In Which Kanga Gives 2009 A Gentle Push

...out the door.

This was a rough year. The (sole) highlight was the arrival of Roo #2, who delights us every day simply by being here.

Working in opposition to this joy were: ongoing work-related drama, the expected struggles that take place when adjusting your family to two new members in rapid succession, a true loss of social network (aside from my burgeoning Twitter and FB presence, ha), friends' health challenges and tragic losses, and -- for the first time in my life -- an unpleasant sense of ennui, aimlessness and impending failure.

Not doom, mind you. Just failure.

I'm carving out a plan to address this incipient haziness, this lack of focus, and I have to say I am excited for the tabula rasa that comes knocking at my door in two hours and 17 minutes.

Happy new year!

In Which Kanga and Roo Bust Out the Wheels

Partially because of the amazing weather lately, partially because of raging diaper rash (hers, not mine) and partially to offset encroaching ennui, J and I have ventured during recent sunny days to:

- the backyard, on a towel
- the front yard, on a towel
- Babies R Us (no towels)

Only one of these ventures involved a stroller.

As we tooled through Babies R Us today, with me jamming a hundred dollars' worth of baby swim accoutrements into my cloth shopping bag, I slowly realized that whipping out the Peg Perego earlier in this seven-month stint could have meant more freedom to both J and me.

It's a very simple thing. Well, the stroller itself is not simple...I seriously require an occasional tutorial in opening and closing it from an industrial designer friend of mine, and even SHE needed a few minutes to orient herself. But the concept of carrying one's child is simple enough.

For the first five months of J's life, besides the transit to and from the car in a carrier seat, I either held her in my arms or in a sling. No other method seemed close enough. What if she cried out? Got scared? Was confused? Only being up close to Mama's heartbeat seemed to solve the problem, and ensure that others weren't bothered by my freaking-out baby.

Realize, of course, that she never -- not once -- freaked out enough to even warrant being that close for soothing. The one time J has ever lost it in public, she was, oh yes, in a sling next to my chest. But still my fears remained and ruled me.

Gradually I started busting out the stroller, swayed by the small group of moms I hang out with. All more fashionable and style-conscious than I, they also make excellent use of their strollers and step out with their babes without a second thought.

Inertia breeds inertia, and today I really felt like I had avoided the Yahoo! baby.house.inertia usergroup by the slimmest of margins.

J deserves to go everywhere I do, insofar as those places are safe and appropriate for her, and I deserve to give myself a little credit for being able to handle the occasional meltdown.

The physical stroller itself also adds some cred to my bounce, as the kids say (or as they certainly should). It warns people ahead of time that a baby is approaching. It leaves my arms untired at the end of the day. It allows me to carry (albeit woefully small amounts of) baby crap. God forbid, it lets J see the world and interact with it as it passes by. And yes, it protects her.

I initially sought protection in methods that kept J physically close to me at all times. But the plastic, fabric and metal of a stroller is something to be reckoned with, and likely keep her better-shaded, -protected and -entertained.

I think I just didn't want to let her go.

In Which Owl Defends Unitasking

I've noticed lately that many bloggers are writing about the renewed respect that "unitasking" is receiving.

Multitasking is, and always has been, for the birds. Our minds are compartmentalized enough without externally forcing our synapses into multiple buckets. J always lurks in the back of my work-mind; when I read her Counting Penguins, am I mentally composing an email to the IT director? Yep.

So the last thing I need is to physically give myself permission to do multiple things at once. Yet this is what we are often called to do.

Some of this, especially in parenting mode, is absolutely necessary. Monitor your child's safety while shopping...part and parcel of the same activity. Cook dinner while catching up with your spouse's workday...just common consideration for your partner, and not mentally taxing.

But the demand that most workplaces place on employees with regard to physically completing multiple tasks at once means that we sacrifice depth for breadth, quality for completeness. Instead of delving into a project -- losing ourselves in it and coming out the other side a little breathless and inspired -- we skim over the top of it and move on, all the while juggling yet another need.

My favorite metaphor lately for the challenges I have at work is that of a waterbug, skimming the water but never breaking the surface. It's happened to me (correction: I've allowed it to happen) for so long that it's now a way of working. In a sense, I am fearful of the diving-in. I fret about what other projects will suffer if I put my attention to a single task. And so I continue to touch all the project threads, run them through my fingers, grasp them for a moment, toss an admiring glance their way, and move on, with the situation largely unchanged.

I manage in this way to frustrate myself and disappoint those around me. (Awesome!) If I would only grow a pair and insist for once that I be allowed to focus on the task at hand before moving on, I'd at least have some assignments that left the recipient and me both satisfied.

As parents, we spend hours and days struggling to live in the moment, to focus entirely on our children (as they do the opposite, straining toward the capacity to understand everything at once). When we do manage it, when we center our intention entirely on one thing, the moments slip away unnoticed and we sometimes look up to see that hours have passed as we played with our infant. It's magic.

Why should that be confined to the home? I didn't sign up for a non-magic job. The simple fact that worker bees everywhere are starting to notice that multitasking is BS means that I may not be the only one who sets up a take-a-number mechanism at her desk and calmly returns to linear thinking.

In Which Owl Busts Out

At work, I am generally known for being friendly, accommodating and upbeat. This is at a company which I, overall, find to be friendly and upbeat anyway, so this is a good reputation to have.

Having J has shortened my fuse. I give her nearly all the love and attention I have (hopefully giving my husband his due as well), and sometimes there's just not as much L & A going around as there was pre-zygote.

As a result of a miscommunication Tuesday and as a further result of inadvertently being taken advantage of by a well-meaning colleague, I temporarily lost my squash, as we used to say in college. I would go so far as to say that for roughly half an hour (though my outburst lasted closer to fifteen seconds), I was utterly squash-free.

The results of this were actually pretty positive. Because of the aforementioned rep as a squash-ful person, the fact that I freaked out caused others to:
- sit up
- take notice
- deal with the issue immediately

I have to admit, it also released some building-up work tension. I've felt awfully productive since that morning.

I'm not an overly emotionally expressive person. I should clarify. I'm not overly expressive when it comes to negative arenas -- I am, I think, good at positive emotion, and much better since I became a mother.

I am working on expressing myself more emotionally when the topic is a tough one. I know it's a problem. The struggle for me is that I haven't seen it help me understand things much more, make me or anyone else feel better about a situation, or help me communicate. I've also found, through the years, that people who say they want you to express your feelings are usually deluding themselves about what they want.

Admittedly, the workplace is not the place to hone those skills. But I probably need to cut myself some slack and be OK with showing myself to be, from time to time, a little rough around the edges.

And it certainly felt good. You never saw those co-workers' heads swivel around and back so damn fast. It's like they'd all rubbed WD-40 on their necks in preparation.

In Which Kanga Shows You What Matters

In Which Owl and Kanga Are Both Thankful

After needing about 48 hours to process the work challenges I wrote about before, I set up a plan of action (with some great help from my husband and a few co-workers). Writing stuff down really does help codify it and, in a way, de-fang it.

I'm glad I was able to wait the usual two days it takes me to work through things, instead of flying off the handle at work. You'd think after over thirty years I'd remember that when things go awry, I just. need. some. time. Often my immediate, emotional response changes drastically once I've had time to sit with things.

I've spent the past two days pretty excited about the opportunities at work, and even ready to address the problems.

And so it also was with some issues on the home front; after two days of percolation (not stewing...ah! there's a difference!) I swam back into happiness.

All of which makes me darn glad.

In Which Owl Laments Snarky Attitudes

Though a long-standing holder of a snarky attitude myself, I have to say things are different when you're the one who has done the work and now proceed to receive uninformed sh*t from others.

Deep breath. Allow me to clarify. The development of our corporate intranet has been a long, drawn-out, unwieldy and painful process. I have attempted to help by setting up rudimentary IA, but the raw difficulty of working with this software package (that task does not fall to me), the siren song of billable work, and everyone's general malaise have combined to give us a semi-functional but completely annoying information "resource."

I curled my lip when I said "resource," by the way.

Those who do use it at the company spend most of their time joking about it with me, inexplicably thinking I'm going to have a sense of humor about it. Actually, folks, no I don't. Sorry...that new skin layer is still on back order, and I'm having the current dermis repaired.

The best thing to do may be to start from the beginning -- since the software suite cannot be changed, it may mean that scrubbing from the very first page makes the most sense. They're just links, right? How hard can it be?

Oh, and then there's that search function that...doesn't...

Gah. Glass-of-wine time.

In Which Owl Revisits Service Marketing

Our intrepid group of researchers has a huge internal marketing opportunity. While we focus on one-on-one training, group orientations, occasional "brown bag" lunches and daily mailings, we need to bust out in terms of both marketing format and frequency. With the turnover rate of employees in both Creative Services and Client Relations, there seems to be an amnesia pandemic when it comes to what our department offers.

The key is to market ourselves simply by showing how our efforts apply to the company's goals. It usually only takes one instance of working with Information Services for employees to say "I get it" and appreciate what we bring to the table.

But that offering is broader than people know, and often comes too late in the game, and that is OUR FAULT. Pushing harder for inclusion at the proposal stage, a willingness to promote our information management as well as information provision capabilities, and a willingness to explore the initial request deeply (the reference interview further dimensionalized) would all serve to narrow the gap between what we offer and the people to whom we offer it.

So many basic business operational issues come down to communication. It's easier to be lazy and assume that someone will figure it out. Tedious as it may seem for those around the table, the earlier the hard questions are asked, the better.

In Which Kanga Hangs With the Kitties

It's no surprise that the kitties have suffered since J's arrival. They are still petted, cooed over and fed copious amounts, but the raw time they spend with Mom and Dad is WAY down.

Tonight I realized that observing J and seeing her learn can show me ways to love the kitties better, too. After all, I spend lots of time each day experimenting to see what J likes: a certain sitting position, a new toy, having her back or tummy rubbed a specific way.

I haven't done that with my cats in a LONG time -- just paid attention to how they react to new ways of being scratched, petted or talked to.

Mundane example. This evening I serendipitously discovered that my 14-year-old male cat loves to have the pads of his back paws spread apart and have the skin between the pads scratched.

Fourteen years I've owned this cat and his sister, and I never noticed this. Meanwhile, I notice new things about J hourly, it seems.

Why should they be afforded any less attention? Certainly they lag in terms of quantity, but with regard to quality they are deserving and unique creatures, just as J is. I'll certainly never understand them as deeply as I might another human being, but it was an important reminder to me today that they are just as...specific...as babies in terms of their idiosyncrasies, wants and needs.

In Which Kanga and Roo Visit a Grocery Store

Today J and I ventured out to New Seasons for the first time. I was pleased to discover these narrow shopping carts they have that you can use to buy oh, three items, while placing the car seat on the "upper deck." They are actually pretty cool.

It amazed me how nervous I was, juggling clam chowder, a brownie, the cart, and my wallet, all focused on getting myself SAT DOWN in ten seconds or less. My friend Annie and her baby were much calmer.

I turned to her as we wheeled the carts into the dining area and commented that much of my time spent out of the house with J was focused on making sure I didn't annoy anyone.

If eighty percent of life is showing up, for me the other twenty percent is making sure no one else is uncomfortable. As J gets bigger and louder, this could become a challenge.

I'll spare you the details of the Tense Diaper Blowout Change.