554th Friday Blog Roundup

There is a huge sale this week for Life from Scratch. Starting July 18th (tomorrow) and running until July 24th, Life from Scratch will be on sale for 99 cents. 99 cents! A small cup of Starbucks coffee is more than double that amount. It’s on sale on Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google, and Apple — yes, everywhere. I would love your help in spreading the word.

So please Tweet about it. Or throw up the announcement on Facebook. Or email a friend about the sale. Or buy a copy for a friend and send it to them. Or Pin the book cover. Or… Instagram yourself reading the book… I will be eternally grateful.

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I’m here at BlogHer, but I wrote this Roundup yesterday before I got on the road. So… while I want to tell you about all that is happening at the conference, it is slow-going typing it on the iPad. Expect an update on Sunday.

In the meantime, the twins went to the White House and reported on the Kids’ State Dinner last week. I’m aware that I am biased and an insanely proud, emotional mother (especially when I think about their beginning months of life and everything it took to get to this age), but I think it’s a great article.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “My Body Image – My Infertile Struggle” (Unpregnant Chicken)

Okay, now my choices this week.

It was a week for beautiful stories and confessions.  Inconceivable! has a post about the embroidered towels she received in a moment when they thought their baby would die, and how she felt when she saw her mother using them recently.  She writes, “It occurred to me how I’d referred to E since the day she’d been conceived, more so once the bleeding started and especially after my water broke. If the baby lived, if she came home, if, if, if. I’d been saving these for that disaster.”  It’s about the if being confirmed and shifting the mind to follow.

Searching for Our Silver Lining has a gorgeous post about being the daughter of a mother with scars, and now being a mother with scars herself.  It is about not repeating what she experienced from the older generation.  She explains: “I was faced with the reality that I needed to find a way to begin healing from infertility in order to save my sanity. Since learning about the existence of the Beats, there’s been even more of an urgency as I’ve worried about repeating the cycle I learned from my mother’s trauma; tainting their lives with the demons that haunt me.”  Weaving in the practice of Kintsugi, she explains her path forward to healing.

So… I’m reading the Listserve this week, and AN IF BLOGGER WAS THE WINNER.  I had already decided to write the person before I got to the end, and then I looked at the name and email address and was like… is it?  AND IT WAS.  I am so happy that R. Sativus won.

Lastly, another post about healing comes from Family Rocks about feeling disconnected.  I think the most eye-opening part of the post was comparing the time she took off after the birth of her sons to the lack of time she took off after incorporating her sibling’s children into her family.  The difference between how we honour the life change of parenthood and how we don’t build that into other situations as people struggle to find their new normal.

The roundup to the Roundup: Please help me promote the Life from Scratch sale.  Twins reported from the White House.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 10th and 17th) 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.