3/9
• Beanie and Rilla march into the room hand in hand. “We’re going on a long and perilous journey to seek a nice monster who’ll growl at us.”
3/10
• Today’s readaloud interrupted by 1 leaky diaper, 2 bouts of spit-up, 2 toddler squabbles, 1 desperate need for snack, 1 agonizing tiny bruise. (more…)
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Favorite twittered moment this week: “I have just been informed that Rilla is ‘Daddy’s dust mote and Beanie’s polka dot.’ ” (more…)
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I was updating my contact page just now and found myself writing “for the fastest response, try Twitter.” I wondered why that would be the case—why am I more likely to reply immediately to a tweet or DM, but it can take me weeks, months even, to respond to my email?
(I know: weeks, months, that’s ridiculous. But if you’ve written me, you know it’s true. Oftentimes, the more important the email—the more attention I’d like to give to the reply—the longer the delay.)
Then I realized: it’s Twitter’s 140-character limit that spurs me to the immediate response. It’s short and sweet, just the facts ma’am. If someone has a question, I can answer it likethat.
A thoughtful and well written email is better than a quick tweet, of course. I’m not saying I’d want to ditch email entirely—heavens no. I relish a nice long letter from a friend or reader. I love writing nice fat letters back. I wouldn’t want to confine my side of any correspondence to a tweet-sized box. But for a quick answer to a simple question? There’s a kind of liberty within the stricture of the form.
(Is that the same reason people are so fond of haiku?)
I had already fallen in love with Twitter as a source of quick answers. Throw a question into the twitstream and the answers leap at you like flying fish. Solid answers, too; keepers. But I hadn’t thought about the converse, before: that if you have a question for me, catching me on Twitter may be your best bet for an immediate answer.
I would love to explore this thought further but I have a boatload of email to answer.
Too funny—after this tweet log posted, I thought, Yikes, I need to change the setting so it doesn’t post the @replies. But so far all the comments on this post have been about @reply tweets!
The log is too long, though. Since my primary aim in autoposting these is to preserve tweets for my own records, I’m going to publish the posts with a “more” link. Twitterlog is after the jump. (more…)
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My Twitter widget was being persnickety (seems to be a widespread problem today), so I nixed it from the sidebar. But I know a bunch of you are dropping by to see if I’ve twittered any baby news, which I most likely WILL do when the ball finally gets rolling, so here’s the link to my Twitter page for all my friends on babywatch. 🙂
(And thanks for all the well-wishes!)
I’ve mentioned before that what I love most about Twitter is how well it lends itself to quickly chronicling tiny moments of our day: the funny quote, the one-sentence sketch of a moment in time. Days will pass where I have no time to write a proper post, but I can manage a quick tweet about something I don’t want to forget. And I would forget, if I weren’t writing them down. My friends Dave and Julianna used to (maybe still do) keep a piece of paper stuck to their fridge as a place to hastily jot down the hilarious or profound things their children would say. Whenever we visited their house, I’d find myself drawn to that sheet of family treasure. For me, Twitter serves the same purpose.
Here are a few of the snippets I’ve tweeted in recent days:
Beanie: “Mom, if there’s one thing I won’t ever NOT want to do, even when I grow up, it’s play boat in a cardboard box.”
It’s going to be fun to visit her house when she’s grown up.
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I ordered Jane some much-needed clothes from Lands End. Too bad I accidentally had them shipped to my parents’ house in Denver. Doh.
A cool thing happened after I tweeted this. I got a follow notice from @LandsEndChat and when I clicked through to check it out, I saw a message addressed to me! The Lands End rep was kindly offering to help me correct my error. I wrote back to explain that it was too late for Lands End to help—I noticed my mistake when I checked the UPS tracking info. The package shipped last week and will likely arrive at my parents’ house tomorrow. But still—I have to say I think that’s a pretty savvy way for companies to use Twitter: track people’s gripes and reach out with proposed solutions. Well done, Lands End.
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Breakfast at my house: “Wonderboy! We DO NOT throw whales in the kitchen!”
Wonderboy begs to differ.
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Beanie on embroidery: “My favorite part is the pleasant pop!” She means when the eye of the needle pops through the fabric.
When Alice read this one, she IMd me ROFL—it had reminded her of a certain knitting-needle-popping-a-diaper incident from one of our family rendezvous years ago.
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I am pretending I didn’t just hear one of the girls scold Wonderboy for licking the cap of the milk jug. Ew.
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Oh that was so nice! Cuddling Rilla as she fell asleep in big girls’ room, while Scott read aloud Sign of the Beaver to us all.
I should write more about this. I am loving our new bedtime routine. Scott puts Wonderboy to bed first, and when he’s asleep, the rest of us gather in the girls’ room. Rilla’s new bed is on the way, but for now she is sleeping on that little futon I mentioned last week. By day three of the switch, she was on board and looks forward to her nursing time every night. I curl up on the futon with her, and the other girls are tucked in their beds, and Scott reads aloud to us. It’s been four or five years since I read Sign of the Beaver to Jane. It’s every bit as gripping as I remember. From my nest on the floor I can see Beanie’s eyes grow bigger and bigger as Scott gets to the exciting parts. I know this routine will shift again in a month or so when there’s a new baby in the mix, but right now, I am savoring it like crazy.
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Happy little girls: Rose’s fave jeans had big hole in knee. I turned them into shorts and made doll skirts out of the cut-off pant legs.
and the follow-up:
Said Bean: “This skirt is perfect for Kit b/c it’s the same thing her mom would have done during the Great Depression!”
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Rilla has spent the past 20 min painstakingly stripping leaves from the ficus & hiding them in the piano bench.
This is a prime example of something I’m glad I wrote down because I would surely have forgotten all about it ten minutes later. It was the funniest sight to behold; she was so serious and focused as she plugged away at this self-imposed task. Yes, I ought to have stopped her from de-leafing the houseplant, but I was having too much fun watching her walk back and forth, stuffing leaves into the bench. It was like she’d found her vocation in life.
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Overheard: 13yo: “I wonder why mirror neurons for yawning are so sensitive.” 2yo, shrugging: “I don’t know.”
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Oh my heart: Rilla, after oohing over the fleece slippers Jane made me, runs to big sis: “You make some small ‘lippers for me? Pease?”
Needless to say, Jane did. And what adorable lippers they are.
…you start getting worried letters from kindhearted readers who want to make sure you aren’t back in the hospital or something. No worries; we are all well; I’ve just not been feeling very talky. Am spending a lot of time working in the yard—our mini-butterfly garden is really coming along, particularly the hundred billion weed seeds which were apparently lying dormant in that dry, dry soil until we oblingly began to water them. Now Beanie and Rose and I are out there every day, ruthlessly yanking up wee baby weedlings by the dozen. Ah, the blissful peace of gardening…
And I’ve had lots of Wonderboy stuff to occupy me: preparing for his IEP meeting tomorrow (yes, on Election Day, because I am a glutton for punishment, I guess), working some new PT exercises into his daily routine, reading Mother Goose on demand a hundred times a day…have I mentioned that he is awfully fond of the two Rosemary Wells/Iona Opie Mother Goose collections? As in, he wants them read and/or sung cover to cover approximately once every hour? Rilla, of course, approves wholeheartedly—except she wants it known that they are HER Mudda Doose books, and hers alone, contradictory evidence in the form of inside-front-cover inscriptions to Jane and Rose notwithstanding.
Speaking of reading, I’ve been kept quite busy, of course, with my ever-growing stack of Cybils picture book nominees. I think we have about 35 of them checked out from the library right now, and at least 20 more have arrived via post as review copies from publishers. I don’t know where I’m going to put them all. We are plumb out of shelf space. But reading them is fun, for sure. Ask Beanie. She’s way ahead of me. I’ve read about a dozen nominees so far, and I think she is upwards of thirty.
I am posting mini-reviews at Twitter, by the way, if you’d like a peek. More like mini-summaries, I guess I should say: these are my plot notes to help me keep the 175 nominees straight. I am finding I quite enjoy the challenge of boiling a summary down to 140 characters. You know brevity really IS a challenge for me, ahem.
Speaking of Twitter, you can always look for me there if you’re worried because of bloggity silence…the link above goes to bonnyglencybils, but my main Twitter profile is just plain bonnyglen. I often post short (duh, it’s Twitter) notes during the day about what’s going on around the house. I really love being able to look back, later, at these microglimpses of our days. They are like candid snapshots, the kind no one knows are being taken, the kind you linger over in the photo album because they are so filled with rich detail of what was really happening. Not that my tweets are necessarily “filled with rich detail,” detail being exactly what is hard to squeeze into a 140-character box, but I’m just going to assume you know what I mean. And sometimes a tweet does capture a detail you wouldn’t have been likely to record in any other medium.
