Happy Anniversary!

I just realised that it's been a little over a year since I began blogging.

A year for me is a significant period of time. For one thing, up until my husband, I'd never had a romantic relationship that lasted beyond a year. I had some commitment issues which were fuelled by my insecurities and poor self-image, and so I always managed to end things at the one-year mark. The logic being that once you got beyond a year, things became considerably more serious and you would find yourself at the tinkle-or-get-off-the-pot point. Since my secret fear was that it was only a matter of time before I would be found out and revealed as being a bad tinkler, I hurriedly got off the pot.

Fourteen years and three kids later coupled with many hours of introspective therapy, I'd like to think that I've laid all those demons to rest. But then I have to wonder about my commitment to blogging.

In the beginning, as with most relationships, things were hot and heavy. I referenced the world and my life in terms of whether I could blog about it. Snooze and I once had a laugh about our obsessive blog behaviours, because we said that we both actually found ourselves composing blogs about an event while said event was stili unfolding. My husband would come home, find me glued to my computer and would just ask "Can I talk to you now or are you blogging?" (most of the time, he would quietly slink off after I would wave him away whilst madly typing).

Sadly, I've become negligent in my blogging duties. Not only have I failed to post on a regular basis, but I've also stopped checking in every other second with my fellow bloggers. Does this mean that while I may have affectionate feelings for blogging, I have fallen out of love with it? Could it be that we've reached our tinkle point, and my failure to perform means that I must give up my seat on the pot? Should we seek counselling, or should we just maturely acknowledge it's over and go our separate ways?

PC = Politcally Confused

Every time I offer my mother-in-law some Brazil nuts, she recounts in hushed tones the name by which, during her childhood, they were called. Nigger's toes.

Back then, of course, "nigger" was the term du jour. It may not have been acceptable to refer to a black person, nay a person of African-American descent, in this manner, but it was common. (Think of the children's chant Eeeny, meeny, miney, moe ... catch a nigger by the toe. Now of course, the nigger has been changed to tiger, but that's not the original version). Those who were more cultured, like my mother-in-law, referred to them as being "coloured" (no doubt while they secretly thought of them as "niggers)..

Now, while I privately express shock and dismay at either of these terms, I had to wonder last night if I wasn't guilty of the same crime.

I have a nightly ritual with my children. They each like having me come and spend a couple of minutes in bed with them. I'm not allowed to just lie there though; I have to come prepared with a funny story. At the end of the story, we then kiss and hug. My daughter's kiss-and-hug routine takes place in four parts: we kiss, hug, bump heads and then Eskimo kiss.

Last night, my eldest son pointed out that Eskimo is an outdated and unacceptable term. Inuit was the correct word. Of course, I know this, and never refer to an Inuit as an Eskimo, but somehow, I never extrapolated that term and carried it over to "Eskimo kiss". Should I have?

Similarly, when referring to the lovely Oriental carpet in my parent's home, should I be calling it an Asian carpet? Growing up, we always referred to ourselves as being Oriental, but now that's not the PC term. But where does that leave the carpets?