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praise

By / October 5, 2008 / 10 Comments

Last week I did two interviews about Hold on to Your Horses. Both interviews were very complimentary to me and to the book. It was heady to have so many intelligent people telling me how amazing I was for creating this book for my daughter and then sharing it with others. Yet, after both interviews I could not wait to get home and change back into my mommy clothes instead of my professional clothes. I was subtlely disturbed by something about the interviews and it took me awhile to figure out what it was.

The cumulative message from the interviews was “we know you’re an amazing mother because you wrote this book.” As if writing a children’s book is a good measure of parenting prowess. The fact that I wrote a children’s book and shepherded it through publication says things about my writing and publication skills. It says nada about me as a mother. I would be much more comfortable receiving praise about my mothering skills from someone who watched the hours I spend snuggling and cooking and remembering food preferences and dropping off at school and supervising homework. Those are all tasks that will never win me a television interview, but they are far more important to being a good mother than writing a book is. In writing Hold Horses, I’m only doing what hundreds and thousands of other parents do every day. I am using the resources I have to help my children grow. It seems wrong that I’m getting praise and attention merely because I’ve got a flashier set of resources to turn to the aid of my child.

It feels wrong for me to seek out this praise and yet the praise is an inevitable part of promoting this book. I need to continue promoting the book. I still want to be able to pay Angela what her work is worth. I still believe that this is a story that can help other families as well as mine. I guess I just have to keep going, but I wish I could share the praise with other mothers who work even harder than I do with less reward.

Daily To Do list

By / October 2, 2008 / 3 Comments

The following is a list of things that I feel I should be doing every day, times are approximate and they’re in no particular order:

Sleep 8 hours
Fix and eat 3 meals 2 hours
Supervise homework time 40 minutes
Bedtime snack/story time 30 minutes
Reading with Patch 20 minutes
Talking with Kiki 30 minutes
Talking with Link 30 minutes
Talking with Gleek 30 minutes
Talking with Patch 30 minutes
Helping Link practice physical skills 10 minutes
Listening to Link read aloud 20 minutes
Household chores 1-2 hours
Gardening/outside time 1 hour
Exercise 30 minutes
Answer email 1 hour
Process and ship new store orders 40 minutes
Other Schlock work 2 hours
Blog 30 minutes
Spend time with Howard 1 hour

If you total all of that up, it comes to 22 hours and 40 minutes. This leaves me an hour and 20 minutes per day to manage all those little incidental events like driving kids to and from lessons, sibling conflict, Parent teacher conferences, grocery shopping, keeping in touch with friends, relaxing. My expectations of myself are impossible. I know they are. About the best I can do is hit most of the important things on most days. And yet I some days I still feel like a failure because I didn’t do all of it that day.

Parent teacher conferences

By / October 1, 2008 / 2 Comments

Sometimes parent teacher conferences are nothing more than me and a teacher smiling at each other and agreeing that we both like my child. That means everything is going well. Other conferences consist of me and the teacher puzzling over a problem and outlining a solution. Then there are the conferences where the teacher and I spend time commiserating, but neither of us knows how to get a handle on the issue. In today’s conferences, I had one of each. Patch is taking to kindergarten like a fish takes to water. Link has been marking time at school without working so that he can get home and do the things he really cares about. His teacher and I have figured out how to corner him and require him to work before he plays. Gleek has two teachers who love her like I do, who see the same issues that I do, and who are as baffled as I am about how to help her with them. The rapport is nice, solutions would be nicer. Unfortunately I think that the solution is ultimately developmental. As Gleek matures, today’s major issues will disappear. They’ll probably morph into tomorrow’s issues, but if I spend time pondering that I will curl into a ball and cry.

In short, I’ve now got a newly expanded parenting “To Do” list. The thought makes me tired.

Podcast

By / September 30, 2008 / 4 Comments

Yesterday morning, while I was waiting to go on for the television interview, I had a wonderful conversation with Dr. Paul Jenkins. He read Hold on to Your Horses and liked it so much that he asked me to participate in a podcast on the topic of impulsivity in children. That podcast took place today.

Podcasting was a much more relaxing experience than the television interview. With the interview, Julie and I had to try to cram an entire conversation into a 7 minute segment. Most conversations take longer than that to really get rolling. This podcast is just over 20 minutes long, which means there was time for the conversation to evolve and grow. There was time for one person’s comment to spark an idea in another person. It was a relief to not always have to be the one speaking. I could sit back and listen to Dr. Jenkins or Dr. Adams while I gathered my thoughts. This was my first podcasting experience, so I made some newbie mistakes. I sometimes made unnecessary/distracting affirmative noises when others were speaking. Other times I didn’t speak clearly or used gestures to carry part of my meaning. On the whole though, it is a good podcast which contains excellent thoughts for parents of impulsive children.

You can find the audio file at parental-power.com.

Mixed up thoughts of a Television Interviewee

By / September 29, 2008 / 11 Comments

I didn’t post yesterday because I spent most of the afternoon trying not to think about being interviewed on television the following morning.

I don’t have a clip to link to yet, but I will have one. They’ll be sending me a DVD and Howard will excerpt my segment from it and post it for me.

It was fascinating to be an observer in the studio. I got to see how the cameras worked and how the scenery was shifted around for the various segments of show.

Everyone was very friendly. It had a small-town feeling, which I’d expect from a local talk show. A more widely broadcast show would have been higher stress for everyone involved. I spent most of the morning just following a co-host as he clued me in to where I needed to be and what to expect.

Then suddenly it was my turn. Someone called out “30 Seconds!” some one else dashed up to me with a mike. I had to thread it up my shirt and clip it into place. I was in my seat with only seconds to spare before Julie started talking.

I only had 7 minutes on camera. It feels like it went lightning fast. I forgot to mention the stores in Salt Lake who are carrying my book. I feel bad about that. It was kind of surreal. The front of my brain was completely engaged with answering questions and trying to make sure that the most important information was covered. The back of my brain was thinking “should I look at the camera? But I’m not sure where to look. What do I do with my hands. Ack. That gesture felt awkward. Maybe my hands should be in my lap. Oh that was a good segue into where to buy books, but I think I should save that information for last. My hair is tickling my arm, but I don’t think I should touch my face or hair on camera…” And then it was over.

I haven’t watched the segment yet, even though I have the video my neighbor made. I’m afraid to watch it. I’m afraid that when I do, I’ll see all the ways I could have managed the interview better. I’ll want to be able to word things differently. I’ll see all my little ticks and habits that everyone has without realizing it. I’ll be able to hear all the places that I put in pointless space holder words like “um.” Right now the only feedback I have is Howard and my neighbors telling me I was great. I’m afraid to face the mistakes. But I’m going to. I don’t know if I’ll ever do another live television interview, but if I do, I want to have learned from this one.

The guest co-host for today’s show, Dr. Paul, has a weekly podcast. He invited me to be a guest on the podcast tomorrow. This is a much lower stress appearance for me. I’ll have more time to make sure the important information is covered, and I won’t have to worry about how I look, just how I sound. After the podcast goes live, I’ll have a link for that as well.

For now I’m changing back into my mommy clothes and I’m going to curl up on a couch to watch Blues Clues with Patch.

Stories That Bind

By / September 27, 2008 / 4 Comments

Reminder: Don’t forget to go check out my short tale Stories That Bind over at Lorelei Signal. There are only three more days before the current issue expires. You can also vote for the story to be included in the “Best of Year” anthology, or just donate to the story and the magazine. The story will continue to be available in the archives after October 1st, but I’m not sure you’ll still be able to vote for inclusion in the anthology.

The chocolate factory of the evil monkey mastermind.

By / September 26, 2008 / 6 Comments

We had to order more magnet sets to fill the orders that came in with the orders for Teraport Wars books. The magnets do not arrive at our house in neatly bagged sets. They arrive in a huge box of loose magnets. I’ve found that the best way to turn loose magnets into sets is to first stick magnets back-to-back in pairs; Biohazard/Schlock Mercenary, Corrosive Agents/Naked Singularities, High Voltage/Flammable, and Radioactive Emissions/Microwave Lasers. I then line up four stacks of pairs and put four pairs per bag. Creating the system took some thought, but the implication is boring and repetitive. So I decided to pay my kids to do it for me.

Gleek and Link have a bookfair at school next week and they wanted money to spend. So they happily sat down to start sticking magnets together. They started strong, but their enthusiasm waned after about 15 minutes. Fortunately at this point two of my backyard neighbor’s kids and Patch showed up. I set up stations for each of the kids and then I hovered over them all as a quality control officer. My neighbor’s kids thought that this was the coolest job ever. In fact, my neighbor’s 9 year old son began spouting trivia about Schlock Mercenary cartoons, complete with quoted dialog. This startled me because I’m pretty sure he knows the strip better than we do.

After awhile someone mentioned that putting the magnets together was similar to a chocolate making process that they’d watched on a How It’s Made episode. All of the magnets were instantly transformed into chocolates and the children became chocolate factory workers. But this was insufficiently interesting because they then decided that the chocolate factory was in fact owned by The Evil Monkey Mastermind (Howard). I supplied them with the word “minion” and the game was good to go. They spoke in nasal evil voices as they clipped magnets and put them in bags. They particularly liked the phrase “evil monkey mastermind” (it is fun to say, you try it) but they sometimes spoonerized it. Howard happened to walk through just as someone was saying “evil master monkeymind.” Howard objected to having the brain of a monkey and admonished the minions to get it right next time. It turns out that the way they all became minions was by eating the poisoned chocolate. After eating poisoned chocolate, you become a minion for life and have to make more chocolate to catch more minions.

The minions worked for over an hour until all the loose magnets were bagged. Then I paid them and they ran off to play while I double checked all the bags to make sure that none had duplicates. Only two bags had errors, now corrected. The minions did good work and they all begged to be able to do it again sometime because it was the best job ever.

Long week almost over

By / September 25, 2008

The books are all stamped and ready for Howard to draw. For the first time all week, I’ve reached the afternoon feeling like I have done enough. There are still piles of things left to do, but I’ve already accomplished the big “Must do today” list and have started on the “As soon as possible” list.

In hindsight, this week was a very hard one. Last night I got to the end of the day, knowing that I’d done an excellent job managing everything the day threw at me, and yet I was still tripping (literally) over tasks that were incomplete. I was so tired, I didn’t even have energy to feel guilty about being grouchy at the kids. The fact that the kids very obviously earned the grouchiness, also helped with the not feeling guilty.

Today has been better. Tomorrow will be as well.

Mission Accomplished

By / September 24, 2008

Hold on to Your Horses and the Schlock books can now be purchased from both The King’s English Bookshop and Sam Weller’s Books in Salt Lake City. This includes copies of the The Teraport Wars. All of the books are signed. I’m not sure if there will be any signings at those locations, but I have begun the necessary communication to make that happen. Now we cross our fingers and hope that the books sell so it can be an ongoing consignment relationship rather than one where the store politely hands back our books at the end of the 3-6 months. There was an author picking up her books a the same time I was dropping mine off. She did not look thrilled to have only sold one book in six months.

Now that I know that consignment relationships with independent bookstores are fairly easy, I’m going to need to do more research. I should definitely see if I can place some books in the area where Angela lives.