Category — Friday Blog Roundup

On the bus ride home from BlogHer, I gave up my seats to some long legged boys and felt virtuous, as if I had given away my kidney.  Perhaps I saved those lanky boys from blood clots.  That was sort of the high point of the trip.  The rest of the ride was mind-numbing.

As I stared out the window from their vacated, cramped seat, I came up with a brilliant theory on how where you like to sit in the theater is determined by the place you personally define as “home.”  Home may be where you were born or it may be where you grew up or it may be where you live now; but at some point, people connect with a space and start feeling as if this one particular space is the best fit.  Even when I live in other areas, I still think of myself as a Marylander, and I was using that as the base for this thought.

I had been thinking about Lori and how she doesn’t live close to an ocean and wondering how one gets through their day being so far from the ocean.  It’s a drive for us, but still close enough that it’s a low stakes day trip.  And I wondered where Lori sat when she went to the theater, but she was on an airplane and I couldn’t ask her.  So I started asking all of you via Twitter and Facebook, and I really think I’m on to something.  I’m just trying to figure out how close someone needs to be to a coast to say they live “close to” a coast.  I’m two hours away, and I always prefer to be close to an aisle.  Is four hours away too distant for the coast to force the person to gravitate towards aisle seats?

So, let’s see where the pull of the coast stops working:

1. Determine the place you think of as home base; the space that you either live in now or lived in during the past that still holds your heart.
2. Work out how long it would take you to drive to a coast from that home base.
3. Think about whether you prefer the aisle seat (or close to the aisle) or the center seats in a theater.

Am I correct?

It was a seriously long and boring bus ride, but I’m still totally curious if my theory is true.

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While we were at the pool this week, I noticed the ChickieNob talking to herself, twisting and leaping on the black tile lap line on the bottom of the pool.  And then I realized that she was using it as her balance beam, pretending she was part of the women’s Olympic gymnastic team, and she was giving a play by play of her routine.  I used to do that when I was her age; I used to use the weightless possibilities of the pool in order to do what my body couldn’t do on land.  And it was sweet to know exactly what was happening in her head.  And it was bittersweet to be old and not using the lap lane tiles as a balance beam anymore.

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I saw the world’s best book trailer this week:

It did exactly what a book trailer should do, which is sell me on the book.  Which rarely happens.  I mean, I buy a lot of books, but rarely because they have such a rockin’ book trailer that it makes me jump over to their site.

My agent suggested The Marrying Kind by Ken O’Neill (by sending me a link to that book trailer) because she knows I like relationship books, and I’m going to use this book to scrub my mind of 50 Shades Freed (more on that when I can wrap up my thoughts.  They are pretty cranky at the moment).  After I watched the trailer, I read a sample chapter before I Googled the author a bit and bought the book.  Has anyone else already read this book?

Thank you, Mr. O’Neill for providing me with my beach read for 2012.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “Playing Catch Up…” (Happy-Go-Lucky)
• “August” (Outlandish Notions)
• “Holy” (Mommy Odyssey)
• “Why” (Mama Said Knock You Out)
• “The Weight of Having it All” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Lori!
• “Siblings” (Are You Kidding Me?)
• “Relief” (Life Pared Down)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Not-for-Profit Dad (as in, Josh) has a post about pulling baby teeth that I fell in love with.  He writes: “Later I Googled how many baby teeth a child will lose and was surprised that it was only 20. I don’t know what number I was expecting, but I thought it was higher. I thought I had more time with her as a little girl.”  It’s about life’s milestone carousel slowing down when you still thought there were two more minutes of the ride.

So I Was Minding My Own Business has a post on the terms childfree and childless, and why she uses the one she uses.  She asks a really important question: “Am I hurting anyone by deciding what term in my situation works for me?”  It’s an interesting discussion on language choice and the meaning behind words (and how strongly we hold on to the ones we believe belong only to us).

IF Crossroads has a goodbye post that made me teary.  It was beautifully written, the perfect closing to a blog.  I love this: “What has this space meant to me? I’m not sure that words can and will ever do it justice. I’ve come to this blog for refuge in my times of great despair and great hope, great sadness and overwhelming joy.”  Wishing her good thoughts on the next leg of the journey.

There were lots of BlogHer ’12 posts, but my favourite was A Half Baked Life who juxtaposed where she felt peace at the beginning of the conference with where she felt peace at the end.  About how the conference is but a moment, and it’s up to each person to take that fuel and use it once they get home.  Loved her recap of the weekend.

Lastly, Hormonal Imbalances has a post about mourning the life she never got to have.  In the midst of loss, she reflects the fact that these small beings changed her world before they left: “It’s such a strange thing. In the middle of life reversing, I have all these memories and dreams of something that I never tangibly got to have, but ended up changing everything anyway.”  A gorgeous, heartbreaking post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Help me prove my theory about coastal living and theater seats.  The ChickieNob is mentally on the women’s Olympic gymnastic team.  I just found the book The Marrying Kind.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 3rd and August 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.

I actually wrote this on Thursday before I left and scheduled it to run today, so I have no idea how the conference is going.  I don’t even know if I’ve remembered to pack pants at this point.  Only time will tell.

I feel like I should take this opportunity to write something to my future self; to all the future versions of you.  Which is actually the current version of you because you are reading this in my future.  Blowing my mind.

Except I can’t think of anything profound to say.  What is life like on August 3, 2012?  Is it very different from August 2, 2012?  I have to imagine it is since things change on a daily basis.  Perhaps Facebook has folded and Twitter is now passe.  Maybe you’re reading this on a new device, one I can’t even begin to imagine on August 2nd but will be commonplace in the future such as on August 3rd.  Oh my G-d, it just hit me that YOU know the results of the Olympic events that I’m going to watch tonight.  Don’t spoil it for me; don’t tell me a thing!  I don’t want to know what is happening at the Olympics on August 2nd.

In all seriousness, fill me in since I’m at the BlogHer conference, and I know from past experience that I will have no clue what is happening in the world beyond this windowless room.  What is life like for you?  In other words, what are you up to today?

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And now the blogs…

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

• “The Words We Use” (Journey of a Woman Warrior)
• “The Greatest Show on Earth” (Everyday Stranger)
• “What Causes Adoption” (Write Mind Open Heart)
• “Uff Da” (I Lost a World)
• “This Mortal Coil” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “This is What We Do With Broken Things” (She Laughs at the Days)
• “Lessons in Infertility” (From IF to When)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Hobbit-ish Thoughts and Ramblings has a post about being thankful that she’s not living her life in the public eye with all the pressures a princess goes through to produce an heir.  She writes: “As someone who dealt with years of questions, even before I was married, about when I would begin having children, I take offence on the Duchess’ behalf.  She has only been married for a year and a bit, and she’s still adjusting to her new role within the royal family.  Cut the woman some slack!”  I mostly just loved her hypothetical questions, even though I had no potential answers myself.

My Bum Ovaries has a great post depression and infertility.  She explains her fear: “We started by talking about how I’ve been depressed. I told him I’m worried that this depression isn’t just a phase and that being infertile is actually re-wiring my brain to be different. I know I’ll never be who I was before, but what if I don’t ever get back to being a happy person?”  It’s a beautiful post about trying to find yourself as you are losing yourself, and the ending brought a huge smile.

Lastly, Quietly Southern has a very moving post tying in a memory of almost drowning as a child to how she feels going through her recent loss.  She writes: “For the last month I’ve felt like I’ve been drowning.  Instead of water filling my lungs it’s been loss, despair, sadness, anger, depression and frustration.  Immediately after the miscarriage there were times where I literally couldn’t breathe.  There simply was not enough air on the face of this earth to fill my lungs and push out all the raw hurt I was feeling.”  It is a heartbreaking post; a must-read.

The roundup to the Roundup: Fill me in: what is life like for you today?  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 27th and August 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.

I was at a nursing home this week with the kids, and I was standing alone with the ChickieNob while we waited for Josh and the Wolvog to return.  I bent down and kissed the ChickieNob’s hair while we were talking, and this woman passing by in the hallway paused to comment that the ChickieNob is such a lucky girl to have someone who loves her so much that she would kiss her head like that.

It was a very sweet moment.

Until the woman gleefully asked, “and how did you get a girl as wonderful as this?”

I smiled and said jokingly, “I made her.”

There was a moment of silence.  And then the woman wrinkled her brow in confusion and said, “how did you do that?  How did you make her?”

There was a long pause as the woman waited for me to answer, and I looked down at the ChickieNob smiling beatifically since she knows exactly how babies are made and is very proud of this fact, though I’ve asked her not to share this information with her friends and to instead wait until their parents decided they are old enough to know the facts of life.

And then I realized that my options were to give a 90-something woman a crash course in sex ed, or to feign sudden interest in the patient’s rights board right behind me.  And yes, I am sorry to say that rather than have a discussion about special hugs in the hallway while “Paper Moon” played over a nearby speaker, I opted to learn that every patient is entitled to prompt and courteous service.

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The Olympics begin tonight, and we’re crazy ready for it.  Like all-out-crazy ready for it.  Okay, I’m lying.  This week like many other weeks got away from me, and I’m more like scrambling-to-make-it-special.  But damn it, when the lights dim tonight, we will be mentally in London.

The twins were born during a summer Olympics.  We missed the games while they were in the NICU, sleeping anywhere but home.  So the summer Olympics are a bit of a marker for us, reminding us how far we’ve come.  Perhaps not quite as far as the Olympic athletes, but far nonetheless.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “Is There an Echo (Echo, Echo) in Here?” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “I’m a Writer Dammit” (Single Infertile Female)
• “Online Pregnancy Websites are Fun Until You Lose the Baby” (Portrait of an Adoption)
• “Are Bystanders Ever Innocent?…” (A Half Baked Life)
• “Rhetorical Questions” (Serenity Now!)
• “Role Playing” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)
• “Find Your Blog Voice” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “Thoughtful Thursday: This Used to Be My Playground” (Baby Smiling in Back Seat)
• “Correspondence, Connectivity, Screens, and Free-Range Joy” (Project Progeny)
• “Here Comes the Sun…” (Cullen’s Blessings)
• “And So It Began” (Freckled Citizen)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Days of Our Lives has a beautiful and heartbreaking post about the Aurora shooting, tying together a prayer she used during the adoption process to trying to understand the decision of the shooter.  My throat tightened with her last thought: “And that I can pray MacArthur’s prayer over the young men in my community who might not have a father to be saying these words and having such hopes for his son.  Hug your loved ones a little tighter today.”

Family Building with a Twist has a really interesting post about an ethical dilemma, namely while she would not allow a son to participate in Boy Scouts, she is trying to decide how she feels about eating at Chik-Fil-A and why it isn’t a clear-cut decision.  She ends no closer to knowing what to do as she unpacks various ways of looking at the situation.  Long before the Boy Scouts statement, we had decided like the author not to allow our son to participate in a non-inclusive organization, but it’s also easy for me to boycott Chik-Fil-A since… you know… I’ve never eaten there.  The fact that I describe their product as dismembered chicken corpses packaged in cardboard coffins should probably give you an idea that my issue goes a lot deeper than marriage equality.  I tried to think about a product I really do like: Special K (again, the cereal, not the drug).  What would I do if the maker of Special K came out with a statement that went against our ethics?  Could I give up the cereal in order to stand by what is important to me?  I’d like to think I could, but who knows until I’m forced to live in a world sans Special K. (Side note to the maker of Special K: please don’t come out with a statement opposing marriage equality.)

Mama Said Knock You Out has such a good post about a trick that back fires with her daughter… except it doesn’t.  I can’t really describe it without ruining how she gets the last laugh.  You’ll need to read the whole thing for yourself.

Lastly, Family Rocks: the Life of Peg has a bittersweet post about Thursdays.  She explains: “For some reason, Thursday has become my Jeanne day.  I think about her more on that day.  The tears flow a little easier.  Don’t get me wrong, I think about her a lot everyday, but feelings of grief are often intermingled with frustration and irrational anger, and tied up with the girls and our relationship.”  I both love and hate that she has this day.

The roundup to the Roundup: Strangely enough, I opted not to impart an impromptu sex ed lesson.  Olympics start tonight!  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 20th and July 27th) 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.

It’s the anniversary of the Roundup this week.  For six straight years, every single Friday, I post a handful of blog posts that have stuck with me long after closing the screen.  These are not the only posts I read worthy of extra attention.  I keep a running list over the week and then pluck 4 or 5 out in order to keep the Roundup from running 20+ posts long.  I try to spread around the love; though I’m not always successful at remembering who has been honoured recently (and I am guilty of also thinking that I have honoured someone only to discover that while they make my personal list frequently, I’ve never posted them into the Roundup).  I have never taken a submission for the Roundup; it’s just my personal opinion of what grabbed me while I was clicking through the ALI blogosphere.

So happy birthday, Little Roundup.  May you keep getting written for many many more years.

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I don’t know why, but these Where is Matt videos always make me cry.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “What We Owe Each Other” (Unglamourous)
• “The Pursuit Happiness” (Quasi-Momma)
• “Expectations” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Believing in the Unbelievable” (From IF to When)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Bereaved and Blessed has a post on something her daughter says.  It’s such a moment of sweetness, but it also ends with a thought-provoking question, one that scared me shitless when I thought about the ending to Max Tivoli.  Looking forward to hearing your thoughts over there.

Why Not Us? has a beautiful post about the knowledge baggage we bring with us.  From the way she watches a pregnancy storyline on a sitcom to a conversation with a friend, she knows too much now about infertility to not have it colour the way she sees the world.  And she wishes she could let it go, even if just for a short while.

My Lazy Ovaries has one of those if you don’t laugh you’ll cry moments as one more thing goes wrong with her cycle.  She writes: “For my next trick ladies and gentlemen, I will fail – completely and utterly – to bleed. Or I should say rather, I HAVE failed. For the first time ever (excepting the nine weeks I spent harboring the blighted ovum).”  She manages to bring humour to an incredibly sucky situation.

Glitter & Rainbows has a goodbye to fertility treatments: “It’s still hard, but I accept it now. There are so many things I want to do, to focus on, to put my mental and physical energy into. I know it’s not going to be a clean break, I’m still going to mourn a little, but the infertility fog has lifted and I am busting out of that tunnel of shittiness.”  It’s a brief post that packs a punch.

Lastly, the Infertility Voice has a post about how her Reader has changed, both with the quietness of summer and the fact that many of the people she started blogging with have moved on to parenting while she’s still in the trenches.  It’s a beautiful analogy of how we affect one another with our stories.

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s the sixth anniversary of the Roundup!  Where is Matt always makes me cry.  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 13th and July 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.

Heads up: this post may have triggers for you if you’ve experienced pregnancy loss, stillbirth, or neonatal death.  Tread carefully and skip the first section if you are raw.

So a few hours after I posted that last post, the ChickieNob witnessed another woman and I dancing around the “are you Jewish” question once we stated our last names.  People don’t actually come out and say, “hey, are you a Jew too?”  Instead we mention something like which camp we went to or drop hints about holidays.  Once enough clues were laid bare, the woman came out and said, “I’m Jewish, and we’re looking for a Hebrew school.  Do you know one?”  Which gave me the opportunity to tell her that I’m Jewish too and recommend a few shuls in the area.

When we got in the car, the ChickieNob asked why (1) she didn’t just come out and ask, “are you Jewish?” and (2) why we even cared.  Which led to a discussion of that blog post and how sometimes it is nice to acknowledge those commonalities.  How sometimes people are shy to volunteer information not knowing how the information will be accepted.  I could see the gears turning in her head, especially once she admitted that she sometimes feels out-of-sorts at school where there aren’t many Jews.

The ChickieNob rarely goes deep the first time around.  She likes to bring up a conversation topic, feel her way around it for a bit, retreat to think about it further, and then pull it back out when you least expect it and unload a series of enormous questions.  So our conversation about Judaism petered out, and I thought we’d return to our favourite topic of conversation: Hogwarts and people who go to Hogwarts.

But instead she matter-of-factly asked me as I was about to bring some pan-fried noodles into my mouth how a woman knows when a baby dies inside her belly.  I told her about sonograms and fetal movement and asked if there was a reason she was bringing this up right now.  No reasons; she had just shelved the Judaism conversation to delve deeply into later and she was ready to return to speaking about mortality.  She wanted to know what a miscarriage felt like, how I knew that I was miscarrying (and strangely, whether I kept the panties I had been wearing or threw them out), how the baby is delivered if he/she dies in utero, if the parents get to hold the baby after death.

I’m not sure how I felt about the frankness, the calmness, the space in which we were talking about things.  On one hand, we were speaking about it as we would any other part of life.  It wasn’t swept under the carpet or sanitized except for the fact that I put things in terms a seven-year-old could understand/fathom.  On the other hand, we were in a noodle shop, and it felt discordant: this hugely emotional topic being discussed calmly over pasta.  I really wasn’t sure what I thought about the whole thing.

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Today is 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 as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Getting Past Writer’s Block” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Lori!

Whoa, seriously, I’m honoured and all, but only one post?  There was only one post that anyone read last week that deserved to be recognized?  Come on, what did you read this week that rocked your world?

Okay, now my choices this week.

Detour to Motherhood has a post about having a goal again.  After making the decision not to try to conceive anymore, she writes, “I can’t remember what tipped me from ‘maybe I’ll try again’ to ‘no way in hell,’ and it felt weird putting it all out there.  But it also felt like a great release.  I’ve found that all kinds of good stuff happens when you open up.  Like finding people to talk about adoption with.”  There is such joy inside the words of this post — I loved it.

Many Many Moons has a really interesting post about her relationship with her twin, and how pregnancy and adoption fits into that picture.  She explains, “In this case though of this pregnancy I don’t feel any of those old feelings.  I am just plain excited for her.  Of course I would love to be pregnant and get to have that experience, but I also know that I couldn’t love our baby even one drop more than I do if she came from my body.  I just want her to get to experience this crazy love that I’m feeling and I’m glad it didn’t take moving mountains to make it happen.”  The fact that they are identical makes this post ten times more interesting, and it was already a must-read for me.

Lastly, Mrs. Spit has a post of wonders.  It is a heart-stopping post, to read what is traveling through her brain in that moment.  And I couldn’t do it justice to describe it.  You need to click over and read it in full.

The roundup to the Roundup: A conversation with the ChickieNob.  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 July 6th and July 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.