412th Friday Blog Roundup

Succot starts this weekend on Sunday night, and for the first time in a long while, I am going to step offline for a bit.  I am not taking a complete break from the Internet for the holiday — that just isn’t me — but I am going to curb my usage to a very limited amount, and if this works, I’m going to repeat it again in the spring with Pesach, which is also an 8-day holiday like Succot.  Two little self-imposed Internet cut-backs, one in the fall, one in the spring.

I did all of my work-work early, and then made a list of the time I would normally spend online during this time period, attempting to rank the activities from “best use of my limited Internet time” to “can wait.”

Possible contenders for my Internet time (in no particular order):

1. Read emails
2. Respond to emails
3. Write posts
4. Read other people’s blogs
5. Check Facebook
6. Check Twitter
7. Check Good Reads
8. Update the IComLeavWe list

Reading emails seemed like it should take the number one slot.  I mean, that is the most common way people attempt to reach me AND it is the only method for communicating with me that I see 100% of the time.  So it seemed like if I had a half hour online, I should use at least part of that time to cull out important emails from the inbox and read them.  Going hand-in-hand with that is the idea of responding to emails that require a time sensitive response.  So know for the 8 days of the holiday, I am going to read email and will attempt to respond to your email quickly if it requires a time sensitive response.  If the response feels like it can wait a few days without slowing down your life, I am going to wait until the holiday is over and do a mass catch-up on email.

Writing posts seemed like a poor use of my online time.  If there are posts that float into my head while I’m offline, I will write them down on a piece of paper as I did at the beach.  And then, when the holiday is over and I return to a normal amount of screen time, I will either type up these posts or… I don’t know… move on from those thoughts if they’re not still relevant.  On the other hand, I have a shit-ton of posts in my draft folder, and this seems as good a time as any to unleash a few on you.  So my blog will still update during this time period, but I won’t be using my limited online time to do so.  I know this is sort of cheating since I used up a lot of online time prior to this weekend in order to do this, but still, I’m going to count it under ways-I’m-limiting-my-online-usage.

Reading other people’s blogs seems like a good use of my time.  I’m sort of counting on all of you to provide me with great posts that use my time well… no pressure.  So I am going to be blog reading as many posts as I can fit in before the hypothetical buzzer sounds though in order to read more, I may star some that I want to comment on to return to later.  So apologies if you get comments on 8-day-old posts when I go back to normal use of the Internet.

Checking Facebook seems like a decent use of time because it’s somewhat slow-moving.  I can scroll through a lot of status updates quickly and get a sense of what is happening in other people’s lives.  Twitter is a waste of time because it moves too quickly.  If I have five minutes left online, I don’t want to use four minutes of it just trying to follow a conversation thread and figure out what people are talking about.  And Good Reads can wait.  I have a stack of books set aside to read during this time period, and I’m going to tackle them vs. read about the next books I should put on my list.

Which brings us to updating the IComLeavWe list.  I have decided that while I may update the list if I find myself with leftover time, I am putting it as a low priority.  What does this mean?  Still add yourself to the list and upload the icon on your blog.  When the holiday is over, I am going to upload everyone at once.  There will be a note on the October IComLeavWe list reminding people that I am going to be slow to upload people to the list.  So — no worries — I will get you up on the list, but it will be after the holiday is over on September 9th.

So in order of I-am-going-to-use-my-time-to-do-this to I-will-probably-not-get-to-this:

1. Read emails
2. Respond to emails that are time sensitive
3. Read other people’s blogs
4. Check Facebook
5. Update the IComLeavWe list
6. Respond to non-time sensitive emails
7. Check Good Reads
8. Check Twitter
9. Write posts

Oh!  And that includes the Roundup.  I will have something else fun in this space next week, but since I had to write it ahead of time, it won’t be highlighting posts that were written during this upcoming week.  Still, it will be fun.  I promise.  I know this because it’s already finished.

So, I am around, I am reading your blogs, I am posting posts I’ve already written, I am answering time-sensitive emails, I am reading pretty much all emails, I am maybe checking Facebook and updating the IComLeavWe list during the course of this Internet break.  But take pity on me as I try to squeeze online time into a half hour a day.

I’ll let you know on the 9th how effective this was or it was more of a pain-in-the-ass than it was worth.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Good Grief… Why Do I Feel Guilty?” (Mommyhood After Fertility Frustration)
• “Diamonds and Rust” (Nuts in May)
• “And Then I Had a Talk with Silent Bob” (Mommy Odyssey)
• “It’s Supposed to Work” (MissConception)
• “A Letter” (Follow Every Rainbow)
• “Finley Helps Save Lives” (Dear Finley)
• “About That Time…” (Beyond Acquara)
• “A Conversation with Two of the 47%” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Dora and Mina!
• “My Life as a Human Ping Pong Ball” (Adventures in Infertilityland)
• “Can You Imagine Not Having a Child?” (Baptism by Fire)
• “Jade is Not a Pretty Colour” (Happily Ever After)
• “A Reason to Live” (Still Standing Magazine)
• “One of Those Days” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)
• “A Birthday Boy and Girl…” (Marwil)
• “Cleaning Out Cabinets” (Three Geminis and a Sagittarius)
• “The Pregnancy Factory” (Little Chicken Nugget)
• “Unlovable” (An Embarrassment of Good Fortune)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I loved Julie Godar’s post about the validity of living child-free on BlogHer this week.  Though she knew even before she was rendered infertile that she didn’t want to parent, she discusses the ways people approach the fact that she is child-free and has moved from saying “can’t have kids” to “won’t have kids.”  I loved these lines because they are applicable in so many discussions regarding family building: “I hate justifying my decision, and I shouldn’t have to. I hate that just speaking my truth freights casual chitchat with tension. I really hate yelling at the Thanksgiving table.”  Great post.

Bloodsigns has a gorgeous post about resurfacing after a long sojourn from her blog.  This is one of those posts where I needed to take a highlighter across large sections of it; there were just too many moments I loved so deeply.  It begins: “I can’t remember a time in recent memory where I’ve left my blog untended for so long. It isn’t even that I haven’t had anything to say and in some cases have had far too much to say so I don’t say anything at all.”  We have all had whispered to ourselves that we want to be Somebody.  This post will resonate with almost everyone.  And what G said… was perfect.

A Woman My Age has created the most brilliant phrase for those pre-parenting daydreams (which I think we still have until we hit each stage too): “show and tell adventures.”  Because that’s it; isn’t it?  We don’t daydream about the toddler tantrums or the endless hours that take us from wake-up to bedtime.  We daydream about the trips to the pumpkin patch and the first haircut and opening Christmas presents.  We dream about all the doing that we’re going to do.  And then the reality of life sets in — a fantastically accurate description of the exhaustion inherent in toddlerhood.

Lastly, An Unwanted Path has a post about allowing herself to enjoy Christmas this year.  After many years of dreading the holiday and the conversations that went with it, she is now looking forward to the surreal fact that she’ll be able to start the family traditions she dreamed about all those Christmases while she was waiting.  And yet she also admits: “Parenting after infertility is amazing, and at times it’s difficult. I’m supposed to be fixed now, if you didn’t get the memo from all my friends and family. I’m not supposed to ever try again, my son is all I’ll ever need, and all the years, the lack of support, all the children I lost, shouldn’t matter.  Except everything still matters. It all still hurts.”  A very honest post.

The roundup to the Roundup: I am cutting down my online time to a half hour per day for 8 days — can I do it?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 21st and September 28th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.