Posts from — January 2011

This was a crap-assy week that started with Josh being assigned to a multi-month trial at jur.y d.uty (because this is soooooooooo our luck) and ended with our bouncey ball pit popping.  For those who have been to our house and know the said ball pit, they can attest that it is the heart of our playextravaganza.  I thought we’d grow old with that thing.  And I had just promised it to my BIL when the twins were done with it — their daughter loved this thing hardcore.  So I was in tears when it popped.  I know the tears were more for the frustration that was this week as well as the fact that I didn’t want this to be the way that era ended.  Josh and I stayed up last night trying to tape this thing back together.  And when I came down this morning, it was deflated again.

It was ridiculous, but the ball pit popping felt like the last straw.

Actually, the last straw was after we stopped working on it, Josh picked up the air pump and the sharp end of it swung up and hit me straight in the middle of my glasses lens.  It was plenty painful, but if I hadn’t been wearing my glasses, it could have been a trip to the emergency room.  That one was really the last straw.  I’m ready to end this week and start a new one.

Anyone else want to say “fuck all” to this week?

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Weekly What If: What if you could remove one date from the calendar?  Everyone would know that date once existed, but now it’s gone.  Would you remember someone by removing their birthday, making everyone mindful of their existence?  Would you get rid of  day that has bad memories attached?  What would you do?

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I am beyond excited about the Grateful Said (thank you texacali/mexicali girl!).  Pretty much as excited as I was for the Creme de la Creme.  It is very moving to see which words you left on a post meant so much to the other person that they highlighted them on the list.  Two weeks until the Grateful Said is live (February 1st), and then it will continue to be open for submissions through February.  We’ll have it go hand-in-hand with the Creme next year.

I know you’re probably struggling with this one because you have more than one comment that means the world to you.  But the point is not to drive yourself crazy, but instead to simply choose one and celebrate the almighty comment.  What else sends a message to the world that comments are important than celebrating them with their own list?  And this is a great way to publicly say thank you to the other person.

We all know that your other comments mean a lot to you too; that this was just one of many that touched you.  So take this weekend to scroll back and find one that you want to show to the world.

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And now, the blogs…

Searching for The Missing Piece has a post about being the last person to reach parenthood.  It piqued my interest because I currently have The Hunger Games as next up in my to-read list.  She writes, “Lately, I’ve been feeling like that victor.  The last one standing.  However, it’s not that everyone else has died, but has gone on to become parents.  They’ve gotten out of the games.  We’ve all endured the challenges that years of infertility brings. They may not include poisonous gas or bees that cause hallucinations, but the lasting scars can be just as deep.”  She worries about posting these thoughts, but I find them very honest and very thoughtful.  And helpful for others to hear.

Finding a New Normal has a post about finding an old slip of paper from a fortune cookie.  I won’t spoil the post by telling you what the fortune said (hint: click over and find out), but I hope that she frames it and places it in that not-yet baby’s room one day.

Lastly, I really like Infertility Unexplained’s thoughts on the latest rash of infertility news; from the twiblings to sex selection via IVF.  She writes, “But as I read Thernstrom’s story I realized that what she is doing is rewriting the fairy tale birth story that many women (and some men) invent before we start trying to conceive (or like, when we’re 8 and playing house and then again as young feminists reading Our Bodies, Ourselves), before we know anything about infertility–the fairytale we realize we must grieve when we can’t get pregnant on our own, and then grieve again when fertility treatments fail. She is rewriting this fairytale for her children, and herself, so that her children will understand and value their birth story.”  Go over to read her thoughts on both stories.

The Weekly What If: I’m having a crappy week, are you?  Answer the Weekly What If.  Have you submitted a comment for the Grateful Said yet?  And lots of great posts to read.

I’m notorious for being unable to control my verbal diarrhea when I see famous people.  One time, we were in Dupont and we were walking toward Christiane Amanpour and Jamie Rubin on the sidewalk when they parted to allow us to pass between them and I pretty much crapped myself and then told every employee at Kramer’s about it for the next hour.

I was at the Helen Hayes Awards because Josh was nominated for one of his plays, and we were at this party when Judd Hirsch walked by.  And unable to control my own body, I pointed at him and screamed, “that’s Judd Hirsch!”

Which isn’t even the most embarrassing part.  I DID THE SAME THING YEARS LATER TO PAULA DEAN.  I was at BlogHer, sitting by a door, and she walked through it and I screamed, “you’re Paula Dean!”  It’s like famous people are the reflex hammer and my mouth is an enormous deep tendon jerking out words I don’t intend to have leave my mind.

But I’d like to report that I controlled my internal monologue, even though the urge was there to yell out their names, when I met the Sklar Brothers last weekend at the EntryPoint DC performance.

In my head: “YOU’RE RANDY AND JASON SKLAR!”

We went with two other couples and we were all fairly giddy with the idea of being out at night like grown-ups.  We had a great dinner at Commissary (where the Sklar Brothers stopped by our table to say hello pre-performance — so I actually almost crapped myself twice in one evening) and then saw the show (which was hysterical.  If they’re ever in your city, you should go out and see them) and then went out to coffee afterward.

Before the show, we stopped into a VIP pre-party for the performance even though I am not a VIP.  I am not even an IP.  I am merely a P.  But I was with Josh, and Josh is a VIP.  And I decided that I wanted a picture with them.

A long time ago, when Josh and I were at Disney World, we kept bumping into this ten-year-old girl throughout the day.  She would scream at her parents, “take my picture!” and then go and pose in front of the ride by placing her hands on her hips and doing a deep lunge.  And Josh commented that one day she’d look back on those pictures and regret that she went through an entire vacation and does not have a single photograph where she is standing in a normal position.

So at dinner before the performance, I announced that when we went to the VIP party, I was going to pose like that with the Sklar Brothers — my hands on my hips, my body in a deep lunge.  And we’d snap the photo, the boys smiling nervously because they couldn’t understand why someone would get into this pose.  And my plan was to laugh apologetically and say, “I really don’t know why I did that.  Could we retake the picture so I could be in a normal pose?”  And then, when we got ourselves in a normal position again, right before the camera would snap, I fall back into a deep lunge, my head cocked to the side defiantly, the palms of my hands covering their face.  And this would go on and on and on; and dozens of photos later (because in this plan, the Sklar Brothers were game for me to do this dozens of times), I would finally declare one of my deep lunges perfect.  And we’d all go on our merry way.

But as you can tell from the picture above, Josh explained that this wouldn’t be amusing — at least not to the other subjects in the picture nor to the people at the VIP party.  In fact, it just might mean that I don’t get invited back to another VIP party.  So I controlled my inner monologue AND I controlled my posing ideas.  I stood upright and bit my tongue and tried to appear like I get out of the house, when it is very very rare for me to get out of the house.  One of the terrible perks of working from home.

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As we drove home, I mused that I didn’t really know why people took pictures with famous people they didn’t know.  I mean, it would be one thing if we had emailed prior to that point and had some sort of connection.  But those comedians didn’t even know my name and won’t remember me thirty seconds after the photo was taken.  So why do we collect these pictures of ourselves with famous people?  To prove that we were there?  To prove that we closed the six degrees of separation between two people and physically stood in each other’s presence?

Or is it because we all have a bit of oral diarrhea and instead of shouting out the obvious, we click a picture instead.  Since, for some reason, that’s more socially acceptable than screaming, “you’re Randy and Jason Sklar!”

Come on, dish.  What famous people have you met?  And did you take a picture?

Many newspapers are running the story of what they’re calling the “twiblings”: two babies born days apart to the same parents via surrogacy.  In other words, the parents worked with two surrogates simultaneously in order to transfer embryos to both at the same time which resulted in each surrogate carrying a child, delivering them within days of each other.  So they have boy-girl twins … from separate wombs.

I don’t want to debate the ethics of this or talk about twins in general or the parenting of multiples (I mean, yes, all those things would be interesting to talk about, but they’re not what I want to focus on today).  What I want to talk about is the enormous amount of word coinage that goes on in the media when they discuss fertility stories and whether these terms even fit.

Twiblings makes perfect sense because the uniqueness of twinhood is partially nature and partially a social construct.  If people didn’t treat the ChickieNob and Wolvog as something special, they would not know that twinhood was something special.  But they have had a lifetime marked by others cooing over them and pointing out how they are different from singletons, and I think that has cemented the relationship just as much as spending time in the womb together.

Which is not to knock the time they spent together inside of me.  The way they interacted then is the way they still interact now.  We used to watch the Wolvog touch his sister’s head in the womb, and that is still his calming technique, his touchstone.  He just needs to hold her ponytail for a moment to be sure of her.  When they came out of the womb, one had bradycardia and one had tachycardia, but if we kept them together in the same isolette, they each regulated the other’s heart rate.  And when we moved them apart, they would return to their irregular heart rates.

I think most twin parents have a crazy story like that.

So, yes, those kids are twiblings, and I would count them as a type of twin because other people will mark them as a type of twin.  And that marking will define them just as much as the time they spend together at home or the time they could have spent together in the womb if they had been traditional twins.

Oh, in case you didn’t know, this story isn’t that unique.  We have our own triplings in the blogosphere: Uterus x 2 which became Finding Chaos had twins and a singleton within 4.5 months of each other.  The two mums are raising their kids as the trio.

The problem I have with the use of the word “twiblings” is when it is applied to children who come from the same batch of frozen embryos, yet are born years apart.  At the same time that newspapers were reporting on this set of twiblings, they were also talking about three kids they were deeming triplets, even though they were born 11 years apart.

But they aren’t triplets — not by nature such as being in the womb together nor by social construct such as having people point out their uniqueness or interact with them based on their triplethood.  The parents will not need to help those kids navigate the pitfalls and benefits of a multiples’ relationship.

I think it can be emotional for parents to think about batches of embryos — of creating two lives from the same batch of embryos — and I’ve certainly read blog posts about this when it comes to loss and creating a second life from the same set from which the first child came.  But in this case, it’s the thoughts and feelings of the parents that are being placed on the children, rather than the other way around.

With twinhood, even non-traditional twinhood such as the twiblings above, it’s the children navigating the relationship and all it brings and it’s the parents who are there merely to observe and guide.  In the case of the faux triplets born 11 years apart, it is the parent’s feelings about embryos from the same batch being placed on the children, telling them their relationship rather than having them organically experiencing it by going through milestones together.*

Which is not to knock the uniqueness of embryos from the same batch growing into children.  Life, in and of itself, is miracle enough.

I don’t know, where do you stand on the use of twiblings in the case of the two-surrogates-at-the-same-time (or two-mums-at-the-same-time too)?  What about in children born from the same batch of embryos years apart? (Which is so freakin’ common that I can’t believe this is newsworthy at this point.)

* I don’t actually know how this couple feels about this phenomenon, but I’m basing this on the fact that the parents are putting this story out there.

Within a comment, Texicali Girl asked an important question: why isn’t there a Creme-de-la-Creme-like post for best comments?  Especially when comments are obviously very important to me with IComLeavWe?

Introducing: The Grateful Said of 2010 — the best comments from the ALI blogosphere*.

Which means diving back into your posts from 2010 and finding a comment (because there were probably dozens) that changed the way you saw your own situation, brought you comfort, were the right words at the right time, or gave you food for thought.

In other words, this is your way of honouring someone who left a good comment on your post.  And it will hopefully encourage people to write great comments throughout the year knowing that they could end up on this list come the next January (oh yes, my friends, this will go hand-in-hand with the Creme in future years).

To Participate:

• Look at 2010 Posts: Go look through your 2010 archives and find a good comment to honour.  There are probably dozens of comments that fit the bill, but just choose one.  Make sure it was written in 2010 and that the post was from 2010.
• Fill Out the Form: Fill out this form which asks for the url of your post (please cut-and-paste it) as well as three lines or so from the comment.  If the comment is 4 lines total, round up.  But if it’s more than 4 lines, please just clip 3 lines from it for the sake of space.
• Make Sure You See This Screen: You will see a “congratulations” screen after filling out the form that lets you know that you’re on the list.
• Wait for the List to Go Up: Check back on February 1st when The Grateful Said of 2010 goes up.  The list will remain open until February 28th.
• Spread the Word: If you want to help spread the word, I’d be eternally grateful.  You can grab the icon, write about it on Twitter or Facebook, blog it, or gently nudge friends by pointing out a rockin’ comment you left back in 2010 on their blog.

* I bet you’re wondering how this project got its name.  Well that, my friends, is a funny story about my own mondegreen.  The suggestion came from Texicali Girl, and I was misremembering the Grateful Dead song Mexicali Blues as “Texicali Blues.”  So instead of the Grateful Dead, it’s the Grateful Said (because you’re grateful that someone said it).  So I set the name and made the icon and THEN I realized that it’s Mexicali and not Texicali.  So… there you go.

Want to win a copy of Life from Scratch?  Go over to Write Mind Open Heart where she’s giving three copies away if you answer this question: “what one thing you would get into if you had to rebuild your life after a major upset?”

Oh, and join the book tour while you’re there…