So the girlfriend has officially decided to evict Ellie from her womb, and the end of the pregnancy is nigh. The era of hyper-ventilation, mapping of hospital routes, and other logistical emergencies has begun.
The small matter of JP has also to be considered. Always a ticklish subject, this older child with new sibling thing, but in a shared custody family such as mine, it’s rather more complex, I think.
Let’s say JP is with me and my girlfriend goes into labor in the middle of the night. I’ve arranged to bring him to his mother, at whatever point, and she will watch him while I’m at the hospital. Her actions in this regard might reasonably be considered a favor.
Do I need to sketch out how I feel about accepting favors from my ex-wife? For those of you who follow this blog on a regular basis, I do not. For the rest: I DO NOT LIKE ACCEPTING FAVORS FROM MY EX-WIFE.
As to those of you who say I should be putting the interests of my soon-to-be and my first son, well, first, I say–no shit. Which is why I will accept said favor, gratefully–and I mean that–with a smile, a sigh of relief, perhaps even a mass market thank you card with a pithy, jokey slogan printed on it, and a minimal amount of handwritten remarks provided by me.
Yesterday we started you off with puppies in the morning. Today, the furthest thing in the natural world from a sweet innocent puppy: a juggalo. Singing about the juggalette who squeezed him into this world: his mama. Thanks to @insanemomposse (who else?) for posting this on the world wide juggaweb yesterday. Sample lyric:
We ain’t taking nothing for granted
Mom’s lasagna is so good I can’t stand it!
Friday was a sick day for our little guy–a steady fever, and general crankiness. (Much better now, thanks.) He’s now at the point where he grabs onto new words and phrases daily–pointing out an airplane and saying “airplane,” recognizing a number on an elevator button as it’s pressed. My wife keeps his favorite songs, including one by Kimmy Schwimmy called “I Like You,” loaded up on iTunes, and he now calls her laptop the I-like-you.
On Friday, however, he walked up to that machine, and he wasn’t looking for music. “Elmo?” he said, pointing. “Elmo?”
Well, wow. I have explained this before: Our child does not watch television. In his entire life, he’s experienced TV for maybe ten minutes. (Plus some YouTube clips of New York City buses, because buses are his very favorite things, and videos posted by amateur transit buffs are pretty innocuous stuff.) We are not viciously anti-TV; we just want to push it off as long as possible. He’ll get there soon enough.
So, a mystery: Where on earth did he pick this up? Day care? Other kids’ T-shirts? The generally pervasive Elmo-ness of toddler culture, where that red furry face appears on everything from diapers to card games? Unless my parents are sneaking him doses of Sesame Street when they baby-sit, I’m stumped.
Times are tough at the Times, just as they are at all outlets of traditional media, and I say that without the typical blogger-glee. All members of this blog draw their paychecks from the Old School, and speaking for myself at least, I want to continue to do so. I love working at a magazine, love the project, love the length of the articles, the capacity to provide context, the rigor of having standards, and hell, I like that we can pay writers, albeit not enough. If everything gets time-warped onto the intertubes, the phrase that instantly springs to my mind is irreparable disaster, with a healthy dose of searing trauma thrown in.
That said, why does it seem that the institutional posture of the Times with regard to blogs is one of passive-aggressive superiority? For a paper that gives the sense of disliking and disdaining blogs, it certainly does have a lot of them. Would it have something to do with how bad its blogs suck? (Why in the world does the Times need a blog called “Complaint Box?” Who dreamed that shit up? Was it someone who wanted the paper to go out of business?)
Oh, wait a minute, did I have point? Yes. I wanted to discuss this article from the Times’s “Consumed” section in the magazine, which appeared under the headline “Monetizing Motherhood.”
For those of you brave enough to read it, you’ll notice that the article, in fact, has nothing to do with motherhood and its intersection with money. It starts with a very small premise: “blogs written by moms—or, as these bloggers frequently put it, ‘mommies,'” were concerned about new FTC rules regulating financial disclosures on a website. Here’s how it is now supposed to work: if a site is taking money from Big Company A, and simultaneously running a favorable review of Big Company A’s Widget X, blogger J must inform reader Q know that money has changed hands. This seems a good idea.
The problem is that many mommy blogs review mommy- and baby-related products, accept money from said companies, and don’t always reveal this, largely, I imagine, because they actually like the products they’re reviewing (I guess). Fine. This actually strikes me as news, printed in a news publication.
But does anyone see a connection to motherhood and money here? I don’t. I see a connection to mothers and money–but motherhood? Do the women who are actually making money off their blogs represent motherhood, or do they just represent, well, mothers making money off their websites?
Here’s how the article describes the bloggers:
Instead of greeting the F.T.C. announcement as good news for the public, many bloggers saw it as an intrusion into the affairs of the citizen media. It was widely reported that bloggers — regular folk expressing their honest opinions! — could face huge fines (“up to $11,000 per post,” Mashable.com asserted) for inadequate disclosure. Some were offended, even outraged, not least because they felt the guidelines picked on grass-roots new media unfairly. Many seemed to fear “a witch hunt against bloggers,” as Lisa Stone, co-founder and C.E.O. of BlogHer, puts it.
Do we detect a wee bit of sarcasm there, blurring the links of black ink at the old gray lady? I do.
