MamaBlogga

Ryan offered to let Hayden call Nana Jane the other day, but Hayden wasn’t interested at first. A few minutes later, he grabbed Ryan’s phone and started asking for “Nana! Nana!”

So Ryan dialed his mom and gave the phone to Hayden. His mom answered: “Hello?”

“‘Yo?” said Hayden.

“Is this my little grandson Hayden?”

Long pause. “Uhhhh . . . I sink so!”

Thank you, gentle readers—you have spoken. And since I know you’re waiting with bated breath, here’s the results from our five question survey on blog ads (winner below!). Figures here have been rounded and may not total 100%.

Do you notice ads on blogs?
Yes—35%
Sometimes—62%
No—4%

Do you mind ads on blogs?
Only if they’re annoying—65%
Always—15%
Nah—12%
If they’re irrelevant—8%

Do you feel ads on blogs detract from the blog, its content and/or its professionalism?
If they’re irrelevant—81%
Never—12%
Always—8%

Where do you notice ads on blogs you read?
Right sidebar—21%
Within posts—16%
Left sidebar—16%
Above post text—14%
In the footer of a post viewed in an RSS reader—12%
Above the header—11%
Below posts—10%
I don’t notice ads—1%

Where do you find blog ads annoying or disruptive to your experience?
Within posts—34%
Above the header—20%
Above post text—20%
Below posts—7%
I don’t find blog ads annoying or disruptive—7%
Right sidebar—5%
Left sidebar—5%
In the footer of a post viewed in an RSS reader—3%

Now we know. Thank you to everyone who participated!

And the winner of the $20 Amazon gift certificate: Romie of Romie’s Rants. Congrats; a gift certificate will be winging its way to your inbox soon!

Happy birthday, Jai!

Some of you know that in my “day” job, I’m an Internet marketing blogger. Occasionally, I come across something cool enough in my line of work that I have to share it with you here.

Last week, a Google-watching blog, Google Blogoscoped, reported this week on features coming up for Blogger—and a lot of them are pretty cool. Like other beta features (a search box, future posting), they’re currently available on the Blogger Draft site.

The latest features, ranked by order of coolness (IMO):

• Comments form embeddedable below the post. Can you believe it? Soon (well, now if you want to switch to Blogger Draft) even Blogger blogs can have the comment form right on the post page, rather than a “Post a comment” link. Google Blogoscoped explains how to get this feature on Blogger Draft now: go “to Settings -> Comments, and in the Comment Form Placement segment check the “Embedded below post” box. Click Save Settings to approve.”
• Integration into Google Webmaster tools. A link in the Dashboard takes you to Google Webmaster Tools. Now, you may not be familiar with Webmaster Tools (and if not, let me know and I’ll be happy to write about it!). The short story here is that Webmaster Tools helps you to interface directly with Google to see any problems with your site in the search engine index, to see keywords people use to find your blog in search results, and to see their click data (though I still recommend using a separate analytics package like Google Analytics). If you don’t want your blog listed in search engines, this isn’t really as useful .
• Exporting and importing your blog. Not only will this make it WAY easy to backup your blog regularly, it may also make it easy to move to a new blogging platform if you so choose. Posts, comments, etc. will be downloadable as XML files. This is under Settings, as Import blog and Export blog.
• A new post editor with new image handling. Google says, “When you upload an image to the new post editor it will appear as a thumbnail in the image dialog box. That way, you can upload several images at once, and then add them into your post at your convenience.” Very nice.
• Star ratings. Personally, I don’t find this one as interesting, but it could definitely be useful for getting feedback from your readers on what kinds of posts they like. It adds a five-star rating system and readers can rate the post. You can then see the average rating for each of your posts. This feature is under Layouts, at Edit at your Blog Posts element. Select the Show Star Ratings box.

If you don’t want to switch between regular Blogger and Draft, you can now also make the Blogger Draft site your default dashboard. But if you don’t mind switching, you can make these changes in Blogger Draft now and still post from regular Blogger with the changes intact.

If you always want to stay on top of new beta-stage features for Blogger, head on over to the Blogger in Draft blog and you’ll always be in the know!

I came across a Wall Street Journal blog post this week on a study showing fewer mothers “opt out” (a term I haven’t heard used before, but okay) of working after the birth of their children. There were a number of insightful comments pointing out potential flaws in the study.

There was also a good discussion on “how can we justify the institutional and social investments made in these women with specialized professional degrees who don’t use them?” with lots of well-reasoned answers (my answer: being overqualified to raise children and choosing to guide and raise our own children makes us a drain on society?)

But that wasn’t the comment that really got under my skin. It was a response to a mother’s anecdotal observation about mothers in her child’s preschool class:

[from the original comment] “In my daughter’s preschool class of 18 kids - maybe 4 or 5 moms work. I am one of two that work full time. In my immediate circle of friends that I met while on maternity leave - I was 1 out of 7 women to return to work. Four years later and I am the only one working. These women are former lawyers and professionals.”

[this anonymous person’s response] There must be a lot of key parties in your neighborhood!

What do these woman talk about with their husbands besides the kiddies? No wonder married men cheat!

I hesitate to say anything because, well, from this comment it’s obvious that this person has absolutely no understanding of anything they mentioned, and not just parenting—everything from human nature to marriage to fidelity to working. But I think there is a pervasive attitude of “What do you do all day?” underlying this comment and society’s perception of stay-at-home mothers.

But let’s take this one point at a time.

“There must be a lot of key parties in your neighborhood!”

A key party is one of those parties held by swinger-types (men put keys in the bowl, women take them out and go home with the owner of the keys). What that has to do with the rest of the argument is beyond me, since apparently everyone in the neighborhood is a SAHM—and I’m pretty sure the premise of a key party isn’t to have an interesting conversation. (And who says that working or staying home has any impact in this area anyway?)

“What do these woman talk about with their husbands besides the kiddies?”

Underlying assumptions here: children are boring; men couldn’t possibly be interested in the daily adventures of their children; any and all jobs are more interesting than raising children and better conversation fodder.

In all the words in my vocabulary, “boring” isn’t one I could apply to my child (soon to be children). Granted, I’m not going to argue that every single day is filled with excitement, interesting activities and new milestones. I do get bored sometimes during the ten to twelve hours I spend with Hayden.

Frankly, however, when I worked full time my job was way more boring. I enjoyed it to an extent, but spending eight hours in front of a computer screen has a bit of a stultifying effect on pretty much anyone. My husband works four ten-hour days a week, and I have a hard time getting more than 10-15 minutes of description about each day out of him (and he’s not the taciturn type).

I’m actually not a SAHM; I work from home (WAHM, I guess) 10 hours a week. But even now, while I enjoy my job, it’s not always interesting—and very rarely is it worth talking about with Ryan, who doesn’t know very much about my field anyway.

Maybe this person has a fascinating job and can regale crowds for hours with tales from each day at work, but the rest of us living in the real world almost always don’t. And even if we had things that we found interesting happen during the day, odds are good that our spouses don’t work in the same field and wouldn’t necessarily find them interesting.

On the other hand, fathers have a bit of a vested interest in the wellbeing of their children. If they can’t stand to hear the highlights of the previous ten hours for at most 30 minutes (and that’s if no one else says anything during dinner), then they should probably be subjected to it for that very reason.

Oh, and since this person asked: my husband loves to hear about my day with Hayden. Perhaps once a week, we’ll talk about my job. I try to get him to talk to me about his job, but he usually is in decompression mode during dinner, and doesn’t want to talk until later (or he’s so eager to talk that he’s already told me everything by the time we sit down).

Aside from Hayden, we talk about news, politics, philosophy, history, psychology, sociology, finances, investments, literature, television, films, etc. You know, the things that most other married couples talk about. Guess what? I might be a mother, but I didn’t go put my brain in the toy box.

But here’s my favorite part of the comment:

No wonder married men cheat!

Yeah. Let’s do an informal survey: if you’re a married man, would you cheat if your wife subjected you to hearing about your children? Otherwise boring dinner conversation?

No? How strange.

Just so we can be fair with the stereotypes, here’s my perception of the “professional” couple without children’s dinner conversation: . . . . Oh wait, they’re both still at work.

Wow, it’s been a while on the pictures front. And after all those posts about great picture posts!

All these pictures were taken last Friday.

Hayden is a weirdo.

Where on earth does he get this from?

Oh.

And by popular request, my belly, as of a week ago (34 weeks/6 weeks till my due date):

Today I was the rude one at the doctor’s office. Hayden and I were sitting by the television (because the first thing Hayden will tell you about the doctor is “Doc’tor? Wats deetee! [watch TV]!”). Another mother was checking in and her two children came to sit by the TV, too.

The older child, a boy about five or six, sat with Hayden on one of the little kiddie benches. The younger child, a girl about three years old, started picking up and moving the other kiddie bench a couple inches at a time, dropping her weight on it with each step.

It was one of those omniscient mommy instinct moments—I knew this wasn’t going to end well as she approached me. But I was trying to read a really great article (which I’ll probably write about soon, if I can find it on the Internet, or I’ll have to wait until I can photocopy it), so I didn’t pay quite enough attention.

Sure enough, within seconds, she hopped the bench right onto my foot.

“Ouch!” I said. “Please be careful!” (I might have even asked her to apologize, and she might have done it. Note that her mother was still busy checking in—I have far more patience with mothers who are actually clearly doing something that makes it difficult to monitor their children than mothers who are literally staring off into space instead of making sure their children aren’t hurting other kids/ME. Yeah, that happened.)

“That was my sister,” said the little boy.

“Yeah. . . .” I said. “And that was my foot.” I’m a terrible mother.