Book Review of Eckler, Rebecca. (2019). Blissfully Blended Bullshit: The Uncomfortable Truth of Blending Families. Toronto: Dundurn Press.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this refreshingly humorous and honest book, Rebecca Eckler provides readers with all the unpredictable 'bullshit' that comes with blending families.After being a single mom for years, Rebecca is now navigating her life with a new boyfriend, his two daughters, his dog and eventually, after a reverse vasectomy, a new baby.Once her blended family is all under one roof, she is hit with the harsh reality of being a blended family "Blending is harder than I ever could have imagined" (p.178).She soon realizes that it is difficult not only for those living under the same roof but also for extended family members, learning about the different kinds of love one has for a biological family member and a blended family member.This book reflects Rebecca's personal experience in a blended family, exploring her role as a girlfriend and as the mother of her daughter, new baby son, and two stepdaughters or, as she refers to them, bonus children.She has to learn how to share a space that was once hers and her daughters with four new people and adjust to new expectations of her.Rebecca examines the critical challenges that impact the functioning of her relationship and family dynamic, from finances and different parenting techniques to feeling unwanted and excluded.She also touches on minor disagreements such as phone screensavers, meal planning, and household chores.Rebecca discovers she is not alone in these issues, hearing from her friends and acquaintances throughout the book, who experience severe and trivial matters
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".