Category — Friday Blog Roundup

I got into a discussion on Twitter about the mother who was seen beating her son as she removed him from the Baltimore protests. I’ll start by saying that I don’t condone violence of any kind or for any reason. I’ve been uncomfortable with the Facebook comments people have written as they put up the video stating that she wins mother-of-the-year. I would never call beating your child a great parenting moment.

BUT.

I saw a woman who was terrified. Who was in the middle of a chaotic, emotional situation and interacted with her son inside that bubble of fear.

We all like to think that we would continue to be ourselves and hold tightly to our ethics in the face of that sort of fear. But I don’t know if I would. Meaning, I’ve never been in a high stakes situation like that where I had to get my child out of danger. I don’t know if I would be myself at that time.

I have no clue how this woman parents in a calm moment. I’ve only seen how she reacted to stress in this one particular moment. I don’t think that we do our best parenting in those moments.

Do I wish she had removed him without using violence? Yes. But I’ve also have never stood in her shoes and have no clue what I would do if I saw my child in danger and they weren’t going to follow me out of danger by using reason. I just don’t know.

But I do know that it’s dangerous to judge a whole person — good or bad — by a moment.

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My house is loud. It’s hard to think.

I brought Truman upstairs with me because I didn’t want him scared by the noise or breathing in the fumes and dust. He was quiet all day but decided that he wanted to start playing around midnight. I told him to go to sleep but laughed hysterically as he attacked his water bottle, a formidable opponent.  Isn’t our pig so damn cute, Josh?

But I wasn’t laughing when he decided to play with the water bottle again at 2:30 am. Nor was I laughing when he decided that 5 am was a great time to get in another fight with the water bottle. Or when at 6 am he decided he was up for the day and would love to be fed.

It is making me rethink the whole dog idea.

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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:

• “NIAW: You Are Not Alone” (Unpregnant Chicken)
• “You Are Not Alone: Flying Together With Broken Wing” (Waiting for Baby Bird)
• “You Are Not Alone (But It Sure Can Feel That Way)” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “You Are Not Alone: In the ‘After’ of Infertility” (Inconceivable!)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Pages, Stages, and Rages has a wonderful rant in time for Mother’s Day.  We point out these fails year after year, the narrow definition with which people define motherhood.  She writes, “Mother is not only a noun– it is a verb. One of those definitions is ‘to care for or protect like a mother.’  Please remember it.”  Yeah, I wish they would.

TasIVFer has a wonderful post explaining how she once was fearful for the type of mother her friend’s child would become, and how she has surprised her by being the opposite.  It’s a nice post about how our expectations can limit us, and how people sometimes astonish us in a good way.

Breathe Gently has a post about secondary infertility and all the things she didn’t know until she experienced it.  To quote Smarshy (remember Smarshy?!), secondary infertility is just a different “bag of ass.”  It is such a well-written summary of the complex feelings that surround trying to conceive again after a first bout of infertility.

Lastly, Life and Love in the Petri Dish writes about flying back out to Denver to cycle again at her clinic.  She explains, “Being back at the Denver clinic was weird… strangely boring this time around but also nostalgic. We flew through much of the day without blinking an eye. The consents, the credit card payments, the procedural instructions on injections, etc.? We’ve got all that down pat.”  It’s another leg of a long journey, and I wish them so many good thoughts as they gear up to cycle again.

The roundup to the Roundup: The Baltimore mother.  My house is loud.  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 April 24th and May 1st) 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.

I am currently writing this on a cocktail of three allergy medications, so I’d like to apologize in advance if it’s complete gibberish.  None of the three allergy medications actually make a difference, but I’m scared to test that theory and stop taking them.  I am a liquidy, itchy mess on them.  Who knows how much I’d ooze across the grocery store without them.

A side note: do you know how bizarre Sherlock is in a Benadryl haze?

I need the trees to stop with their pollen making.  Please, trees.  Do it for me.

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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.

*******

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 Wonder of a Talisman” (Earth & Ink)
• “Mother to Son” (The Empress and the Fool)
• “Pants” (The Empress and the Fool)
• “To My Fellow Infertility Wives” (Waiting for Baby Bird)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I had The Empress and the Fool’s heartbreaking post, Mother to Son, bookmarked for this week.  As much as it is about loss, it is also about the deep love that she has for her son.  She writes with such grace and beauty: “It was my privilege to feed and protect you, to watch you grow, to share this symbiosis, your cells with my cells in an ancient dance. I just wish I could have loved you from the outside.”  It is a moving tribute, one I wish she never had cause to write.

A Little Bit More has a post that shares a story of a poor decision from her childhood that illustrates how a single moment doesn’t define a whole person.  After reading about another child’s tantrum on Facebook, she tells a story about her own tantrum, explaining the impulse behind it.  And she asks important questions about public shaming — not posts that ask for advice but ones where the sole purpose is to shame the child for mistakes made.

Today’s the Day has a post about the concept of ancestors when you’re an adoptee.  It’s a post that runs so deep that I can’t really do it justice by writing about it, but I really really really (yes, it needs three reallys) think everyone should read this post.  Because you need to be witness to such an important moment of a single voice stating her truth, and it will make you think.  I promise.

Lastly, while there were many excellent NIAW posts this week, Resolve already rounded those up.  I wanted to highlight The Polka-Dot Umbrella’s post about not participating in NIAW.  It made me smile because it reminded me of that scene in Dead Poet’s Society where Robin Williams asks the boys to walk around the courtyard, and one uniquely expresses himself by not walking.  The non-walkers, or the non-writers in this case, are so important, too.  She calls it a grumpy post, but I’m grateful she wrote it and spoke up for the people who aren’t comfortable speaking up.

The roundup to the Roundup: My allergies are killing me.  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 April 17th and 24th) 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.

I read a post a few weeks ago about the idea of closing the comment section on a blog in order to move the conversation to other social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.

He makes some excellent points about the comment section: “The system is built for individual comments, not for discussion threads … Commenting on something that’s more than a couple of days old guarantees that apart from the blog author only a handful of people will ever see the comment, and starting a discussion about a post that’s several months old is pretty much always a dead end.”

I guess what I like about the comment section is that if I find a post weeks later, I can still see the discussion because it’s dangling under the post.  And yes, there are plugins that enable you to run tweets under the blog post, but I assume the tweets disappear if the person removes the plugin or the commenter deletes their Twitter account.  It feels less… permanent.  Beyond that, 140 characters often isn’t enough space to respond to a post, though it is enough space to acknowledge a post.

Commenting has definitely dropped in recent years as more people read from mobile devices and more people blog.  I think when the blogging community was small, you felt obligated to comment and let the person know you read their words.  You also had fewer places to write your thoughts therefore you felt a deeper impulse to comment and use the commenting space.  Now, you can jump into conversations about a post in a wide range of spaces, which dilutes the use of each individual space though the commentary is probably at a similar level if one considers all the places someone may have aired their thoughts.

What do you think of closing down the comment section in order to funnel people toward social media for conversation?

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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.

*******

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:

• “Draw Your Infertility” (Because I Can’t Have Babies)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I actually had “Draw Your Infertility” by Because I Can’t Have Babies bookmarked for this week because I didn’t read it until last weekend.  So I decided to put it in both places mostly because I think the exercise she did in the workshop is so helpful and applicable to a large range of emotionally-charged situations.  And yes, I am going to make you click over to see what she did in the workshop.  Believe me, you’ll want to bookmark the post, too, and return to it on a day you need it.

Persnickety Chickadee has a frank post about dealing with depression.  She also points out this fact about carrying your traditions and expectations with you: “Everyone’s expectations around home behaviours are different.  And because it’s something learned at home, where everyone else does it, it can be hard to explain it to someone else.”  This is why I read blogs and write a blog: because reading about someone else’s experience makes me feel less alone.

Unpregnant Chicken is struggling with the question many of us grapple with at some point in our treatment journey: reconciling her political beliefs about conception with her heart’s beliefs about conception.  It’s an interesting read.

Invincible Spring has a beautiful post about what a difference a year makes.  She writes, “During all those long years of loss, infertility and loneliness, I often comforted myself with the thought that life can change profoundly and unexpectedly in a single season, in the blink of an eye. ‘Everything could look completely different this time next year‘, I told myself, hoping it might be for the better.”  And isn’t that the hope that fuels us to put one foot in front of the other?

Two Adults, One Child kicks off her post with a venn diagram and then asks the eternal question: how does someone find their purpose?  It’s not just an interesting post that will encourage you to take a step back and look at your own life, but an interesting discussion is taking place in the comment section, too.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a moving post about the plot next to her daughter’s grave finally getting the plaque on it.  You should read this post precisely because it is a hard read.  Because hard reads are usually important reads because they force us to look at the truth about living and the time we have.

The roundup to the Roundup: What do you think about moving commenting to other platforms?  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 April 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.

So the Wolvog just finished his first online college class.  He audited it instead of taking it for credit because I wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep up.  But he did, excitedly chatting with his fellow students on the class forum and taking his exams at night.  It was super cute and sometimes I snapped pictures of him while he was trying to work and then screeched, “you are so cute!”  He got really good at ignoring me.

The only problem came when he got to the final project.

He dragged his heels because he wanted it to be spectacular.  He kept coming up with ideas and summarily rejecting them.  The clock kept ticking closer to the deadline, and I advised him that satisfactory-but-turned-in beat spectacular-but-not-turned-in.  It was finally a few days before the due date and he started working on coding a game.  He finished it with hours to spare except for a small glitch.  He sent a message asking for help from a fellow classmate and went to baseball practice.  When he came home, the answer was waiting, and he fixed the project.  Completed, at last.

He went to turn it in and discovered that he was locked out of the class.  The due date had been a half hour earlier; the time zone listed as one 5 hours ahead of our own even though the college itself was 3 hours behind our own.  He couldn’t turn in the project and would have to accept a zero, lowering his final grade from an A to a B.

He asked me to email his professor, and I did, explaining that I’m writing because I’m his mother and he’s 10 and lacks the ability to negotiate that power dynamic.  He is accustomed to a school situation where his mother can mosey into the classroom and speak to his teacher if there is an issue.  And I also explained that he would have to accept the consequences if it was impossible to turn in the project.

The professor was sympathetic but ultimately couldn’t bend the rules.  The due date was the due date.  Even though it was marked as a zero, she still gave him feedback and praise on the project, and I think he left the class feeling good about it overall.

I think letting him experience that was important — not the class, I mean, but having your hard work not counted due to lateness.  I don’t think he’ll procrastinate like that again.  He gets that the stakes are raised as you age, and that there will be times in the future where he will have to set aside other fun things to buckle down and get something done.  That he may sometimes need to settle on an idea that is satisfactory instead of waiting for something spectacular to spring up in his brain.

I think it’s a good sign that he’s looking for another class to take in the future — either in person at a local college or online again.  It means that he gets the idea that he’s going to be held to a standard and he gets to choose whether he rises to reach it and reaps the benefits or not.

Plus he’s still promising me that I can move to wherever he goes to college in the future so I can still do his laundry and cook his meals and tuck him in at night.  Hoping the ChickieNob chooses the same city if not the same college since she has that plan, too.  Though I’ve been told that I need to stop screeching at them, “you are so cute!” and covering them in kisses while they’re in class.  Online is fine since their classmates can’t see.  But in the classroom?  So embarrassing.

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STAR WARS COMES OUT ON ITUNES TODAY!  Um… yes… we set aside a gift card we had to purchase all 6.  One needs to be able to carry these things with them in their pocket at all times.

Isn’t that mid-blowing?  It used to be such a big deal to get to see the movies at home on a VCR.  Now I can carry all of them in my pocket on my phone.

*******

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.

*******

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:

• “One Day, in Retrospect” (Unnaturally Knocked Up)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I Try: The Additive Property of Happiness has a fantastic post on BlogHer this week busting her top three infertility myths.  It’s nice to have words going out to a more general audience instead of preaching to the choir, and I can see the post being shared over and over again across the Internet.  She’s invited people to add their favourite myths in the comment section, and I encourage you — if you want your words to travel outside this community and hit a more general population — to add your myth in the comment section ASAP.  It’s a great chance to spread a little more understanding into the world.

Searching for Our Silver Lining has a post about choosing to pick up heads-down pennies, superstitions be damned.  I love how she has taken bad omens and turned them around, writing, “Before our final treatment cycle, Grey informed me that we were black cats as others viewed us harboring bad luck. And yet we continued to persevere, choosing to live and exist without apology.”

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ has a post asking you to treat yourself as well as you would treat others, especially when it comes to infertility and loss.  If you have uttered something cruel to yourself lately; told yourself that you need to suck it up or get over it or that you’re not “woman enough” or that all of this is your fault, you need to read this post.  Run, don’t walk, over to her blog.

The roundup to the Roundup: Wolvog learns not to procrastinate.  Star Wars is out on iTunes.  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 April 3rd and 10th) 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.

Tonight kicks off Pesach.  I have tearfully said goodbye to bread and pasta for the next 8 days, and sighed a not-very-welcoming hello to the matzah.  This is not one of my favourite holidays.  It is very hard to be a picky vegetarian at Pesach and get enough protein.

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Skip this section if you skipped the recent post that had the Harry Potter spoiler because there is further discussion of the spoiler.  Leaving a few spaces to give you time to jump ahead.

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Okay, I call foul on the idea that it was a self-generating potion.  That would be completely out of character for Voldemort.  The man/snake has hubris.  He believes he is invincible and smarter than any other wizard.  Therefore (1) he wouldn’t believe that anyone would ever know of the Horcruxes, (2) if they did know about the Horcruxes, they would never seek one out to destroy him, (3) if they were seeking Horcruxes that they would know about the cave, and (4) that if they did reach the cave that they would get to the island.

His security measures are not really security measures.  They are more Voldemort playing with his prey like a cat plays with a mouse.  All the obstacles are there for his personal enjoyment of his own cleverness because he never believed anyone would actually reach that cave, much less the island.  Therefore, there would be no need to create a regenerating potion because the only time Voldemort would be returning to that island would be to retrieve and use the Horcrux.  Why would he want to use a regenerating potion — surely more difficult to create and maintain — if he believed there would never be a reason to refill the bowl?

Plus, he underestimates other witches and wizards through the whole series — from Lily Potter to Harry, himself.  Why would he account for other people’s dedication or intelligence now?

I know, we’ve thought about this way too much.  It’s like we’ve turned into little Potter scholars.

*******

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.

*******

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:

• “Exploding Lawnmowers and Dog Poop” (Wild and Precious Life)
• “The Lessons She Teaches Me: On Time #WDSD15” (Invincible Spring)
• “Cobra Pose” (No Baby Ruth)

Okay, now my choices this week.

River Run Dry gutted me with her post about giving away the last of the baby things.  Karen already dealt with my hysterical sobby emails, so I will spare you the recap.  But this line gutted me: “As I stood there, looking at it, grief washed over me.  He is my last baby.”  I am with her on the 99% of the time (um… maybe more like 97% of the time), especially when we are biking or plotting out our visits to Harry Potter conventions or reading young adult books.  But that 3% of the time?  It’s there, too.

Bound By Symmetry is back with a post about holding a room for a nursery when there isn’t a child on the way.  Especially when they have guests staying with them soon.  Should she really ask them to stay in the basement just so she can hold the unused room for someone who isn’t here yet?  You can see my take on her situation in the comment section, though add your own while you’re there.

Lastly, it was a week for crying-while-reading.  Something Out of Nothing is writing a series of posts for her daughter with the A to Z Challenge.  The first one, for the letter A, recounts her feelings on losing her mother in the month of April.  She writes so movingly about connecting with her mother through her daughter: “She gave me a connection to my mom I hadn’t experienced before. With every act of mothering, there was a recognition, a repetition. She bathed me and changed my diapers. She worried and watched while I slept. She responded to my cries with love and compassion. She watched in wonder as I grew and changed daily.”  It is such a gorgeous post.  You need to go over and read the whole thing.

The roundup to the Roundup: Pesach starts tonight.  More on the Harry Potter spoiler.  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 March 27th and April 3rd) 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.