Category — Friday Blog Roundup

It has gotten veeeeeery quiet in the blogosphere as people get ready for Christmas.  The blog post reading is thin.

For the first time ever, we’re not volunteering on Christmas.  We’ve declared it a day of Nothingness: no commitments, no running around, no getting dressed, no stress.  We’re going to sleep in and then lounge about in our pyjamas watching movies and reading books.  Okay, fine, and play Candy Crush.  I’ve been looking forward to this all month.

But it’s very odd to not celebrate Christmas and yet have to navigate Christmas regardless since it’s everywhere you turn.  For instance, nothing being open.  That doesn’t phase me on Thanksgiving because I’m ensconced in hanging out with family at Thanksgiving.  But on Christmas, we sit there, twiddling our thumbs and saying things like, “we could… well… no… we probably couldn’t because I bet it’s closed… maybe… no… that’s probably closed too…”

So we’ll plan ahead, stocking up on milk and bread as if it’s a snow storm.  And then we’ll settle down inside the house.

So… what are you doing for Christmas?

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I have a question for all iTunes users.  I suddenly have over 6 GB of “other.”  This has been since updating to iOS7.  I’ve deleted my Safari cache, deleted old text messages… what else can I do?  Have you ever had this happen and how did you reduce the size of the “other” column on the phone?

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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:

• “Dam. Open Adoption is Hard” (Lavender Luz)
• “Then. Now. Always.” (Mrs. Spit Still Spouting Off)
• “Adjusting to a New Sound: The Voices of Childless & Childfree Women” (TheNotMom.com)
• “The View Through the Windshield” (A Crack in Everything)
• “Fertility Privilege, Part One” (Schrodinger’s Catbox)
• “Fertility Privilege, Part Two” (Schrodinger’s Catbox)
• “A Change in DH Helps a Change in Me” (An Unexpected Trip)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Bickerstaff Blog has a post digging down to the roots of the argument between working and stay-at-home parents; namely, “There is no rank or betterness to one way or the other, yet because of the judgement and strong opinions of others, we always feel the need to defend what we do.”  I really loved the post because it spoke more to our personalities than to benefits or detriments to either situation.

Not an IF blog, but definitely worth a read through an IF lens.  Sassymonkey has a post about situations where words fail us.  It begins with her admitting: “I’ve had a difficult year with words.”  And it continues with the question of what happens when writers can’t find words beyond the overused “I’m sorry” when they hear bad news.  “Shouldn’t I know something better, something less cliched? Something more meaningful? You rail against your lack of mastery of language because there’s got to be something better to say.”  I especially love the thought she comes to in the end.

I held my breath through a post about loss on Inconceivable!  Intuition tells her something is wrong with the pregnancy, and a visit to the doctor confirms a lack of heartbeat.  It is a heartbreaking post; a gut-wrenching post.  And just as the fall from the jungle gym took her breath away, she took my breath away with her retelling of the death.  Sending a hug to her.

Lastly, Stumbling Gracefully writes about the happily ever after… and what comes next.  After achieving the family she wished for, she wonders about setting a new life goal.  She writes, “I wonder, what does one do with her life when has everything she ever hoped for? What do you work for when it’s all been achieved?”  She sets patience as her goal for 2014.  It’s really a lovely post.

The roundup to the Roundup: What are you doing for Christmas?  How do you reduce the “other” column on the iPhone?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between December 13th and December 20th) 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 I’ve been running Hour of Code in the twins’ school (which, for me, is more like 12 hours of code as each class shuffles through), and on Wednesday, I ate lunch at their table in the cafeteria.  I was already there when their class came in and paused, staring at me.

“Oh hey,” I told a random girl who sat down near me.  “I’m Melissa.  I’m repeating third grade.”

She looked at the twins for explanation, but they just shrugged.  One of their friends squinted at me.  “No, you’re not.  You must be here for something else.”

“Nope,” I told him, cheerfully.  “Here to repeat third grade.  Didn’t do it that well the first time around and only realized that this week.  So, here I am.  Ready to do it all over again.”

And the best part was that for the next twenty minutes, they politely included me as one of their own, explaining what I would be doing now that I was an official third grader.  I will apparently learn all about a bird that can make a sound like a chainsaw, a few useful phrases in Spanish, and how to play the recorder.

Bring it on!

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A long time ago, I did a sugar art demonstration in a nursery school.  Years later, I was in the grocery store one morning, and there was a group of kids there on a field trip from a local elementary school, and as I passed them in the produce section, I heard a boy say, “that is the woman with all the sugar!”  It was a kid who had seen my demonstration in nursery school!

Lesson learned: Sugar makes an impression.

So the amusing, parallel part to leading Hour of Code is that as I return to the school day after day and I lead the workshop, I can hear kids talking about me: “that’s the woman who has all the electronics!”  To be fair, I am schleping around a big bag filled with a computer, littleBits, thumb drives, math books, and a tablet with a stylus.

But it made me feel cool, like the Pied Piper of Circuits.

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This is it, your last chance.  The 2013 Creme de la Creme closes to submissions on December 15th at night.  Anything that comes is after 11 pm ET will not be on the list… ever.  As in, this is it.  If you want to be part of the Creme de la Creme for 2013, submit now.  On Sunday, the list will be finalized, and it will go up on January 1st.

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I always feel like I need to mention that it’s Friday the 13th when the Roundup falls on Friday the 13th.  As I wrote last time this occurred:

Though I’m usually fairly anxious around certain dates, allowing my imagination to run towards grotesquely disturbing scenarios, I’ve never had big feelings concerning Friday the 13th.  Even if I live … like … 2 miles from Camp Crystal Lake and I totally know someone who knows someone who is the cousin of the counselor who decapitated Mrs. Voorhees.

It’s one of those dates that I feel like I should have big feelings about.  If I’m not worried, then I must be a fool.

You know how girls pinched each other’s arms with a Cootie Shot to ward off boy germs?  Mentioning that it’s Friday the 13th feels like a horror Cootie Shot.

Do you care about Friday the 13th or are you not superstitious about the date?

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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 Dread of Advent” (Through the Ardennes)
• “Christmas.  It’s Coming.  Again” (By the Brooke)
• “The Best I Can” (For My Sweet Boy, Jonah)
• “Courage for the Present” (Work is for Suckers)
• “I am not a loosey goosey come-what-may kind of lady” (I’m Polycystic Inside)
• “I Don’t Know Your Story” (A Sky for Blue)
• “20 Ways” (Where the *Bleep* is Our Stork?)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Anabegins has a post about shaking up her life.  Believe me, she could have been describing my life when she writes, “I’m no good at change. I get stuck in a rut and start to really like my rut, and get all cozy and comfortable with my rut, and suddenly its like ‘my beloved rut, don’t leave me!!’ You get the point.”  Oh, yes, I do.  Which is why I’m impressed with all the changes she hopes to make.  As she says, she put it online so she feels accountable.  Seems like a good time of year to do your own post about what you’d like to change in 2014.

My Lady of the Lantern has a post about waiting (or not?) for your period.   It’s clever, but it’s also veeeeeeeeery familiar; those phantom pregnancy signs.  (Is it?  Or isn’t it?) And the fact that your period always seems to show on the least opportune day.

Lastly, From IF to When has a post about understanding someone infertile.  She tackles common misconceptions, addressing both the myth and the reality.  Infertile people don’t hate those who conceive easily, nor do we want to avoid kids at all costs.  It’s a great post that you may want to leave open on someone’s computer screen by “accident.”  Just sayin’…

The roundup to the Roundup: I’m a third grader!  Or the lady who has all the electronics.  The 2013 Creme de la Creme is closing.  It’s Friday the 13th.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between December 6th and December 13th) 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.

Josh and I were all ready to drop down over $100 for a small piece of tech this week.  I’m being purposefully vague because my goal is not to harm the reputation of this company but to point out an issue with brands utilizing social media.  So we were all ready to shell out the money, but I decided to ask a question before we plopped down the cash.  It’s my new canary in the coal mine: if I can’t get a company to answer my questions BEFORE I’ve given them my money, I have a good idea that they’re not going to be available to answer questions AFTER I’ve given them my money.  And for some of these obscure tech items we get the kids, there are such a small amount of other people out there who own the same item that if we run into a problem and the company itself won’t help us out, we’re out of luck.

So I write a quick question.  If I get an answer back in a reasonable amount of time, I make the purchase.  If I don’t get an answer back at all, then I walk away from the product.  So, for instance, the Wolvog desperately wanted a coding app.  It wasn’t clear that the app came with a tutorial, and it was a pretty expensive app.  It happened to be a coding language that the Wolvog doesn’t know, so I wanted to make sure that there was going to be something on the app to help him when he got stuck.  I sent an email in mid-October.  I’m still waiting for an answer.  In the silence, I told the Wolvog that I wasn’t willing to spend that amount of money to be frustrated.  So no app.  Instead we put that money towards an engineering toy where the person not only answered my first question quickly, but each subsequent one in quick succession.  That company is a keeper.

I think brands — especially small brands, just starting out — look at social media as this paradise where the customers are like low-hanging fruit.  There are just so many of us, and we’re all so accessible.  They can purchase ads and send it to our Facebook wall, tweet at us, slip comments into our blog posts.  They can throw up a project on Kickstarter and get tons of people to contribute small sums of money vs. going through the grant writing process (which is often an exercise in frustration).

What they don’t realize is that if do social media poorly, it hurts their brand.  It affects their reputation.  And social media is loud.  A single complaint sounds louder than it would in the face-to-face world.

Part of being a brand on social media (and perhaps some small businesses may want to think twice about joining in with social media if they don’t have the bandwidth to do it well) is engaging in that social part.  Not just talking at, but talking with.  Sometimes that means hundreds of people asking you questions.  If you’re asking them for money or support for your idea, that’s a fair trade.  Sometimes it means someone whining about your product, and you need to pleasantly respond and try to make their experience with your product better.  And sometimes they have such a fantastic experience with your product that they give you tons of free press, spreading that love across the blogosphere.  It works both ways.

So I sent an email that got no response back from this tech company, despite the fact that the company continues to tweet and Facebook and blog.  And yes, I sent them a message on Twitter letting them know I emailed just in case it went into spam.  Crickets.  They just keep tweeting, “support our project!”  And I’d love to.  I just want my question answered in return.  Especially since I got the email from a page that asked potential customers to email them with questions.

I know I’m hella cranky.  I should probably go drink a cup of tea.  Though I am giving them a week.  That seems fair-ish.

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The 2013 Creme de la Creme is trucking along.  There are currently 75 on the list and under two weeks to go until the hard deadline (December 15!).  So, are you on the list yet?  It’s wrapping up, so this is your last chance.

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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:

• “Raising Daughters: Smart and Beautiful are Not Mutually Exclusive” (Three Geminis and a Sagittarius)
• “Am I Just ‘Playing House’?” (Sweet Dreams are Made of This)
• “An Empty Place at the Table” (The Empty Cookie)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Processing Thanksgiving was a theme this week.  Birds, Bees, and Medicine had a post about her two Thanksgivings — one with kids and one without.  Both contained their moments, but it was her words about a family member’s Christmas present idea that gave me pause: “a family tree with the parents in the trunk, the four children in each of the branches with their spouses, and then all the grandkids as leaves with thumb-prints. I wondered if our branch would really look as sad and barren as it did my imagination and if there would be space for us to add our thumbs prints later or if this was her idea of the family being complete. ”  I especially loved the end of the post.

LittleLightLuke sat at the Thanksgiving table and remembered her son who should be here but wasn’t.  As they went around the table, stating what they were thankful for, her mother answered that she’s thankful that they’re all together.  She wrote, “My heart felt stabbed–We are all here?!  It is so glaring to me that we are NOT all here.  I know she didn’t mean anything bad by it and she misses Luke too, but it still bothered me.”  But the moment most moving was when the author brought Luke’s name to the table.

Lastly, the Road Less Travelled had a post about the elf on a shelf.  And I love love love this part: “But these days, it seems the pressure to do more, buy more, give more gifts — on top of all the other pressures of modern life and parenting — just keep ratcheting upward.  And who is benefiting here?”  I don’t even celebrate Christmas, but who hasn’t felt the volume turned up everywhere year after year?  Brilliant post.  Actually, I feel like I need to unpack it myself in my own post.

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s hard to be a brand on social media.  The 2013 Creme de la Creme opened: is your post on the list?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 29th and December 6th) 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 hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving if you celebrate it, and that you weren’t too annoyed by all the Thanksgiving posts and Facebook status updates and tweets if you don’t celebrate it.

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I learned this week that the thing I’m calling a speckled doughnut in Candy Crush is really a nonpareil (or, I’m told a “freckle” as it’s known in Australia).  Like a Sno-cap.  Those things you get in the movie theater.  Once the person told me that, it made perfect sense — more sense than a speckled doughnut, since it wasn’t clear how doughnuts fit in with the whole candy world.  But I have to admit that I can’t stop calling them speckled doughnuts, even now knowing their real name.  It doesn’t sound right to say, “combine a rainbow nonpareil with a striped candy.”  Right?

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The FDA told 23 and Me that they have to cease marketing their product as screening for genetic information, stating the reason as a lack of accuracy in test results.  It brought back my thoughts on the fact that 23 and Me (backed by Google) is amassing an incredible wealth of genetic information on participants.  But if it’s not accurate, what is its worth?  In terms of marketing, if companies collect incorrect information to market to us, how valuable is that information if it isn’t accurately enticing the right people with the right goods?  I think of things such as the containers of formula I received while going through treatments, companies believing I was pregnant when I clearly wasn’t.

It feels like the information companies attempt to collect and believe is meaningful keeps proving time and again how little we can know about people at a distance.

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The 2013 Creme de la Creme is trucking along.  There are currently 71 on the list and two weeks to go until the hard deadline (December 15!).  So, are you on the list yet?  Extra love to people who submit early!

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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:

• “Confession Time” (Fox in the Hen House)
• “Forty, Fat, Infertile and Falling Apart” (The 2 Week Wait)

Okay, now my choices this week.

MoJo Working admits that despite recent posts, there is a lot of happiness she is feeling with her current pregnancy.  That happiness doesn’t necessarily make it into posts since she writes for the catharsis, to process darker emotions.  I think it’s the way a lot of people use their online space; to process their fears or sadness.  It may skew our perception, but only if we forget that the need to write is what drives some blogging and not necessarily a perfect recording of the daily world.

MissConception debates whether or not to return to work after having a child, and tells her story of how the unexpected costs of building their family chose her path for her.  It’s not a decision all women or men get to make — to have a stay-at-home parent — and sometimes the sacrifices need to continue into parenthood.  It’s a good post that give a complicated and frank answer to what is sometimes an assumption.

It is What It is has a post on “what it’s all about.”  She begins: “It’s true that I always wanted to have two children. I’m not sure why that is or how the notion of how many kids one wants to have comes into focus, but that is how I thought it’d be.”  She lists off a series of moments that she describes as having a feeling of deja vu that is “not so much repeating something I may have lived before, but something I longed to live.”  It’s just a gorgeous post of captured moments.

Stupid Broken Eggs has a post about her dog, Swish.  And, oh my G-d, he is so cute.  Click over for pictures of pure love.

Dear Noah has a post about how family avoids speaking about her son; his death has become the elephant in the room.  She ends the post with this very powerful thought: “it physically hurts not to talk about him. Why I need others to talk about him. I just don’t know how to get there. And if the silence is this bad after only one month, how bad will it be at a year. 5 years. 18 years. Because I won’t forget. But I worry they will.”  The next time you wonder whether to say something to a grieving parent, speak up.  Even if it’s just to open the door and invite them to talk.

Lastly, Constant in the Darkness has a post on what she wished she had known about adoption before forming their family.  It is a wonderful post, exploring the complex relationship that exists between all the members of the triad.

The roundup to the Roundup: Hope you had a good Thanksgiving.  It’s not actually a speckled doughnut.  23 and Me and the FDA.  The 2013 Creme de la Creme opened: is your post on the list?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 22nd and November 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.

A few weeks ago, It Is What It Is wrote about a very different way of eating an apple from the bottom up rather than eating around the side.  The result is a lot less waste.  I decided to try it yesterday.  I cut out the tiny flower at the bottom of the apple but kept on the stem.  When I cut out the flower (a chunk about the size of my pinky nail that I removed with a paring knife), it opened a hole in the core where I could see the seeds above.  I don’t know why I thought the core was somewhat solid.

So I started chomping at it from the bottom.

Do you see that hole?  This apple is halfway gone, and I’m getting close to the seeds.  Everyone in the waiting room looked at me either because (1) I was eating an apple in an unusual and cool way, (2) I was taking excessively large bites, almost choking on each one, or (3) I was screaming between every bite to the Wolvog that he needed to photograph this because it was so damn cool.

So he did.

You can sort of tell how small it is by looking at my thumb.  I probably could have eaten more, but I had to stop to have a long conversation with the Wolvog about why he couldn’t have my apple seeds.  (Him: “Why?”  Me: “Because, they’re garbage.”  Him: “They’re only garbage to you.”  Me: “I’m not going to give you my seeds because all that will happen is that they’ll end up in the wash.”  Him: “No, they won’t.  I really like them.  I’ll take care of them.  I’ll plant them.”  Me: “No.”  Him: “Why?”…)

It Is What It Is has changed my life.

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Josh sent me an article about comfort pets on planes, an option that I didn’t know existed until that moment.  I immediately said that I wanted to bring Truman to calm me on our next trip since I am a horrible flyer.  Josh told me that isn’t going to happen.

But for curiosity sake, how would you feel if you sat down on a plane, and the woman next to you (let’s say, someone who is diminutive in size with long brown hair and writes a blog — NOT ME) was holding a guinea pig on her lap?

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The 2013 Creme de la Creme is trucking along.  There are currently 68 on the list and under a month to go until the hard deadline (December 15!).  So, are you on the list yet?  Extra love to people who submit early!

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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:

• “Courageous” (Genuine Greavu)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I loved Lavender Luz’s post comparing the state of adoption to the concept of glasnost from the former Soviet Union.  She writes: “So today, during National Adoption Awareness Month, I make a bold prediction: the walls that still exist in adoption will fall not gradually and softly but in a rush. A shocking, thunderous rush, just like we saw nearly 25 years ago in Europe.”  To continue reading, the rest of the post is on Huffington Post.

Plan Y has a post about friends who came to dinner and the baby they brought with them.  She admits, “Sometimes I’m able to hold back and not engage with babies and toddlers, and other times I just can’t help myself.”  It’s a bittersweet post about a fun evening that ends with a bib left behind on the table.  She made me feel as if I was there.

Lastly, Taboo Baby Talk has a very honest post about why she’s not crying after her miscarriage.  She writes: “I still haven’t cried since the miscarriage was confirmed on Tuesday.  I google everything and was avoiding my recent google search of ‘what if you don’t cry after a miscarriage’.  A little nervous of what the search results would reveal.  But I did it.  I literally googled that.”  I think it’s important to read a wide range of reactions to loss, and I’m really glad she wrote this post.

The roundup to the Roundup: A different way to eat an apple.  How would you feel if you had to sit next to a guinea pig?  The 2013 Creme de la Creme opened: is your post on the list?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 15th and November 22nd) 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.