Self-Promotion

Last week, I chaperoned a K field trip to a well-known Chicago restaurant. Its owner, a generous and visionary individual, is in the midst of launching several new projects. The field trip comprised lunch, a lecture, a tour, and lots of filming. There were tweets, Foursquare check-ins, and Facebook uploads by every geeked-out, Smartphone-wielding adult in the room.

I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

It seems like it's not enough to have a point of view or something to say, we must also constantly promote ourselves to make the Google algorithm, combining content and keywords in the right way so as to optimize the search engine.

I'm terrifically awful at self-promotion. Indeed, I've kept this blog for over 6 years and probably have about that many readers (whom I appreciate very much). Over the years, the blog has evolved from an online journal of sorts to a collection of essays.

But maybe it's time to change things? Using some feedback her art teacher had given me as a jumping off point, The Girl and I talked today about her "work" as a painter. The Girl, it seems, rushes through her work as if she's punching some kind of internal time clock. As we talked, she acknowledged that she's going for quantity over quality, which I do think is an astute observation for a 7-y/o to make, if I do say so myself. But, she said, she feels like all the good paintings have been done already and there are no ideas left for her to interpret.

She's wrong. No one else in the whole world has had her exact experiences and thoughts. Her story is worth telling, her perspective is worth painting.

And so is mine.

Field Trip

Today, Grandma Naperville came in to care for The Girl and The Tot. And I took a field trip with The Boy's class to the Kohl Children's Museum in Glenview. 50 kids, 20 adults and way too many bagged lunches on a smelly yellow bus. As a child, I always lived within walking distance of school, so the thrills of the yellow school bus were reserved for the rare field trip. Fortunately for my children, the same is true for them. I managed to forget how ill a ride on the school bus can make you. Fortunately for me, I was in the first 3 rows and it was not hot.

The Kohl put on a good program. We got there, ate lunch in a program room, had an hour to explore in groups (I asked child in my group to pick one area that s/he really wanted to explore and we hit all 5 in our free time), had a 45-minute session with the museum-provided educator, and then had 1/2 hour of free time again. During our education session, the kids read a book about birds' nests, drew bird's nests and made bird's nests out of clay and bits of string, feathers, etc. They were totally grossed out by the clay; they should see me when I come home from pottery: I've usually got clay in my hair, on my face, all over my clothes, stuck to the bottom of my shoes. It was a fun day, but tiring.