JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

Plenty of baby books teach H is for Hippo, J is for Jaguar, K is for Kangaroo. While most suburban American children won’t need to be able to identify L is for Lemur, ring-tails can be common…

At Vancouver’s Stanley Park, on our way to the aquarium Sunday afternoon, I unbuckled Elisabeth and put her on the sidewalk before going to unload another child from the van, as is my routine.

Suddenly she started yelling “‘Acoon! ‘Accon!” I looked to see a raccoon in the woods along the parking lot, only two feet from our two year old and coming closer.

As a microbiologist, I’m not crazy about my kids coming into contact with potentially crazy animals. My daughters are not fond of vaccinations either (the rabies series is intense). So I quickly shepherded them off the sidewalk and into the parking lot. The raccoon seemed tame, standing on its feet (probably almost as tall as a two year old) and coming close to Ted. The incident reminded me that it can be important to teach children at an early age to be able to identify animals, although the exotic ones may not be necessary.

Then again for kids living in Simi Valley near Los Angeles this week, L may be for Lion or Liger on the loose…

Update 2/26/05: The large cat on the loose near Los Angeles turned out to be a tiger which was killed Wednesday.

Ilona’s enthusiastic response to the reports of my talk at Northern Voice – Better Than If It Were Mine illustrated exactly what I was describing: how our lives are interwoven through weblogs. thanks Ilona for your care! And I agree that Ted is romantic!

Update 2/26/05: I’ve been informed through a comment and private email from Preetam Rai that the incident below was a joke and did not occur at the Northern Voice Conference. However, I will still leave this post, since I think that my point should be made. Some parents would try the idea below.

Also please see the comments for other intriguing questions and aspects of this issue.

end of update

From a post titled Blogging and the family: Northern Voice Blogging Conference by preetam rai:

One attendee in one of our “Introduction to Blog” session suspected that her teenage daughter had a anon. blog. She was wondering if there was a way she could find the blog. We suggested that she surprise the daughter with a gift. Later in the night she could locate the daughter’s blog by running a web search with keywords like “Wow!! my mother bought me a gift”.

I wasn’t present in the Introduction to Blogging session and I was upset after reading this post corrective note – this did not occur at the conference. If the teenage daughter does indeed have a blog, she may have reasons why she doesn’t want to disclose this to her mother. Perhaps she doesn’t trust her parents with the sides of herself she is sharing online. Giving the daughter a gift, a bizarre sort of bribe, to use as a tool to discover her secret identity will only break whatever trust is left in the relationship. Especially now that this snippet of the session has been published (what if the daughter is reading Northern Voice posts to discover what her parents are doing?!) From my limited perspective, the best thing the parents can do in this situation is try to build trust with their daughter: trust, I believe, is what blogging (and life!) is about and trust is what allows secrets to be shared.

Please don’t try this at home.