It’s a fad and I’m a follower. Five things only a few know:

1. I have a middle name. Since lots of people think of my double duty first name as two, most people don’t realize that Mom and Dad (and my big sisters) threw in a middle name, too. I’ll give you a hint: it starts with P.

2. At the age of ten I appeared in a summer stage production of South Pacific at the Springfield Muni Opera, in which I played the role of Ngana, Emile DeBeque’s Polynesian daughter. All my lines were in French.

3. I was a World Record holder.

4. I was married at 18. It wasn’t my first marriage. Oh, come on, I’m KIDDING. The first part is true.

5. I was allergic to all dairy products until I was about 12. Now I’m fine, but I seriously can’t deal with crumbly cheeses, even though they’re delicious.

I had a hankerin’ for smoked turkey, so Sunday afternoon Mark fired up the smoker for a few hours. At dinner, we enjoyed sweet, juicy turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce. It was a Thanksgiving sequel that left the kids asking for pumpkin pie immediately after. I would have acquiesced, but having caught sight of my derriere in a dressing room mirror earlier that day, pie is sadly not in my future.

By 8pm, the boy announced he was going to bed. By 8:30pm the girl wandered off to bed, unchased. By 9pm, the turkey smoker and I were snuggled in reading our books, blinking heavily. It was a lovely night of sleeping. We should really have Thanksgiving dinner more often.

Occasionally, I stop and wonder, what good comes from having a blog?

Then I remember, were it not for the blog, I wouldn’t have met Sean, or Amy, wouldn’t know Jennifer or Waldo. I never would have shared a table with Bill Emory, or have forged an e-friendship with Michelle. I would have learned at a later point about the shocking death of Danielle’s mother, the first post I remember leaving giant tear puddles on my keyboard.

I would never have been inspired to keep going if it weren’t for the big sisters of blogging, Angela and Dana. Robin makes me feel better, even when she’s having a tough time. Raquita and I may never have crossed e-paths and if it weren’t for her, there would not have been delightful Dwight in my life. Blackbird has such a gift and is sure to give me a smile even on gloomy, house-bound days.

With the blog, nonbloggers like Greg, my parents, my in-laws, my friends at work, my aunt and my sisters get little snippets of what’s going on in our home and in our lives. If it weren’t for the blog, Craig never would have called laughing so hard he was crying.

Friends who blog, like Shawn, Amanda and Brian (they’re a couple!) and Jen (the newest to the ’sphere) help me know what’s going on in theirs.

So what good, the blog? Lots — I’m almost at two years and I think I’ll keep on going.

See that rectangle at the bottom of the right hand of this page? I’ve reinstated the e-mail service, since so many readers demanded it. Enter your e-mail address if you’re not a user of an aggregator or can’t bring yourself to enter this url to visit this site periodically. Like so much Internet magic, you’ll get an e-mail when I’ve updated this site, so you can rest at night knowing you’re not missing out on anything STLWorkingMom has to offer.

Oh, and while I’m pandering to the audience, please leave a comment. I’m really tiring of the comment spam and would like to hear from some of the actual visitors my site statistics are telling me are lurking out there in the cold. If you’re a blogger, throw me a bone once in awhile. I promise you’ll get props from me when the occasion arises.

All right, all right.

CrabbyMom out.

On New Year’s Eve, we went to a potluck dinner party to kick off the evening. We were seated at the table with a gentleman who described himself as the oldest parent of all the children in his daughter’s class. The daughter, age six, was in the other room watching a DVD on a portable player. The father told us that his little girl is not allowed to watch TV, that they do not own a television and that they carefully control every video she’s ever seen. At the moment, she was watching National Velvet. Mostly, the list included musicals which of course, puts the majority of her movie intake at films created between 1940 and 1970.

The most hilarious concession the father shared was that, concerned by their daughter’s lack of experience in diversity (ah, Charlottesville*) they rented from Netflix a season of The Cosby Show. The idea of The Cosby Show as an example of diversity still has me chuckling.

My own philosophies about television and children stem from a childhood balanced with movies, TV in moderation, live musicals, plays and lots of reading. TV is such a part of our culture; whether you’re a fan or not, it’s there and provides the backstory to pop culture references that will be lost on anyone who hasn’t logged the requisite four hours of TV per day. We know, of course, that kids who watch too much TV can be overweight, anti-social, have ADD and display violent tendencies. Thanks to TiVo, they’re watching less commercials; the American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that kids see 200,000 commercials per year. I’m more against the commercials than the programming, most of the time.

It’s really not that unusual for parents to set limits — almost every parent I know sets limits and has kids who are encouraged to play outside more often. It’s the elimination that gives me pause. This strategy makes the forbidden more attractive; look for mass amounts of TV binging as soon as that six-year-old is able; years spent “catching up” on all she may have missed.

I wonder, however, with the “approved” list of movies whether she’s on a diet of two musicals a day, whether she’s come to  expect people to dance and sing in banks and strolling down the street. I wonder if she’s waiting to be asked to the barn raising when she’s older.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the approach these parents are taking; it’s a personal parental decision. I just don’t know if it does any good, in the long run.

How have you dealt with TV and your kids?

*Follow this link for a very interesting article about diversity at the University of Virginia.

Often I’ll spend more time, much more, agonizing over a task and thinking about how much time or effort it will take than, when it comes right down to it, the time it actually takes to complete the task.

I can get easily overwhelmed by a cascade of thoughts I have in preparation to work through something that, when in the process of the activity, I realize was much simpler than I’d convoluted it to be. I do this often, I think and am really tired of dreaming about my work when dreams of vacations and other more lovely thoughts are waiting backstage.

A resolution: to not overthink and process (like American cheese) to death projects that are totally within my capacity.

Does everyone do this, endlessly obsess over what must be done?