It all started with a link to these towels, decorated with two little aqua birdies and “Love! It is all u need!”

The next thing that happened was a big heavy box arriving yesterday from Rachel of Doing My Best (of Crappy Day Present fame):

Do you see the small pink writing on the top photo? “This is a surprise full of surprises.” And then note the blue writing in the bottom photo: “There can never be too many!” Which was soon to feel MUCH MORE SIGNIFICANT.

I opened the box, and:

Re-enactment

Ha ha, she got me the bird towels! SEVERAL, it looks like! Ha ha! That Rachel!

We were in the middle of the “homework and clean-up and dinner prep melee” time of day, so I thought I’d better wait and unpack the rest later. But I sent a quick direct message to Rachel, saying the box had arrived safely and ha ha bird towels thanx!

I went back to the kitchen…and something caught my eye:

Wait

And then:
 

What’s this?

And another, and another—a sticker on every bird towel. And SO MANY bird towels! A WHOLE DOZEN in all, coming from a WHOLE DOZEN different people! [It took me awhile to come up with a pleasing way to do the links there. Finally I picked towels blindly one by one out of the box and did them in that order, except for Anne and Joanne who are at the end because their towels were in the photos. There.]

So when I said above that “The next thing that happened was a big heavy box arriving”—NO, that was NOT the next thing. The ACTUAL next thing was Rachel organizing a SECRET SURPRISE.

OMG

INTERNET BIRD TOWEL VALENTINES.

And there was MORE:

ZOMG

A wrapped box from another internet friend, and a note that another internet friend had contributed toward shipping costs, and a note that others had wanted to participate but the number of towels was getting daunting; plus a pile of Crappy Day Presents from Rachel, plus Hershey bars with almonds. Does the size of the photo make those Hershey bars look like regular-sized bars? DO NOT BE FOOLED. They are the BIGGIES.

THANK YOU, everybody. This was a REALLY fun surprise—and I was COMPLETELY surprised! Happy Valentine’s Day to YOU, too!

[Edit: Also see Rachel’s post on how it came together on her end!]

My friend mentioned how she taught her kindergartner his phone number, and I thought it was a great idea: She made their phone number the password on her cell phone. To play one of the games he likes, he has to type in their phone number. (Her phone’s password isn’t to keep people out, it’s just to keep her from pocket-dialing.)

I was thinking this could be used for other things, too, like teaching kids their home address, or how to spell their names. Our home computer has a password for each kid to keep them from accidentally or on purpose messing up each other’s stuff. It’s easy to re-set the passwords, so we could change them to be whatever we wanted the particular child to be memorizing: a phone number, a name, an address. (We could make Rob’s “Mom and Dad know best”!)

In my dream last night, going to the beach with friends:

Me: What a perfect day for it.
Friend: Yeah. Was it two years ago we came here last?
Me: I think so. Yeah, two years ago makes sense. I remember I was all freaked out that you were coming with us.
Friend: Huh?
Me: Yeah, I was all [*self-mocking tone*]: “Aiieeeee, we’re going to the beach with BEYONCÉ [*parody of anxious jazz hands*].”
Beyoncé: Ha ha! [*rolls eyes, whacks me with towel*]

I have a question about dressing girls.

Elizabeth wears a skirt almost every single day (her choice). In warm weather, she wears shorts or bicycle pants or cropped leggings under the skirt, so that she can still play normally without having to be careful of her skirt.

In winter, she wears tights or full-length leggings with her skirt. To me, it feels as if leggings are sufficiently covering, but tights might not be. Leggings are opaque enough to completely cover underwear, and tights sometimes aren’t quite as opaque, so that’s an issue if the goal is for the underwear to be hidden. But even when the tights are completely opaque, they seem….more underwear-y, somehow. And that does seem to be the societal perception, if I think about how we’d perceive it in the same situation with a grown woman. Individuals may differ on whether they think leggings are pants or not, but we’re not even having that discussion about tights.

So some days Elizabeth wears shorts or bicycle pants over her tights, but then that is a lot of layers, and it can be a little challenging in the bathroom. Other days I don’t worry about it (especially since she’s only 7) and she just wears the tights. But she is a bit of a “flip upside down” kind of girl, and when I see the tights I think, “Uh oh, her skirt,” but when I see leggings I don’t as much.

So what I’m curious to find out is what other people are doing for their daughter’s clothes. Are tights enough for decency, or do you add bicycle shorts as well?

I had a stomach bug over the weekend that left me feeling VERY GRATEFUL for everyday non-queasy life AND got me caught up on some reading! Also, before I got sick I watched a movie:

(photo from Amazon.com)

Beginners (Netflix link) is slow-moving/indie. I especially loved Mélanie Laurent, and also now I want a Jack Russell terrier. (Like the sweet one in the movie. Not because of Mélanie Laurent.) I really liked the whole movie, and it was fun to see Christopher Plummer again. Now I feel like I’m leaving Ewan McGregor out if I don’t mention him, especially if I’m even making a fuss over the DOG! I liked him too.

(photo from Amazon.com)

I finally read Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. I resisted for awhile because it sounded like I would hate it, but then I felt like I really wanted to know what everyone was talking about, so I read it. At first I thought I wouldn’t be able to get through it, because I hated Amy so much at the beginning: if her first diary entry were a blog post, I would have clicked away after a few sentences. But by the end, I didn’t hate anyone. It’s a little hard to give a full review, for two reasons: (1) I don’t want to give anything away, and (2) I accidentally found out a key plot point BEFORE reading, so I’m not sure what I would have thought about the book if I hadn’t known that part ahead of time.

Here’s what I liked best about the book: I found it riveting and couldn’t wait to get back to reading it. It can be hard to find books like that.

I was distracted by the way SO MANY characters in the book had double letters in their names just like the author. Based on the novel’s theme of in-jokes AND all the in-jokes in the acknowledgements, I’m guessing that was on purpose—which is a little irritating for those of us who think in-jokes should only be used with those who are in on them, because otherwise they’re off-putting, unfriendly, and deliberately excluding.

(photo from Amazon.com)

My Mother Was Nuts, by Penny Marshall. If you like autobiographies, this was a good one: a nice mix of insider stuff, name-dropping, getting in her side of the story, etc. I liked and admired Penny Marshall more after reading it, and now feel like re-watching her stuff. I’ll bet she and Carrie Fisher have the same plastic surgeon: when I looked at her author photo on the back, I thought, “Goodness, she looks a lot like Carrie Fisher!”

(photo from Amazon.com)

The One I Left Behind, by Jennifer McMahon. This one made me mad. It’s about a serial killer. The chapters alternated between “back then” and “now” in a way that was supposed to increase the tension but instead just made me cranky and inclined to skim. Many sections ended in faux cliffhangers: “There was A KNOCK AT THE DOOR!!!”—oh, it was just a package being delivered. “Behind her was A MAN!!!!”—oh, it was just the neighbor getting his mail.

There’s also a whole series of cutting incidents that seem to be intended to be erotic, but I couldn’t identify at all so they just seemed odd. And it seemed like people who COULD identify would probably be trying to avoid such material, and those who had the POTENTIAL to identify ought not to be exposed to it in that way, so it was hard to see the value of it.

By about a third of the way through, I felt like I really had to know what happened, but I didn’t want to have to read the book to find out. I tried skipping ahead, but it wasn’t that kind of book. So I just read fast and resentfully and got it over with. And then the ending was unsatisfying: I was left thinking, “Wait, but what about…?” and “But that doesn’t work with….” and “But in that case, wouldn’t they have….?” and so forth. And the serial killer’s motivations/reasons are so pat, it’s irritating—the serial killer version of “the butler did it.”

(photo from Amazon.com)

Marbles, by Ellen Forney. I liked this one a lot. I saw it mentioned in a magazine shortly before Christmas, and it looked likely to be my kind of graphic novel, so I added it to my wish list and Paul bought it for me. It was indeed my kind of graphic novel. It reminded me of Alison Bechdel (Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, Dykes to Watch Out For). The author has bipolar disorder, and this is the story of her diagnosis, symptoms, and treatment. Gosh, that sounds depressing! But it’s also funny and interesting and informative. Right after reading it, I ordered a used copy of another of her books, Monkey Food.

Elizabeth told me a rather long story yesterday about which children of her acquaintance had birthdays in what month, and then Angela mentioned on Twitter that birthdays in her office were heavily weighted toward certain months, and that got me curious about whether certain birth months are more heavily weighted over the entire population. I could look it up, but then I realized I’m mostly interested in OUR population. And it was fun doing that “Guess what number I’m thinking of” poll awhile back.

So let’s have a poll for “What month were you born?,” to see if we’re evenly distributed around here or not. The poll will be in the righthand margin. As I understand it, those of you reading on mobile devices can’t see it, is that right? Is that why some people put their poll votes in the comments section instead of in the poll? I poked around but don’t see any way to fix that issue, other than “Go home and take the poll on your computer.” (If anyone else has solved it, let me know and I’ll see if I can solve it the same way.) [Poll closed; see results below.]

[Edit: Ah ha! Jessica‘s comment sounds like exactly what I need! Let’s try THAT: now the poll MAY OR MAY NOT be in the post itself!] [Edit again: No. I see it in html, but not in the post. Continuing to work on it.] [Nope, still not working. I’ve read half a dozen posts describing how to do it, but all of them describe an iframe situation I don’t see in my own html. In the meantime, several commenters have mentioned that if they scroll down, they can click on “view web version” and see the poll that way.]

Poll results for “What month were you born?” (1110 votes total):

I am trying an experiment: I’m cooking one new thing per week and making the children try it. The experiment came about to try to fix three major issues:

1. I’d like the children by the time they leave home to be physically able to force themselves to eat food they don’t like (the “Keep offering it and they’ll eat it!” method never did work out for us, but now they’re all old enough for the “Eat it anyway” method)

2. Edward’s food pickiness may not be worsening his anemia but it isn’t helping it either, and we’d like to see if we can find more foods he’ll eat

3. I’m so bored cooking dinner, it makes me want to drink

Here are the ways life has been improved by this new way of doing things:

1. It really is kind of interesting (bordering on fun, but I wouldn’t want to go quite that far) to cook something new, though “during the worst hour of the day” is perhaps not ideal timing for it

2. It feels good to feel like we’re working on the children’s food-eating training, even if so far we don’t seem to be making any measurable progress and maybe all we’re doing is teaching them that trying new things always leads to not liking it

3. Paul thinks he doesn’t like any meals except the half dozen he always eats (hm, I wonder where the children get that picky eating, hm hm hm, what a mystery), but as it turns out he really likes the new foods, and he also likes coming home from work to find a dinner ready for him (normally I cook for the kids, and then Paul and I make our own dinners later: eating dinner around the table as a family makes us wish we weren’t one)

4. I cook stuff I like, so my dinner is made too

5. Since none of the kids eat the food, I have lots of leftovers for my lunches

Here are the ways life has been unimproved by this new way of doing things:

1. When I spend a couple of hours researching, shopping for, and cooking a new meal, and then the children don’t eat it, I feel like laying waste to all the lands

2. The more time I spend doing cooking and cleaning in general, the less happy I feel with my role in life: I start feeling grey and drudgey and like I’m in servitude to an endless cycle of unappreciated work that leads nowhere and results in nothing of any lasting value (I had not been sure which way this one would go: lots of people feel MORE fulfilled and happy when they do more/better cooking/cleaning)

3. It takes about 5 seconds for Paul to start taking cooking/cleaning for granted, I think because those gender roles are so easy to slip into; when I see even the first edges of that happening, I feel like laying waste to all the lands AND I feel less happy with my role in life

4. Because this is new, and because the children normally are allowed to have a snack in the evening if they’re hungry, we are dealing with a lot of new-rule explaining, accompanied by whining, forgetting, and fresh shock upon hearing that no, after eating one bite of dinner, you do NOT get to have a snack.

I would say that overall, the costs and benefits of the experiment are about equally matched: I am both happier and less happy. But I can see the long-term effects going either way. If, for example, Paul gets even one single millimeter further on the “Wow, I LIKE having a wife who cooks me a hot dinner and then does all the dishes while I go have free time!” spectrum, that will make a kilometer difference to my drudgery spectrum. One. more. millimeter.

I completely shop for Rob in the men’s department now. He is 5’10”. He wears the same shoe size as Paul.

Fit on some things is tricky: he’s guy-height, but not necessarily guy-width. He can wear a men’s medium or large in t-shirts, but if it’s something SHOULDERY like a jacket or a button-down shirt, it can look weird. I found a nice brown hooded jacket at TJ Maxx, but because the material was kind of stiff (leather-like), the jacket looked bizarre on him: it was the right length, but about a foot too wide.

I am not enjoying the waist/inseam pants-measurement thing. He has a drawer full of mixed sizes because I can’t figure out what size he should be wearing: 30/31, 30/32, 31/30, 31/31, 31/32. Aiieee. His pants are always needing to be hitched up, not because he’s too cool for pants that fit him but because his mother has not yet conquered this challenge. (I have a MEASURING TAPE. Why is that insufficient to determine his size??) (Yes, yes, he could try things on. But most of the time he’s not with me when I’m shopping, or I’m ordering online.)

I was wondering why now it seemed weird/gross to buy him underwear, when it didn’t used to. I think it’s because the wrapper now shows a grown male model looking pleased with himself. Ick.

You know how kid sizes are all weird when you’re transitioning from the toddler sizes to the 4-16 sizes? There’s some weird overlap, so that some 5T is the same size as 4, and some is bigger and some is smaller, and different brands are all different sizes and use all different size names, so for awhile you have a drawer containing 4-5T, XXL, 5T, 4, 4-5, 4-6, XXS, XS, S, etc. It is similar going from the 4-16 kid sizes into the men’s sizes. I had expected to go from size 16 (the highest size in boys) to size S (the smallest size in men’s). But no: some brands for boys have 18-20, and some brands for men have XS, and in some things we went right from 16 in boys to M in men’s, so there must be some overlap. This new information helped me because William (age 11, size 14 in shirts) wanted more sweaters, and there were some size S men’s sweaters on 70% off at Target that I think are going to fit him.

One upside of shopping in the men’s department is that the clothing styles continue on pretty much the same as in the boys’ department: cargo pants, graphic tees, solid long-sleeved t-shirts. One of my friends tells me that shopping in the women’s department for appropriate clothing for a middle-school girl can get a bit more challenging.

I finished May We Be Forgiven (by A. M. Homes) last night and, as with many books, I can’t figure out if I DO or DON’T recommend it. But a telling detail is that this morning I am disappointed that I finished it, and I don’t really feel like starting a new book.

(photo from Amazon.com)

I would like to digress and talk about photos of ourselves, because I think that’s a subject near to a blogger’s heart. Here is the author photo I kept looking at on the book jacket as I was reading the book:

(photo from the jacket, by Marion Ettlinger)

And here is the photo on Wikipedia, which I saw when I went to find out more about the author:

(photo from Wikipedia, credited to David Shankbone)

I do empathize, and I suspect we ALL do, with the feelings that cause an author or blogger to use something more like the first image. Here are two reasons not to:

1. The shock of seeing the second image AFTER the first is far more severe than it would have been if I’d only seen the second. The second photo would have been a normal picture. But because I was familiar with the first picture, the difference between the two CRIED OUT. If a blogger is ever planning to be seen in public, it would be better to be frank from the very beginning.

2. I liked her far, far better when I saw the second picture. I think people think to themselves, “People will only like me if they think I’m thin and pretty.” But the thing is, I think we admire people who are thin and pretty, but that most of us are also a little put off by it until we get to know the person. Also, photos made to look thin and pretty may carry an unintended attitude the photographed person isn’t aware of: the photographed person is thinking, “Whew, this angle hides my double chin!” and not noticing that in order to hide that chin they’ve had to make themselves look bitchy or vapid or silly or unfriendly or unapproachable or unrelatable.

When I was reading the book and seeing the first picture, I had the author summed up as a girl in her twenties, right out of a writer’s MA program after attending expensive prep school; grew up rich; now kind of a privileged brat trying to shock people just for the sake of making them uncomfortable. I was a little cranky that it turned out she was making it work, because I’d prefer to see such people taken down. When I saw the second picture and read on Wikipedia that the author is 51 years old, I had to completely re-evaluate my impressions of the book. (Paul: “Well, how long ago was the book written?” Swistle: “2012.”)

I think when people choose pictures of themselves that they find flattering, they do know that they’re trying to alter the way people see them—but what they don’t realize is that they could be altering it with a net effect of WORSE.

Anyway. On to the book. I knew from the flap that there would be some violence at the beginning, so I was braced for it. I read the first scene of violence, which was only described by a character, not witnessed by the narrator, and I closed the book. Nope, not reading this. A minute went by. I opened it up again and kept reading. I came to the second scene of violence, which the narrator does witness, and I closed the book even more decisively. No. I’m not reading this book. Five seconds passed, and I went back to reading.

For me, continuing to read was the right decision: the really bad stuff was over after that, and was tempered considerably by later events.

Another reason I almost stopped reading is that this is a book that employs a method I’m sure has a name but I don’t know what it is. I would call it “unreliable narrator”—which is funny, because I just Googled that and it IS what it’s called. This reminds me of when I was trying to figure out what “AKA” could stand for, and I thought, “Well, it’s kind of like saying ‘also known as’….oh.”

Anyway, you can’t trust the narrator to tell you the truth, and I generally HATE that. There are two Agatha Christie books with unreliable narrators, and I will never read them again because that makes me so angry. But it can make for a compelling plot, because you keep thinking if you keep reading you’ll find out what’s REALLY going on. And there are enough hints in this book that even though many things are left non-revealed, I didn’t end up feeling tricked. It’s not that the narrator LIES, it’s more like he’s not processing information correctly HIMSELF, so he can’t quite relate it accurately to us either. I ended up with a feeling of “Boy, humans sure do kid themselves a lot about their own behavior and/or sure do tell the story one-sidedly to others.” (Another issue close to a blogger’s heart.) I did, however, feel like the narrator’s issues were too severe to have been so easily resolved, and there were a number of places where I’d been pretty sure we were working up to a big plot twist but then was irritated when nothing ever happened with it.

From my author assessment, you will have received the correct impression that there are parts that I feel the author wrote To Be Shocking. But I wasn’t SURE about it: that is, I’m still not sure the author DID write them “just to be shocking”; she might have written them because that’s how she writes and that’s how she saw the story going. In descriptions of her writing, the word “fearless” keeps coming up. I could go along with that.

Both plot and dialogue seemed unreal to me, but it was hard to tell how on-purpose that was. I probably thought “What?” a thousand times. I kept reading parts aloud to Paul, because I couldn’t figure out if (1) the author had no feel for dialogue, or (2) the author was trying to be funny, or (3) the author was trying to Show Something with the way the people were talking, or (4) kind of all three.

Also, if I hadn’t read on Wikipedia that the author had a daughter, I would have said she not only didn’t have kids but had no experience with kids. The kid part comes across as a 1980s fantasy movie where the single career woman with no interest in children gets stuck with someone else’s. (But I liked it, the way I also liked those movies.)

I don’t know, I don’t think I’m telling this well, because if I read this description I would be like “NO WAY IS THIS BOOK FOR ME”—and yet it WAS for me. When I was reading it, I kept being eager to get back to it, and that doesn’t happen with very many books. I don’t want to read it over again, but I want there to be MORE of it—two more volumes! three! four! MORE ABOUT THIS STORY. That seems like recommending.