437th Friday Blog Roundup

I follow our summer ice cream shop at the beach on Facebook, and this week they asked people to name their favourite flavours as they planned out their summer rotation.  I told the ChickieNob that she better go on and tell them which flavour she wants.  “I don’t need to,” she scoffed.  “All I want is chocolate, and they’ll always have chocolate.”  While she is most likely correct that chocolate seems like a constant, I told her that it’s a terrible habit to get into.  That if no one says, “chocolate,” the store may reason that no one really wants it and get rid of it.  Of course, they’ll hear from people once they get rid of it, people saying, “but I do love chocolate!  I just assumed it would always be here!”  And by that point, it may be too late for them to whip up a batch.

We went and told the ice cream store that we wanted chocolate ice cream.

So go tell five chocolates in your life — the constants that you sometimes overlook thinking they’ll always be around — that you love them today, whether that be a store, a person, an organization, or an ice cream flavour.

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April’s IComLeavWe list has opened for sign-up.  As always, IComLeavWe runs for the week of April 21 – 28.  Commenting galore.

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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:

• “The Darkness” (A Glimpse Inside)
• “Time Whooooshing” (I Can’t Whistle)
• “Memento Mori” (The Empty Cookie)
• “When Family Stories are Hard to Tell” (NY Times)
• “A Birthday of a Different Sort” (Teach Me to Braid)
• “On Marriage Equality” (Bereaved and Blessed)
• “Better When” (The Journey of a Woman Warrior)
• “The Trouble with Twins” (Stephanie Snowe: the Blog!)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I too loved Stephanie Snowe’s post “The Trouble with Twins.”  We’ve heard the same sentiment, which has always struck me as bizarre when people say it to us.  I mean, say it to a fellow singleton parent, say it behind our backs, but to our faces?  Or to the kids’ faces?  We always tell the kids that some people have weird-ass ideas about twins and that this is their problem and not ours.  And I loved her point about how everything doubles except time.  Perfect post.

A Crack in Everything also had a post on Thursday that I didn’t read until after I wrote the last Roundup about telling her boss about her infertility as well as trying to become a single mother by choice.  It’s a moving story about two women coming together in a conversation about grief, and the things that are learned when we open up to each other.

Bio Girl has a post about the tangible things we leave behind when we die.  Her sister’s things have migrated into various places, and now everywhere she looks, tiny reminders of her sister are around her house.  It was telling how important those tangible items can be; how much we need to record and remember with something visual.  The part that moved me the most came towards the end: “And in a way, it feels so wrong to have her things at my house, because I so desperately want her here to need them.  I want her to walk in and ask for them back.  Since I know she can’t, we will surround ourselves with her things; we will think of her when we look at them, but we are already thinking of her all the time anyway, so that won’t be anything new.”

Lastly, Kmina’s Blog has a post about our imagined futures.  She admits that she never imagined life beyond 35 (though her real life looks nothing like the life she imagined for herself at 35), and she states of this visual cliff: “Perhaps it is a good thing I have no idea what turning 40 means, for once I can leave behind the prejudices and other people’s ideas of what my life and I should be like, and start on this journey just as I am.”  I really loved that idea of starting a stage of life without expectations.  And I found the whole story about beds amusing.

The roundup to the Roundup: Go tell the chocolate in your life that you appreciate it/them.  April’s IComLeavWe is open.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 22nd and March 29th) 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.