Posts from — March 2010

Welcome back to IComLeavWe. It stands for International Comment Leaving Week, but if you say it aloud, doesn’t it sounds like “I come; [but] leave [as a] we”? And that’s sort of the point. Blogging is a conversation and comments should be honoured and encouraged. I like to say that comments are the new hug–a way of saying hello, giving comfort, leaving congratulations.

Here is the vital information, pure and simple (a more detailed set of rules follows below the list):

• The list opens the 1st of every month. It remains open until the 21st. You can add yourself at any point. The list is open to everyone in the blogosphere–blog writers and/or blog readers.
• Add yourself to the list by filling out this form: the April list is closed.  The May list will open on 5/1.
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• Commenting kicks off every month on the 21st. Please mark it somewhere (calendar, post-it note taped to your computer…), though I will be sending out an email reminder on the 20th. Commenting week runs from the 21st to the 28th. Every day, leave 5 comments and return 1 comment for a total of 6 comments. You are highly encouraged to choose the blogs you comment on from the participants list below, but this is not required.
• I will send a second email on the 28th to remind you to remove the icon from your blog.
• Read below if you want to find out about Iron Commenters.
• The commenting ends on the 28th. We catch our breath and the whole thing starts again the next month on the 1st. Drop in and out according to what is happening in your life between the 21st and the 28th.

1. Stirrup Queens (twins, books, writing)
2. Dreaming of Quiet Places (emotional abuse recovery, ponderings, my cute dog)
3. Waiting for Sunflower (pregnancy, gestational diabetes, life)
4. Among the Blossoms (infertility, life, shopping)
5. You Just Never Know Where Hope Might Take Ya (open adoption, faith, family)
6. Maybe Momma Someday (infertility, faith, IVF)
7. Women’s Health And Fertility (infertility, women’s health, reproduction)
8. Production Not Reproduction (open transracial adoption)
9. Expecting the Unexpected-IVF/Preemie/Toddler (son, life, whatever)
10. AnxiousMummy (IUI, TTC, secondary IF)
11. The Mud and the Lotus (hysterectomy, cat, random)
12. Banking On It (mfi, taking a break)
13. The Impatient Optimist (infertility, pregnancy-after-infertility, pcos)
14. Please Let This Be It (pregnancy after IVF)
15. Sparkly Things Distract Me (40+, donor embies, waiting)
16. The Gal Who Wants to Be Anywhere But Where She Is (life after ttc)
17. PandaBox33′s Blog (everything, life, living)
18. Keeping my eyes on Jesus (faith, infertility, IVF)
19. The Journey To 40 And Beyond (adoption, advocacy, life)
20. My Pathway to Motherhood (pregnant, SMC, life)
21. Wishing4One (IVF, twin pregnancy, Egypt)
22. Our Journey, But Not Our Plan… (adoption, fet, summer)
23. Semi-fertile (trying again, miscarriage, grief)
24. Infertility And Me (male factor infertility)
25. Musings of a Hormonal Egg Basket (ivf, family, waiting)
26. Northern Grin (craft, mail, photography)
27. Our Incredible Journey (adoption, special needs)
28. The Subfertile Frugalista (pg after loss, entering 2nd tri, dirty 30)
29. Adventures of a Dam Engineer (adoption, infertility, random crap)
30. Creating a Family (infertility, adoption, adoptive parenting)
31. In Due Time (life, infertility, pcos)
32. Ambivalent Womb (male factor, break)
33. Inconceivable?! (IVF, NOA, life)
34. My Infertility Diaries (IVF, grief, TTC)
35. Adventures in Baby Waiting (IVF, PCOS, infertility)
36. Arizona Mamma (kids, pcos, scrapbooking)
37. The Yerkes Life ~ Learning to Embrace God’s Plans (pregnancy, ivf, faith)
38. I Never Thought it Made Sense Anyway (infertility, adoption, loss)
39. Raising Miles (parenting after IF, baking, randomness)
40. The Babbling Bitter Bitch (pregnancy, humor, anxiety)
41. Baby On Mind (IVF, ttc#1, unexplained)
42. The Eternal Guestroom (infertility, IUI, thoughts)
43. All Aboard the Pity Boat (infertility, exercise, life)
44. Are We There Yet (IVF abroad, dancing, preparation)
45. Half as Many Chances (infertility, acupuncture, spirituality)
46. Dragondreamer’s Lair (parenting, secondary infertility, crafts)
47. ErnieGirl (pregnant infertile birthmother)
48. Random Thoughts from Angie (ttc, life, family)
49. No Suzy Homemaker (family, babyloss, life)
50. Journey Through Infertility and TTC (pregnancy, baby, family)
51. Waiting for a Baby Bump (ivf, infertility, ttc)
52. Life with Endometriosis and PCOS (pcos, endo, waiting)
53. Faith, Hope & Poop? (life, parenting, thoughts)
54. A Tale (of the Trials and Tribulations) of Trying (pregnancy, anxiety and depression, pregnancy loss)
55. Woman Anyone? (primary subfertility, unexplained IF, headbanging)
56. Oh Sanity, Wherefore Art Thou (parenting after IF/loss, life, random)
57. Fertility Foibles (infertility, humor, china)
58. My Infertility Woes (infertility, other options/adoption, spirituality)
59. Infertili- T & A (foster parenting, IVF, sass)
60. Once an Infertile (uterine rupture, endo, PCOS)
61. Inconceivable! (ttc, family, struggles)
62. Wistfulgirl’s World (ttc, pcos, life)
63. Junebug’s Musings (IUI?, reverie, tomfoolery)
64. Spermination Station (infertility, coping, life)
65. Your Great Life (fertility, women, self-belief)
66. Riding the IVF Roller Coaster (billionth stimulated cycle)
67. Pull up your potty seat, This could take awhile. (ttc w/ pcos, our daughter, & randomness)
68. A little blog about the big infertility (IVF, infertility, loss)
69. A Woman My Age (adoption, infertility, parenting after 40)
70. My Accidentally on Purpose (pcos, life)
71. Everyone Else But Me (FET, adoption, ectopic pregnancies)
72. Waiting on Baby (PCOS, IUI, male infertility)
73. Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed (infertility, judaism, coping)
74. Baby Dreams (ttc #2 with pcos, my son, life)
75. Knock Me Up, Doc (fertility shots, infertility)
76. The Bushey Life (ttc, life, infertility)
77. The Cubas Cubs Corner (interesting giveaways links)
78. Partners In Crime (twins, life, memes)
79. Big Belly or Bust (ttc, life, distractions)
80. Mindful Meandering (adoption, motherhood after infertility)
81. The Road Less Traveled (IVF/ICSI, pregnancy, books)
82. A + B, Waiting for C (iui, injectibles, distractions)
83. Letters to my Unborn Daughter (pregnancy, baby, love)
84. A Half Baked Life (secondary infertility, cooking)
85. infertile myrtle (parenting after infertility)
86. On Tap for Today (life, humor, Boston)
87. The (In)fertility Diaries (TTC, clomid, new IF)
88. Alex’s Adventures (IUI, acupuncture, hope)
89. A Greater Yes (infertility, embryo adoption, pregnancy)
90. Stress Free Infertility (support, tips, success)
91. It’s Baby Time~!! (pcos, mfi, ivf)
92. Lose to Gain (infertility weight thyroid)
93. From IF to When (endo, MFI, IUI)
94. In The Middle With You (infertilty, loss, life)
95. The Barreness’s Blog (parenting after infertility)
96. Cape Girl’s Journey (stillbirth, inferility, IVF)
97. Hope Springs Eternal (male factor infertility, endometriosis, food)
98. Life: Chats and Rants (ttc, pcos, life)
99. The Adventures of a New Mom (new baby, recipes, pictures)
100. Busted Plumbing: When Mother Nature Kicks You Right In the Ovaries (PCOS, loss, awesomeness)
101. Getting There (adoption, infertility)
102. I Will Be A Mom … Someday (infertility, waiting, hope)
103. Communique (life, infertility, ivf)
104. Infertility Musings (having fibroid surgery)
105. The Infertility Overachievers (son, infertility, army)
106. Waiting on Baby (male factor infertility, PCOS, TTC)
107. Ready To Be A Mom (miscarriage, IVF, infertility)
108. Infertile Follies (infertility, ectopic, ivf)
109. A Virtual Hobby Store and Coffee Shop (news, music, food)
110. The Truth Is Out There (pregnancy, life, random thoughts)
111. Lifeslurper (over 40, donor eggs, Australia)
112. Eggs Out of Time (infertility, iui, ivf)
113. Awaiting Our Miracle (MFI, starting IVF, PCOS)
114. Journey to the Eng of the Rainbow (infertility, ivf, acupuncture)
115. Overcoming Obstickles (infertility, acupuncture, clomid)
116. Leave It To the Beavers (TTC, PCOS, life)
117. Three is a Magic Number (IVF#1, MFI)
118. fickleinpink, the dark side (introspection, writing prompts, life and love)
119. My Lovely Lady Bump (early pregnancy, family)
120. My Stories: An Infertility Blog (IUI #4, unexplained infertility, life)
121. And Baby Would Make 3! (IF, PCOS, clomid)
122. CD 1 Again (infertility, clomid, life)
123. The Conceivable Future (RPL, infertility, IVF)
124. Trying Not to Scream (infertility, IVF?, life)
125. Salvageable (marriage, rpl, work)
126. Through Eyes Of A Stranger (infertility, life, everything)
127. Find Joy Now (life, travel, joy)
128. Half of a Duo, Raising a Duo (traditional surrogacy, toddler twins, loss of children)
129. The Fiegels (mommyhood, gerd/medical issues, young children)
130. Pollination Chronicles (IVF abroad, suspected w MFI, failed IUI’s)
131. The Egg Drop Post (infertility, adoption, life)
132. The Birds and the Bees (ivf, unexplained, life)
133. Tripletly Blessed (triplets, jewish, food)
134. That’s My Answer (fun, question of the day, you)
135. Outside My Head (family, movies, books)
136. Oven Seeking Bun (ttc #1, pcos, follistim)
137. Do Without Doing (baby, work, stuff)
138. Circus Acts (formerly Kicking You From the Inside) (improvement, parenting, life)
139. Except For Mondays (TTF, Project 365, everyday life)
140. Musicmakermomma (de ivf, 40++, uterine surgery)
141. A Little Bit of Life (trying to conceive, husband, infertility)
142. Self Confidence (skincare, cosmetics, health)
143. The Road Worth Traveling (pregnancy, health, life)
144. Letting It Out (parenting, deployment, unknowns)
145. Hobbit-ish Thoughts & Ramblings (pregnant after losses, viability?, hope)
146. The Journey Through Life (pregnancy, emotions, life)
147. You Call Me a Bitch Like It’s a Bad Thing (PGD, early pregnancy, dogs)
148. All Grown Up (domestic infant adoption, new mom, random)
149. Venting Vagina (FET, miscarriage, hope)
150. An Unexpected Life (adoption, infertility, family)
151. Mommy in Waiting (male factor infertility, TTC)
152. The Pitter-Patter (if, miscarriage, life)
153. Hubby, Baby and Me… Would Make 3 (pregnancy, preparing for baby)
154. My Basic World (IVF, miscarriage, unexplained)
155. Life Is Now (adoption, infertility, loss)
156. O Small You (ivf, feelings, food)
157. Mama Bear (adoption, infertility, openess)
158. Sister Village (life, people, community)
159. Hopes and Dreams for Us (love dare, childfree, life)
160. All Because Two People Fell In Love! (infertility, PCOS, life)
161. Being Jamie Lynn (infertility, photography, randomness)
162. Circus Children (life, love, infertility)
163. Jennifer in MamaLand (Judaism, food, life)
164. Surprised By Hope (open transracial adoption,adoptive parenting,infertility)
165. The Life and Times of KitVonD (ttc, infertility, life)
166. Believing in June (infertility, hope, marriage)
167. Twists of Fate (pregnancy after loss)
168. Going For It (IVF, MFI, TESE)
169. Waiting for Our Miracle (infertility, PCOS, IF treatments)
170. Adventures in Babymaking (IF, SU, TTC)
171. Her Womb, Our Hearts (domestic adoption, army wife, faith)
172. The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow (I Hope) (recurrent miscarriages, hope)
173. The Buonanno Family (children, life, family)
174. Write, Baby, Repeat (adoption, infertility, writing)
175. the April list is closed.  The May list will open on 5/1.

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A: Not for the faint-of-heart. People who wish to be an Iron Commenter and be entered on the Iron Commenter honour roll need to leave a comment on every blog on the participants list (exceptions are blogs that require you to have a special log-in, such as some LiveJournal accounts or other similar situations). You can spread out this commenting any way you wish over the whole week, but the final comment needs to be left by midnight on the 28th (EST). Reaching Iron Commenter status is done on an honour system. Please email me if you earn Iron Commenter status so I can add you to the wall of honour.

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Lindsay is such a great photographer that she can even make the grey in your hair disappear without using photoshop.

Unfortunately, she cannot make the squinty appear unsquinty.   But all photographers have limits.

Back in college, I worked for the National Endowment of the Humanities.  Part of my job was to take apart the grants and put them into this special format to aid the selection committee with quick cross-comparisons.

One day, my boss came into my office and asked if she could talk to me about P-Satch.  All of our files began with the letter P and were followed by a number (for example P-34), but I had never seen one followed by letters so I told her I didn’t know what it was and she walked out of my office.

She came back in a few minutes later and said, “I really think you know about P-Satch.”

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I have P-67 through P-71 right now.”

She left my office only to return again, equally insistent that I must know about this missing file.  She finally asked if she could show me something in her office and she brought me to her calendar where in faint print at the bottom of the square said the word “Pesach.”

“Oh,” I said, a little surprised that someone working for a major Humanities organization didn’t know it was a major Jewish holiday.  Or…at least think to come into my office and ask if I could list any upcoming Jewish holidays as the one token Jew on staff.  But I explained that Pesach was just the Hebrew word for “Passover” and it was that Last Supper holiday she probably knew about through Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.

Since that day, I’ve always pronounced the holiday P-Satch, creating a new generation of people mispronouncing the holiday name.

The point of all of this is that P-Satch begins tonight.

*******

I know the focus on everyone’s mind with the census was the adoption question, but all I could think about were the people I should have had to count.  Isn’t it strange?  They weren’t there for the last census, and they certainly weren’t here for this census, and for all accounts and purposes, they didn’t exist in the grand sense of the census-taking world.  But they existed for me and it is strange that they’re tucked into the last decade, just a few notes in a diary rather than a number on a form.  Today is the anniversary of an early loss.  We did the math in the car last night and realized I was at the hospital seven years ago.

I remember once reading an article when I was younger about an eight-year-old girl who had died.  She was born a year or two after the census and she wasn’t here for the census that came months after she died.  I know the census doesn’t count actual humans–we have birth certificates and death certificates (though too many parents who have lost a child will tell you that death certificates are not a given) for that.  She obviously existed.  But it is such a strange idea, the concept of counting populations in ten year intervals and all the people who fall through the cracks.

*******

We have to buy a new car or we have to put a lot of money into an existing car–more money than the car is probably worth.  This fact sucks, but I’m trying not to focus on the money issue.  Instead, I am driving myself crazy by thinking about the size issue.

I always pictured myself the type who would drive around a gaggle of children, some my own and some their loud-mouth friends who will teach my children all sorts of non-socialist crap that I will need to spend my nights deprogramming (what?  Did I say that aloud?).  It turns out that in order to drive around three or more kids, you need a car that seats more than 5.  This math probably doesn’t sound quite right, but you need to subtract the two front seats for safety reasons, and most bench backseats cannot take more than two booster seats at a time.  Which means that if I want to have this scenario, I need to buy a car with 6 or 7 seats.

I would have never made this scenario happen if we weren’t in a place where we needed to buy a new car.  But still, am I buying more car than I need to fulfill another person’s needs?  After all, why are said loud-mouth children in the car other than the fact that I am doing their parents a favour by shlepping around their non-bleeding-heart-socialist beasts?

Still, I can’t get this idea out of my head, and the reality is that we need a larger car if we have another child because we’re not going to buy another new car (hopefully) in the five years or more after we purchase this one.  But aren’t you supposed to make major purchases based on what you know right now?  What I know right now is that we only have two kids.  Are you seeing the circular thoughts yet?  It’s like the Windmills of Your Mind in here.

Oh–and compounding the problem is the fact that I hate to drive large cars.  I’m a small car sort of person.  So a mini-van, no matter how useful, is out.  We’re now looking at a few cars like the KIA Rondo or the Mazda 5 which have third row seating, but are on a car frame.

I guess I’m telling you all of this because I’d love to hear from people who drive a 6 or 7 seat car-frame vehicle and can tell me their thoughts.  Especially those who moved from a 5-seat small car to a larger car and are happy they did so (or hey, I’d love to hear from people who are miserable so I don’t make the same mistake).  And anyone else who wants to weigh in with car thoughts (except making the suggestion of a mini van or SUV because we’ve ruled those out despite good arguments) because we didn’t expect to be in this space where we have to make a decision, but finding ourselves here, we want to make the decision well so we don’t have regrets down the road.

Get it?  Down the road?

We were driving to a friend’s house when the ChickieNob suggested that we move to the beach much in the same tone she uses to suggest that we have pizza for dinner or watch the Muppet Show before bed. Low-impact decisions. I explained about house sales and finding a new school and new doctors and new friends in this new location, and finally, she agreed that maybe it wasn’t very realistic. Especially because Josh’s job was back here in the city, three hours away.

A few moments later, she came to a new idea: Daddy could get a different job. He could work in a restaurant (when I pointed out that he doesn’t even cook at home, she assured me that “we could teach him” as if she is a mini Cat Cora). There are a lot of restaurants at the beach, I agreed, if the man first took a few cooking classes. “What would I do?” I questioned.

“You’d just be a mum!” she laughed, as if the idea of me working was as bizarre as eating sand. Her dad could easily become a chef with a few instructional lessons, but her graduate-school-educated mother was best at cooking, cleaning, and building Lego towers.

Um…by the way, I do work. As in, I have a job. Right now.

Though I’m aware that I downplay my work both to the twins and to my peers. I label myself a SAHM. On one hand, it’s more honest. I work mainly between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m., after the twins are asleep. I have more in common schedulewise with SAHMs and am available to volunteer at their school or shuttle them around to activities. At the end of the day, almost every SAHM I know does some work, whether it’s running a small baby gift business on etsy or doing some freelance web design for a couple of dollars a month.

But I think I’m also squeamish about having the twins perceive that I’m not there for them 100%. I loved knowing that my mother could be at school to pick me up if I felt sick. I liked that she would volunteer to chaperone field trips or work on the PTA. It’s guilt that pulls two ways–I feel like I’m not contributing enough to my family because I’m not meeting my earning potential and I’d feel guilty if I went off and worked full time (hell, I feel guilty for the two afternoons a week they go to grandma and grandpa’s house so I can churn out a few articles and they are with their grandparents, having fun. By the way, thank you, Grandma and Grandpa!). I fear I may have done too good a job not only tucking my job timewise into the darkened nooks of their life, but tucking the very existence of my job into those same unconscious nooks.

I have no desire to work full-time. Our original plan was that I would continue to work and Josh would stay home with the kids, but once we started fertility treatments, that idea changed. One night, as I held a needle over my stomach, about to give myself an injection, I looked up at him and said, “by the way, you realize that this means that I’m going to be the stay-at-home?” I was not going to go through needle-sticks and have him get the daytime shnuzzles. He generously acquiesced without argument, and the rest is history–treatments worked, we had the twins, and I got to stay at home.

In all other facets of life, I have to behave within a workplace frame. No matter how much I love a job, there are expectations that I also despise. Loved lesson planning and teaching; hated grading and meetings with parents. Loved dishwashing the coffee cups; hated filling out the paperwork. Parenting has been the first thing I’ve done where I am 100% my own boss. Yes, I need to do certain things for a short period of time–for instance, as much as I don’t love wiping asses, it’s a finite task, unlike grading which was there year after year after year. The kids and I get to set the day, explore what we want to explore, read what we want to read. If I could get paid to be a parent, it’s the one job I could do where I wouldn’t also have half my mind focused on the point when I could retire.

A long time ago, when my sister’s first child was little, she told me that she was concerned that her daughter associated her with household tasks and her father with outside the home tasks, even though they both worked. More often than not, it was my sister who was cooking and cleaning and generally keeping house in addition to full-time employment. Her daughter mimicked her, following after her with a mini-Swifter or a pot from her kitchen set. We talked about the dangerous message we send to our daughters when they don’t see us in a multitude of positions.

How can we teach our daughters that having a career is important if they don’t perceive that we have a career?

My mother didn’t return to work until all of her children were in school full-time, which occurred when I was in 6th grade. She taught three mornings a week and was home around before 1 p.m., long before it was time for any of us to come home from school. She was damned good at what she did and people came to her for advice all the time. Even without seeing her work during my formative years, it was somehow instilled in me that it was not only a good idea to go to college, but that graduate school could come next and a career should probably follow. The message didn’t just come from teachers who constantly asked us in five-part essay form to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up, but from my parents as well.

And that’s what I did–college, graduate school, teaching career ranging from middle school to the college level. I made finding a societal space of my own a priority just as much as I worked hard to find a partner and build a family. Somehow I absorbed the entire message, but I wasn’t entirely sure how to pass it along to my daughter. I didn’t want it to be a case of “do as I say, not as I do” and seriously, I have a job! I’ve just wiped invisible cream all over it.

“Am I just a mummy now?” I finally asked. “Or do I have a job.”

“You have a job,” she said, somewhat sullenly.

Good; I left something poking out of the shadows.

“What do I do?” I questioned.

“You’re a writer. People pay you to write things and talk about things.”

Which pretty much sums it up. I write articles, I write books, I go out and talk about the topics of said articles and read from said books.

So it has sunk in that a job exists and now I replace my old fears with new ones: what message am I sending by hiding my job, will my daughter embrace the idea of finding her own career, and how can I celebrate work while not missing out on time with them?

Another pause ensued and we were almost to her friend’s house when she chirped, “but luckily, you can do your job from the beach. You can write anywhere. So it looks like we’re moving!”

Break out the flip flops and sunscreen, the only thing holding us back now are those cooking lessons for Josh.

If you are currently parenting, do you have a career outside the home, and if so, how are you conveying that it’s okay to choose to stay home? Or, if you work in the home or not have a job, how are you conveying that it is an equally valid choice to choose a full-time career? How do we teach the other possibility from what our daughters see us do?  And if you are not yet parenting, how do you envision your work/home balance in the future? Apologies that these questions assume living children and doesn’t take into account the fact that so many in our community are without their children right now.

Cross-posted with BlogHer…

I loved Peggy Orenstein’s New York Times article on femivores.  Not just because I tried to bring a chicken home a few months before the twins were born.  There was a science fair at the school where I worked and one boy couldn’t bring home the chicken he had been raising so he offered it up to a good home.  And I have a good home.

So I called Josh and left a message about how I’ve fallen in love with a chicken, and it would live at our house, mostly outside, but inside when it needed to come inside.  And the chicken would give us eggs and we would give the chicken love and we’d be one big human-chicken family.

Then I reconsidered the idea after talking to a science teacher about diseases that chickens carry in regards to the newborn twins I was about to have in the house (apparently a chicken living in the house and preemies to not mix well) and I called back Josh and left another message telling him to scratch that idea.

But he didn’t listen to the second message.  He listened to the first message and then sucked enough air into his lungs to yell without pause into the phone: “under no circumstances should you bring a chicken into our house I swear Melissa that I am going to kill you if I come home tonight and there is a chicken in our house it is against our homeowners association rules and we cannot live with a fucking chicken in our house.”

So we don’t have a chicken in our house.

But I can definitely still see the beauty in making an omelette with eggs collected from your own backyard.  We’ve tried the garden, which really didn’t work both due to a lack of gardening skills and poor sunlight in our yard (oh, and my fear of crickets who like to live near plants).  But I definitely subscribe to the idea of “radical homemakers” or “tomato-canning feminism” (oooh, I have to read and write about this book.  It appeals to me so much more than Michael Pollan).

Because like many women with graduate degrees who chose to become a stay-at-home (okay, more like a part-time work-at-home), I couldn’t just do the tasks–I had to turn it into a project with the same passion I brought to academia.  I read books about nutrition and I set up the house for minimal television watching and I think about the chicken-that-got-away.  My kids knew the term “sustainability” before they knew their ABCs.  Orenstein’s article outlines so much I have thought or experienced since leaving the traditional work force five years ago.

I read her article right on the heels of finishing Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food.  Which was fine.  I wanted to be all gung-ho about it because he speaks to so many things we already believe and do (our home has a dearth of high fructose corn syrup, we make almost everything from scratch, and we eat a lot of fruit for dessert except when Lori is here and then it’s cake 24/7, baaaaaybeeeeeeeee!).  But he didn’t grab me by the ovaries.  I think his rules are sound, but it was sort of like watching Mr. Rogers.  You know how Mr. Rogers is comfortable and enjoyable, but he doesn’t make your heart race with happiness?  That’s sort of how I felt about reading his book.

I immediately followed his book with Kitchen Confidential.  I’m about a third of the way through it.  Anthony Bourdain is sort of like hanging out with a grumpy uncle.  One who tells you a lot of stories about how bad-ass he was in his past, which makes you wonder how bad-ass he could possibly be if he needs to tell you that he was bad-ass.  I’m enjoying the book and I’ll probably end up reading another one or two of his cooking memoirs because I’m on a food memoir kick, but like Pollan, I keep wanting to be grabbed by the ovaries and I haven’t been yet.

It occurred to me as I wrote this that maybe their lack of ovary grabbiness is due to their genitalia.  Maybe I need to be reading more books by women.  Women know how to grab the proverbial gonads and never let go.

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The Weekly What If: If you could follow one celebrity chef (and celebrity is a loose term–if you know them, they count.  They could be someone from a local restaurant; they don’t need to be someone with a television program or cook book) for the day, seeing what they do, receiving tips, and eating incredible meals who would it be?

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I love all the additional assvice people gave and I am toying with a new (extended remix?) version of Aunt Jane Knows More than My RE.  Will post when I start working on it.  At the very least, I want to clean up the images.  I learned so much about Microsoft Paint by the time I finished the fourth film.

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And now, the blogs…

A lot of people do an introductory post each month for IComLeavWe, but Partners in Crime had the best one I’ve read in a while.

Serenity Now has a post about eating cereal with her son that twisted my heart.  It’s exactly what you want to have happen; it’s exactly what you dread happening because it means that time has passed–and it usually comes with the accompanying feeling that time has gone way too quickly.

My heart is with Busted Babymaker this week as she remembers the Doodles, but she also wrote a scathingly honest post about a Facebook status meme that breaks her heart.

My Basic World has a post about not letting infertility control her life.  On one hand, it’s impossible to not have it consume you because of the numerous appointments or medications during a cycle (seriously, how do you not think about it if you have to remember to do an injection at 8 p.m.?).  She points out that an article from her clinic “suggested setting a specific time every day to deal with any concerns/questions you’re dealing with. This sounds good in theory, but take this weekend…I started spotting, am I really going to wait for my ‘allotted time’ before I started psycho googling breakthrough bleeding…hell no!”  So how does one focus on treating their infertility without thinking about it?

Lastly, Ezra’s Space has a post about gardening with one son while remembering how she always dreamed of gardening with her first son.  It is a bittersweet post that made me smile while making my throat catch.  Head over to read her brief thoughts.

The roundup to the Roundup: what are your thoughts on femivores, Pollan, and Bourdain?  Answer the Weekly What If.  Keep the assvice coming.  And lots of great posts to read.