACKLE THE CHILDREN! THROW AN ELBOW! ARGHHHHHHH!

You would have thought they were hiding cash money in those balloons with the way parents were racing for them. Like, dammit, we paid a lot for these tickets. We are going to get our money's worth. IN BALLOONS. 

I saw infants sharing lap space with two or three dubiously procured balloons. I saw parents waving a half dozen in their hands, jumping up and down as if they had won the lottery.

As I turned fro the total balloon mayhem back towards my girls,  I watched Thalia's face devolve from pure joy to utter despair. There were no more balloons in the nets. All the balloons were taken.

The sobbing started (oh no! Not the sobbing!) and I tried every terrible parenting trick in my book.

Don't cry Thalia, sometimes we don't get balloons. Life isn't always fair.

Thalia, really, we don't cry over balloons. Look how much fun we're having! Remember the part when Toodee was hiding?



Don't cry Thalia, maybe they will give them out after the show! We'll look after the show, okay?

Want another sip of my Coke, Thalia? Sugar!


Oh Thalia, please don't cry -- if we don't get one here, we'll get one tomorrow. A big one. A pink one - you like pink right? They don't even have pink here!

And then I gave up. Because as much as I want my kids to learn that life isn't always fair, this wasn't the time.

I took my crying five year-old in my arms, raced down the aisle and grabbed the first mom I saw holding more balloons than children. As nicely as I could, I pleaded, "Crying child here. Any chance you have a balloon to spare?"

And wouldn't you know it, she did. Bless her forever.

We took good care of that hard-won balloon. I hid it under a jacket the entire second act (the kids behind us were eyeing it greedily). I raced after it twice when it escaped into the aisle. I juggled it--and Sage, and the popcorn, and the jackets--three blocks back to the subway then straight to Brooklyn.

*POP*

It lasted about 45 minutes. But no one cried.

I suppose it is better to have loved and lost a balloon than to never have loved one at all.

Trying to talk about Cancer above a whisper

One of the best moments in the brat pack classic St. Elmo's Fire is when the preppy Mare Winningham character introducing her family to rebel Rob Lowe at a dinner party. Her mother has this habit of whispering words she doesn't like to say. So she'll ask, "Did you hear about so-and-so?" Then she'll pause, look around, finally leaning close into another guest to whisper dramatically, "Cancer."

Yes, you can laugh. But don't laugh too much. Because that's kind of me. 

I am more superstitious than I care to admit. I don't talk about the things that scare me most, I don't confess my deepest fears about my kids, and I don't write about diseases so much.

I think it's a horrible thing, actually. And it's not how I want to be. There are a million causes I stand behind and scream about at the top of my lungs (don't ever ask me to promote the store rhyming with Schmallmart on this blog, ahem) but I recognize that I sometimes stop short when the cause is medical. It's like, if I don't talk about it, maybe it will go away.

Well I've tried that with breast cancer, and so far I've failed.

1 in 8 women will get breast cancer.

That's a lot of freaking women.

I'm crying as I write this. Like I said, I'm not good at writing this stuff. And I'm not good at thinking about how close to home that really hits. Because if I conjure up 8 women in my life that are important to me, then imagine one of them getting breast cancer...well you can see why it's something I'd rather not do that often.

So here's why I am forcing away tears and pushing through my sheer terror about saying cancer above a whisper, and writing about it anyway.

My friend Susan Niebur of Toddler Planet, aka Why Mommy, is a brilliant blogger (seriously briliant - she used to work for NASA) and yes, a breast cancer survivor.  And she told me to.

Her post In the Name of Awareness was one of the Blogher Voices of the year, only partly because the semi-final judges were me and Tanis Miller, and we each, coincidentally, scored it a 475 out of a possible 100 points.  It's a must-read. Because Susan is so freaking rational and brilliant about how to help beat breast cancer.

And what Susan says is that wearing pink ribbons and making people aware is kinda not helping enough. Same as me not talking about it is not helping enough.

What is helping is research.

So what she'd like us to do is Join the Avon/Love Army of Women which means you'll get emails so you can participate in research and online studies. It's free, it's easy, and it really does make a difference. Then you can pledge to blog for breast cancer today and share the decision like I just did.

This is a big deal for me.

It means I'm going to get emails about breast cancer all the time. So I have to think about it. And do something about it. Maybe even get better about (eek) talking about it.