Sunday Confessional with a Side of Site Admin

Heather says:

Let's get the site adminstration stuff out of the way. Home-Ec101.com has been having some performance issues; my good friend Michael Carnell and I are working hard to make sure that we get it whipped into shape.

The comment system has been changed, IntenseDebate seems to have been a part of the problem, but certainly not the only cause. I have switched out to LiveFyre which seems to be lighter and faster. It also looks as though it has the ability to host a live chat, which intrigues me with the possibilities. Don't worry, you'll still have the ability to share via your Twitter or Facebook identities if that's what floats your boat. If you just want to say hey and get on with your life that's fine, too.

If you are used to using the categories in the sidebar to navigate, switch to the tag cloud. I've shuffled up the taxonomy of the site to help Google understand what Home-Ec101 is all about.

The forums have been closed temporarily, in case they are a part of the site issues. I'll reopen them after I get back from Type-A Parent Conference.

Now, on to the confession part of the show.

I have two this week, one small and one that I'm not sure is exactly a confession, but it is something I've been struggling with for a long time.

The small one-

I got lazy about sharpening my knives AND I wasn't paying attention to my chopping -there were a few extra neighbor kids bouncing in and out of my work area- I had a knife slip and took off a good chunk of the nail on my ring finger. It's as attractive as it sounds. Knife skills are important, but attention and basic safety matter just as much.

Now the one I'm not sure is a confession and I hope doesn't come across as a plea for attention. (See, there goes my neurotic side and I haven't even managed to spit it out yet.) My oldest son has been diagnosed with a mild form of autism most commonly referred to as Asperger's. For a long time, we didn't want to put a label on him even though we knew that his mannerisms, while similar to our own, didn't fit in with "normal."

My son isn't the type that shuns contact, he gloms onto it in a way that makes many people uncomfortable. He has no sense of personal space -which is ironic because my personal bubble is gargantuan. He's incredibly articulate, his vocabulary rivals that of Anne Shirley. He lives in a world of his own creation, but he's more than happy to tell you all the details, if you glance in his direction. It's kind of cute when a 3 year old invites a perfect stranger over for dinner, it's not so cute when he's 7 and the size of your average 10 year old -he gets his height from Tim and I. He tends to  invite random adult strangers to spend the night and thankfully no one has taken him up on is offer. We're dealing with the usual set of challenges with an atypical child with the added bonus of people assuming he's much older.  We're working with a psychologist to give him coping skills that neither limit who he is as an individual, but allow him to relate better to others.  Most of you know I'm very self-conscious, I won't lie this stuff stresses me out like crazy.

So, it's not exactly a confession, it's just that I'm no longer going to keep that information private.

One of my goals is to be as honest as I can about life. There is joy to be found in the everyday, when we aren't trying to make it fit some unrealistic ideal. I know people who took drastic measures when their version of reality didn't match what they thought it should and this makes me look carefully at what I present to the world. I started this series to encourage people to admit that life isn't magazine and tv perfect. Real life is messy, tiring, and wonderful at the same time. Sure you can't really laugh at everything when it happens -like if you step in dog vomit before coffee- but the rest of us can. After the irritation wears off, it's time to share and laugh at what we all go through in our day to day lives. On the internet it's all too tempting to share the cropped and photo-shopped version of our lives (the one where all of my kids behave perfectly all the time), but that isn't my reality. Is it yours?

So Home Eccers, I ask, what do you have to get off your chest?

Sunday Confessional with a Side of Site Admin is a post from: Home Ec 101 ©Home Ec 101.com 2007 - 2011