The Twizzler

Have you been reading Anousheh Ansari’s blog by any chance?  I just discovered it.  She’s a good writer, and it’s fascinating to imagine what she’s experiencing.

http://spaceblog.xprize.org/

(For those of you who don’t recognize the name, Anousheh is an Iranian-American who has paid her own way to the space station.  She is blogging from space, and has only a couple more days up there before the return voyage.)

It’s 3 am.  Take that fact and the title, and I leave the rest to your imagination.  I’ll spare you the pictures.

Amazingly (thank God!) Kenan is still asleep.

Amazingly I kept my own stomach contents down while cleaning up Shana’s.

Ah well, I guess this is what turns me into a man!

Now to try to get some sleep before it’s time to get up.

Cool!  Heritage Park is expanding, and planning on being open year-round.  We’ve bought annual family passes for several years and have often wished it was open more in the fall and winter.  It’s nice to see that happening.

 This was a thrift-store find, and Shana named it Phyllis the Flamingo.  Kenan says, “Tillis Mingo”  Yes, Shana really named it that all by herself!  I did not help.  I don’t remember if it was before or after we visited her Aunt Phyllis in Ottawa in June. 

Today our precious little 3 lb baby girl turned 5 years old.  She’s not too old for pink, as we decorated the house in two-tone streamers.  She wanted to wear this summer dress (and hat!) and I let her until we went out into the cool fall air.  It was a pretty normal day at home, except for the streamers, a nice Honey Baked Chicken dinner with sparkling ‘wine’, and then we had Awana tonight. 

We managed to squeeze in a small gift (yes, another stuffed animal, a pig if you can’t tell from the picture!  We went to a toy store and she picked it up and would not put it down, we bought it secretly) and we also gave her a first allowance tonight.  More partying will happen Saturday with the local Grandma and Grandpa. 

I’m trying to find the balance between privacy and “publicity” (for lack of a better single-word antonym to “privacy”) on the web.  I like having a personal web site and a blog.  They make it easy for family and friends around the world to stay connected with us, to see what we’re doing, to see pictures of us and our kids.  And they help those “long lost” friends I haven’t heard from in years to discover that we’re living down the street from them (as happened earlier this summer with a schoolmate from boarding school).

But then I hear of the dark side of the web.  Of identity theft.  Of pedophiles.  I hear that you shouldn’t be putting personally identifiable information on the web, letting some sick person connect those cute pictures and cute stories with a real person, a school, a phone number, an address.  Should we really be doing this blog?  Should I throw my computer out?  Should the blog and/or our web site be password-protected?  Should we use pseudonyms?

I realised as I thought about it that part of the problem was I didn’t even know what I was trying to defend myself (and my family) against.  I can think of a million worst-case scenarios, but I don’t know the likelihood of any of them happening.  So I started a journey of research.  I don’t have the final answer yet but I’ll share some of what I’ve learned.  If this is something any of you have thought about, I’d really like to hear your take on it too.  Leave a comment!

The first helpful resource I stumbled across was WiredSafety.  This site has a tonne of information, mainly for parents wanting to keep their children safe online.  It’s aimed at parents, educators, and kids who are online, have web sites, IM, blogs, all that.  Actually the parent section seems to reflect the reality that most kids know more about the ‘net than their parents, so a lot of it is educating parents about what’s actually out there.

The really positive thing about WiredSafety is that they don’t advocate getting rid of your computer, or restricting your child’s use of it.  If your kid can’t use your home computer, she’ll be using the one at school where you have NO idea what’s happening.  Instead it encourages parents to talk with their children about computers, keeping the communication channels open, so that the parents learn about computers, the children learn about security and learn that their parents really do care, and so when the child does think something’s happening that shouldn’t be, they’re not afraid to talk to their parents about it.

I found WiredSafety (and other sites) lacking in the area of parents whose children are not yet online.  What can I do now to keep my kids safe?  What are the risks?  Are there some simple things I can be aware of?  Not finding answers to these questions, I emailed Parry Aftab, WiredSafety’s Executive Director.

True to form, her first response was, “the trick is balance.”  But the most useful thing she explained was this:

The real risk is with people agreeing to meet someone,not having someone stalk you down. (Many misunderstand that)

For me whose kids are not yet able to correspond online beyond IM’ing me at work with “AAAJJQQRPP   888IDSK”, that was a relief.  I’ll still avoid putting too much personal information on this blog, just in case the blog is still around in a couple of years when Shana’s getting more active online, but it’s not a major faux-pas if our last name shows up here or a credit card number or something.  Okay, maybe not the credit card…

I’m going to play it somewhat safe.  We won’t (intentionally) use our last names for now.  I didn’t mention our church by name, and if the kids end up going to a regular school we likely won’t mention it either.  I haven’t linked this blog to our home page, nor vice-versa, since it has (a bit) more personal information on it.  But for the next year or two at least, I don’t think we need to be too concerned.  And by that time your computer will automatically sample your DNA and only exact family member matches will be allowed to read this blog.

I thought this was the easy pick at Blockbuster on the weekend, a definite win.  Look at all the big-name holywood actors:  Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, Anjelica Huston, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Owen Wilson…  Those who know me know I’m really not up on actors, but I know most of those names and I’ve loved them in other movies.

What a disappointment!  I spent most of the movie wondering if there was going to be some punchline at the end that would reveal the whole story as a joke.  I think the problem is an unbalanced mix of humour and seriousness.  Plenty of great one-liners from Murray and others, but the serious storylines were too serious to be mixed with that humour.  It reminded me of Sahara, another movie I barely made it through because of how it combined the heart-wrenching subjects of epidemics among the poor and civil unrest alongside the triviality of a constant stream of witty one-liners by the two main characters.

Definite waste of a rare evening when the kids actually got to bed on time!

Sorry for posting two negative movie reviews back to back!  I’m not an overly-critical movie-goer normally, promise!  I just happened to get a couple of duds this time.

I picked this movie out at Blockbuster because I like word plays and because even after reading the single-paragraph description on the cover, I had no clue what it was about.

I’ll speak for myself, but I think Helen felt similarly.  After watching Palindromes I was happy to have watched it because it was different than anything else I’ve seen (and I like expanding my horizons), but I wouldn’t exhuberantly recommend you go rent it tonight.

It follows the life of Aviva, a 13-year old girl whose only desire is to have lots of babies, because they’re cute.  (The scary thing is I could see Shana being like that!)  You see her and her parents and other characters learning some tough lessons through her experience.  The author’s message, though, is that nobody can ever really change.  So although several characters make some strong and tearful confessions that “I’ve changed, I’m a new person,” you can tell they really haven’t deep down.  This leaves you in the end with a rather depressed, fatalistic view of life.

The most interesting cinematographic technique in the movie was its use of half a dozen or so different actresses–of various ages, sizes and races–to act the part of Aviva.  The purpose, I believe, was to show that who you are is deeper than what you look like.  As the viewer, you didn’t grow attached to the main character’s appearance, but her personality (which was the same no matter which actress was playing the part).  I felt that was a neat twist and made an otherwise depressing movie more interesting.

Definitely not for young kids, and don’t watch this for a fun evening at the movies.  But if you want something different and thought-provoking it might be worth it.  Just be prepared for discussions about abortion, sex, right and wrong, and of course the meaning of life.

Out of the middle of nowhere, unrelated to anything else going on around her, Shana blurted out at dinner tonight, “What I want to do with lemons is make apple pie!”

No, we don’t have any lemons in the house.  Nor apple pie.  Nor even apples. 

From time to time I think we will try to put the funny quotes the kids say here in our blog.  To see them all, just click on the category “Kids’ Quotes” and it will group them all together. As this is the first, well, it’s the only one! 

Not to let Shana get all the fame, here are some recent ones of Kenan: 

Eyes –  Cut eyes Out!   Need bandaid. 

Rabbit my apple!