Category — Friday Blog Roundup

At the end of last year’s cherry season (it actually may have been closer to mid-fall), I bought a push button cherry pitter from the farm store where we buy our vegetables.  It was a few dollars and pitting cherries is enough of a pain in the ass that I tended to not give them to the twins because they couldn’t really grasp the concept of spitting out the pit.

I used the push button cherry pitter for the first time on Wednesday, and I fell so deeply in love with it that I immediately started calling people to see if they too knew the beauty of the cherry pitter.  People didn’t react well to my effusive questions, brushing me off as if cherry pitters are not something to be cherished or discussed ad nauseum.  Some friends actually seemed concerned when I offered to drive out to the farm store to buy them one, and they muttered things like, “that won’t be necessary.”  I want to give people the gift of cherry pitting, and people seem unsure of whether they want to take it.  Odd.

If anyone has a good recipe for cherry preserves, the twins and I would like to try our hand at making our own cherry yogurt filling.  Yes, it is just an excuse to pit more cherries.

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What are your thoughts on this idea of pay per use of the Internet?

I use my home Internet for play, but I also use it for work, and it doesn’t really bother me to use it for work because I have unlimited usage.  But if I had to pay every time I used the Internet, would it make me feel cranky to answer work emails off the clock?  Would I cut corners instead of giving it my all?  We’ve created a culture in America where we meld business with pleasure, being accessible outside of work for work-related questions/actions.  We can’t create that culture and then set up obstacles that don’t allow us to follow that culture.  Would having to pay every time to used the Internet make you use it less, or would it not affect your usage at all?

And dude, if I was being billed for spam getting past the email filter and coming into the inbox, I hope the government would do more to curb spam.

I know this isn’t imminent, though capping your Internet usage in tiers is something that companies do for smartphones.

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Because the twins have to share a birthday, we created for each of them a floating family holiday called ChickieNob Day or Wolvog Day.  They float along the family calendar and each pop up once a year.  The way one knows that it is ChickieNob/Wolvog Day is that you go down to your chair in the kitchen and it is decorated in a big sign and lollipops. When it is your special day, you get to choose all the activities and meals.

It was ChickieNob Day last weekend, so we ate doughnuts for breakfast (I was thankfully spared and allowed to eat yogurt though I still ended up smelling like the doughnut store which turns my stomach) and painted pottery and swam.  And then the ChickieNob cried when it was time for bed because she wanted every single day to be ChickieNob Day.  Don’t we all.

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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:

• “Visible Life” (Slate)
• “Right Where I Am: 2012” (Still Life with Circles)
• “Belief, Discussion, and Dissent in the Cloud” (A Half Baked Life)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Life As I Know It has a post about witnessing pure joy.  Until you see unadulterated joy, you can’t really understand the difference between extreme happiness and what lies beyond.  But she got to witness it when an adoption was finalized.  She writes, “Sure I’ve seen plenty of happiness, but this was something different. This was more. It was a couple who had truly given up on this ever happening. Today I literally witnessed a dream come true.”

A Thousand Oceans has a gorgeous post for Angie’s “Right Where I Am” project that recounts what life is like 2 months and 3 weeks after a loss.  I will give you a heads up that you — like me — will bawl reading this, especially when you consider the most enormous part of her move: “Leaving this place, packing these boxes with our books and pots and pans, is leaving my children behind. So on this day, 2 months and 3 weeks since Aminadav and Naava came and went and returned to the land, my land, I hope you can understand why I can’t interrupt my moping to thank anyone for enabling me to leave this place.”  And you will suck in your breath when you read what her MIL said.  It is a gorgeous, heartbreaking post.

Lastly, A Half Baked Life has a post about what she learned about between-ness from an exercise she did in yoga.  Instead of moving right into the next position, her teacher had them hover close to the position for a moment before completing it, creating a slow-motion effect.  She explains, “I am not good with in-between-ness.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy the journey from point A to point B, but rather that I generally live with my end goals in sight, and I tend to be hell-bent on arriving at them.”  The post really resonated with me, perhaps because I feel similarly about between-ness — both struggling with it and knowing there is a lot to learn there.

The roundup to the Roundup: Profound love of the cherry pitter.  What do you think of pay per use for the Internet?  It was ChickieNob Day.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 24th and June 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.

This story, about how her blog domain got hijacked and how she got it back?  Freaked. Me. Out.

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Speaking of which, I am working on a tutorial for self-hosting; the freaky post above notwithstanding.  I look at self-hosting as an insurance policy for your blog.  Which it usually is.  Freaky situations aside.

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It was my Bat Mitzvah-versary this week.  My 25th anniversary of becoming a woman (in the non-menstrual sense).  By which I mean I chanted from the Torah 25 years ago.  One of my best friends shares the same Bat Mitzvah-versary as me so she called me on the day to remember our Torah portion together.  Which I can still sing.  And I’ll do it for you if you can get me drunk enough at BlogHer.

It made me feel really old to think that 25 years had passed.

Happy Bat Mitzvah-versary to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

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We went to see the Nats play last weekend.  It was such an amazing game.  They started out three runs down with some of our favourite players injured.  And then Jesus Flores hit a home run.  And immediately afterward, Stephen Strasburg hit a homerun.  And we were on our feet and screaming like crazy, and I literally wanted to go run home and bake a cake for my boys to celebrate (but I didn’t want to miss the rest of the game).  I was just so incredibly proud of them.  I was so proud that Bryce Harper is on our team.  That Clippard is such an amazing pitcher.  I still can’t get over how much I love our team.

And then they had this little boy who came out to do a contest between two innings.  He had thirty seconds to run to second base, switch out the base with a new base, and take second base back to the finish line.  So the little boy runs out to second base and fumbles a bit with the base in trying to pry it out of the ground, so he has under 15 seconds to get back to the finish line, which is a ribbon held by two people.  So he’s trying to get back, and you can see he’s losing energy and the clock is running down, and the adults start running the finish line towards him.  And you will understand completely when I tell you that I got my period the following day, but I started bawling for this child.  I was so happy for him that he won the contest as well as the fact that these adults so subtly moved towards him so he could achieve that.

So… yeah… I was a big hormonal mess.  But I really do love the Nats.  As their superfan.

P.S. If you Google “Nationals, superfan,” I come up on the first page.  Which I believe means that I really am a superfan.  Isn’t it only really real when Google confirms your superfandom?

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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:

• “Nobody Likes Me, Everybody Hates Me…” (Unglamourous)
• “All the Things that are Left Behind” (Mrs. Spit)
• “Warrior Eli is a Hoax” (So Close)
• “What Was and Will Be Lost” (Mommy Odyssey)
• “To All the Mothers…” (Courage and Curls)
• “The One with that River in Egypt” (Mommy Odyssey)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Stork Diaries had a post last week that I didn’t find until after I wrote the Roundup.  So I’m including it because it’s that good.  In “A Barren Woman,” she heartbreakingly states, “I am not merely grieving over another failed cycle.  I am grieving because I realize that hope is nothing more than my own fabrication.  It only exists because I created it.”  It is about finding yourself at the end of the line with the final answer, and staring at it with the intensity of all your grief.  It’s a must-read for anyone hoping to understand infertility.

Follow Every Rainbow has a fantastic post about her Granny Sam.  It’s a story of loss and love, of a granddaughter learning from her grandmother’s story.  It’s just such a gorgeous recording of a history.

Lastly, Adventures in Infertility-Land has a knee-jerk reaction to a comment followed by a more measured answer: “If he is the villain, then I am the victim – it is much easier role to play, in my opinion.  But, I am losing a big part of the story here.”  I think the pivotal moment in the situation is when she gave him an out… and he didn’t take it.  And hopefully that speaks volumes to finding that middle ground between angels and demons.

The roundup to the Roundup: Freaky tale of a hijacked blog.  Working on a self-hosting tutorial.  It was my Bat Mitzvah-versary.  Effusive moments at the ballpark.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 18th and May 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.

Josh and I showed the twins the Time magazine cover last weekend.  Beyond inquiring if people were upset with the cover because the boy was biting his mother (our conversation: Um… he’s breastfeeding, not biting.  But he’s standing on a chair.  Is that how older kids breastfeed?  No, not exactly.  Then why is the boy standing on a chair?  I don’t have a good answer for that.  Why are breasts sometimes called private parts and we’re not supposed to look at them and other times mommies show their private parts and that’s okay?  Can we get back to the discussion I wanted to have?), we asked them if they would be okay if they were the boy in the picture.  Based on their reaction, we guesstimated correctly when we said we couldn’t imagine the twins being cool with having their picture out there.

And before you get your panties twisted, it had nothing to do with what the boy was doing.  I asked them if they would be upset to have me post a picture of them smiling nicely in the camera and they shouted yes.  Eating a lollipop, yes.  Playing baseball, yes.  Would they ever be okay being on the front of a magazine for any reason including winning a big award, and the answer was no.  The reason being that neither wanted strangers  looking at them, or people talking about them.

They gave us their hard limits, which were what we were already doing: no pictures or videos online, especially in publications and no stories about them unless they were the sort we would tell everyone anyway (the evolution story was fine, medical information is not).  I asked them if they were okay if I continued to tweet from time to time amusing things they said because I use the medium to quickly record these moments for myself, and they gave me the okay as long as I asked first.  We talked through past posts about them from the ones about the Wolvog and Steve Jobs to poor Mr. Whiskers of earectomy fame.  And for the most part, they’re comfortable with what is out there.  They know that all of you know about them, and sometimes you may even talk about them in this detached sense, but you don’t know them unless you have met them.  They were okay with the idea of themselves floating out there but not the concreteness of names and images.  Which pretty much falls in line with a lot of other life choices they’ve made.

Maybe I do know them after all.

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Want to know when I write?  I participated in She Started It’s author series where she asks writers to talk about when they write.  It’s a really cool project.  If you want to see my answer, click here.

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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:

• “Warrior II” (A Half Baked Life)
• “Are You Mom Enough Time Magazine Cover” (Stirrup Queens) – thank you, Lori!
• “On Being Left Behind & Rooting for All Babies to Be” (Writing for Life)
• “Hole to Whole” (Aiden, Baby of Mine)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Waiting for Little Feet has a post about waiting for the first ultrasound.  As she steels herself for the possibility that she could go through the same devastation she felt after her first loss, she also makes a promise to herself: “Although there is nothing I can do to avoid being scared between every ultrasound and chance to check on the baby, I refuse to waste my entire pregnancy feeling as petrified as I do right now.”  It’s a promise she’s now going to have to keep…

Still Life with Circles has a heartbreaking thank you after a recent loss.  She writes so beautifully: “I cannot tell you what the notes, condolences, comments, and the emails we have received have meant to us. We feel held. We feel loved. We know we are not going through this alone. Thank you. Oh, loves, thank you.”  It is a post about the aftermath of a loss, about the grief of a child who wants her sibling, and a family carrying on knowing they aren’t alone.

Write Mind Open Heart has a fantastic post that pretty much everyone should send along to anyone and everyone to read during the months of May and June.  She gives a heads up to everyone who holds a Mother’s Day or Father’s Day celebration about the section of their community they may not be reaching (and, in fact, may inadvertently be needling).  I also love that she admits that she knows the person didn’t know; but after reading this, people can hopefully bring even more compassion to their speeches at this time of year.

A Thousand Oceans wins for best title with “The Grinch Who Stole Mother’s Day.”  Okay, so she admits that it wasn’t her best moment, but I actually think the rawness reflects what so many people are thinking inside their head.  That maybe people do need to hear in order to understand.  Life can’t always been roses and breakfast in bed; sometimes it’s thorns and spilled coffee.

From IF to When has another amazing post about finding resolution.  I think it’s a must read for anyone who is infertile.  Period.  Even if they think they’ve resolved their infertility.

Lastly, An Engineer Becomes a Mom has a post about a shopping trip which was ruined by someone’s insensitive questions.  It is realizing when you’re speaking with someone who is not going to be deterred from their questioning as well as that desire to simply be honest, for your child’s sake.  Since there is nothing to hide; no shame in the multitude of ways people build their families.

The roundup to the Roundup: I guess I was right about my kids not wanting to be featured.  When do I write?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 11th and May 18th) 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.

Now I’m really late with this.  But I consider it all Lori’s fault because she’s a distraction.  Watch out if you swing by her blog because she will (1) turn you all healthy and then (2) give you mad coping skills and then (3) teach you something interesting.  And that will use up the hour you intended to write the Roundup.  Oh, though while you’re at her blog, you may want to wish her a happy fifth blogoversary and tell her about your own blogosphere kismet.

And now that I’ve vented that out of my head, I can return to watching this incredible video someone made of all of MCA’s first lines:

The first time I watched it, I was sort of grooving along. (My seat dancing had to keep switching tempo with each new line. It was hard. I feel like I deserve some type of recognition for my seat dancing skills.) And then at the end, when it faded out, it felt like Sirius falling back through the curtain in the fifth Harry Potter book. Where you want to grab the person and drag them back, and know full well that you can’t. Josh had a similar reaction except it was this desire to slow time once it hit Hot Sauce Committee Part Two and he realized that it would soon be over. There would be no future MCA-laden albums.

As much as I love Hot Sauce Committee, my heart is with Ill Communication.  It reminds me of college.  It feels like being in college when I listen to it.  We used to call my friend Ma Bell due to that album, and hearing it in this montage made me wish I had his phone number still; could grab coffee with him while we did our homework.

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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:

• “Please Ignore; or Infertility Revisited” (Park Slope Promised Land)
• “Sometimes You Love People Not Because, But Anyway” (Nuts in May)
• “In the Closet” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “Heal” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)
• “My Week of NIAW on FB” (Living Our Life in Cycles)
• “Infertility, Despair, Tarot Cards and Acceptance” (Fertility Doll)
• “The New It Girls” (Silent Sorority)
• “The Oleander & the Groves” (Bloodsigns)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Where Love and Chaos Reign has a post about stopping treatments.  She points out, “The thing is, there’s not much out there that talks about stopping treatments when you already have kids. There are blogs about living child-free, but most of the secondary infertility blogs at some point become pregnancy blogs again.”  Even if it hasn’t happened yet, they are still in an active state of fertility treatments, adoption or third party reproduction; even if they are currently in a pause or wait.  But few who write about making the choice to close the door on family building.  I both love the post and hope that others who are in a similar situation and seeking support will find each other and start to write more about this.

Birch and Maple has a post broken up by musical interludes about moving out of the world of infertility for her own sanity, as well as how she views herself.  Where this view of herself stems.  She admits: “So anyway, this week has been bad. I am drab, growing older. I find myself wanting to wear black all the time, a statement of intent, the declaration of feeling, the ease with which I don’t have to worry about trying to look decent. Alas, I do not have enough of it in my wardrobe.”  She describes her post as emo; I describe it as bittersweet.

And lastly, Single Infertile Female has a post about her friend’s newborn child that… well… let’s just say that it hit really close to home for me.  It probably will for you too.  She is holding him and writes, “I found myself whispering in his little ear ‘I really need to get one just like you…’ I caught Lindsey’s eye directly after saying it, having briefly forgotten she was even there while in my blissed out baby haze. And for the first time since he was born… I found myself fighting back the tears.”  It is the perfect post for explaining how someone can be unbelievably happy for another person while being simultaneously sad for themselves; in case you ever needed to explain this phenomenon to a good friend.

The roundup to the Roundup: Wish Lori a happy blogoversary and listen to MCA’s first lines.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 4th and May 11th) 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 had to go into the storage room this week to get our microscope because Christy gave me this really cool science project to try; extracting DNA from strawberries. (And it worked, it really worked!)  We bought this microscope in 2002 to examine my saliva for ferning.  I was in that time period before you actually get to the RE, but the appointment has been made, and you’re trying things such as green tea and Robitussin and spitting on slides.  I packed it up in 2003 and put it in the basement.

So I went down to get it from the basement and inside the box was my unopened Lego Harry Potter sorting hat set.  It has since been discontinued, but I bought two of them back in 2001, one that I left unopened and the other that I kept on my desk.  I liked to use it as an ice breaker when a student had to meet with me because, let’s say, they plagiarized their paper.  Before we spoke, I would have them spin it and see which house they were sorted into and then say something like, “huh… you got Ravenclaw… that’s really interesting because plagiarizing is a pretty bone-head move, and I think Rowena Ravenclaw would be pretty horrified with you right now.”

Oh sorting hat.

The thing is, I don’t know where the opened sorting hat is.  It’s probably also somewhere in the basement.  But that would mean opening up and unpacking dozens of boxes to find a small ziplock bag filled with Legos.  But part of me doesn’t want to open this second set… and I have no idea why.  I would never get rid of it. (Actually, who am I kidding.  If someone offered to pay the Wolvog’s college tuition, I’d part with it.)  We want to use it.  And yet instead of gleefully tearing off the top and setting it up, it has been sitting in limbo on the kitchen table since mid-week.

Would you let me sort you if I opened my Lego Harry Potter sorting hat?

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The ChickieNob cried this week because her brother started reading the same book she was reading.  They don’t have a lot of book crossover with the exception of the stuff we read together.  They both like biographies, but don’t want to read about the same people.  The Wolvog has read every Magic Tree House and the ChickieNob is more partial to Sister Magic and American Girl Doll books.  The ChickieNob has been making her way through the Junie B Jones series this spring, and this week, the Wolvog decided to read them as well.  And this is devastating to her.

I tried to explain to her the concept of a book club, and how people purposefully choose to read books together and discuss them.  She could not wrap her brain around this, and kept saying, “I would not like that at all.  Only one person is supposed to be known as the person reading the book.”  Daddy has erudite American history books, and Mommy has smutty 50 Shades of Grey, and the Wolvog has his Magic Tree House books, and THE CHICKIENOB CLAIMS THE JUNIE B JONES SERIES HANDS OFF.

I don’t know — would you rather be the only person around who has read a book (and feel special because of it?) or would you rather read a book as a group?

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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:

• “Don’t Ignore” (The Misadventures of Missohkay)
• “Don’t Ignore: The Secret Life of the American Infertile” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “The Scar Remains” (My Life After Loss)
• “Just Ask” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Lori!

Okay, now my choices this week.

Lessons from an Infertile Social Worker has a post about the first time she breastfed her son after her son’s birthmother gave her the go-ahead in the hospital.  I really loved reading through the moment, feeling the power of that act through the screen.  She writes, “The first time I breastfed my son, I cried. It was perfect. He was perfect. He was my child. I was finally a momma.”  It’s a great post.

Breathe Gently has a post about how she was feeling after retrieval and the fertilization report.  It is a post about sinking into doubt and then finding a way out of it back into hope.  She writes of transfer: “Tomorrow we’re going to transfer an embryo, something that we created. It may stick, it may not, but we’re having a go. And isn’t this what the goal has been all along? To give ourselves, and our potential baby, a chance?”  I had a huge smile by the last line.

Multimama tells a story about why we shouldn’t judge others.  She admits about the new mother in her playgroup: “She was skinny and I, feeling fat in post-baby mode, felt a flash of jealousy. In that moment, and for no good reason at all, I made a whole set of assumptions–that she had gotten easily pregnant with the cute little boy at her side, that we wouldn’t have much in common.”  Of course, they do have a lot in common, though that wouldn’t have been discovered if she hadn’t set those preconceived notions aside.

Edenland has an amazing post about the changes afoot in her house.  I think it’s incredible to watch someone jump, to have them allow you to see that initial step.  And how breathtaking is this ending when they come home from their respective trips: “In Africa I bought myself a red wooden mask. In Mexico, Dave bought himself a green ceramic mask.  We then met each other back at home.  And took them off.”

Lastly, Family Building with a Twist has a post about her son’s first day at daycare.  I cried reading this post, my preschool woes still pretty fresh in my mind (my G-d, do y’all remember when I hid in the library?)  It’s a bittersweet post about your child growing up and inviting the rest of the world in.

The roundup to the Roundup: Should I open the Harry Potter sorting hat (and would you let me sort you)?  Do you like to be the only person reading a book?  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 27th and May 4th) 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.