Category — Friday Blog Roundup

We left our shul for a year to join a different one.  Before we went away, I liked our shul.  It had a great service and a great rabbi.  At the same time, it was far distance-wise and we didn’t have a ton of friends there, so it didn’t feel like a terrible idea to try a new place.  Except the new place was an awful fit; awful to the point where I stopped keeping Shabbat for a year.  I didn’t make a challah.  I didn’t light the candles.  I didn’t attend shul.  I didn’t feel Jewish.

Josh promised me last Yom Kippur that by this Rosh Hashanah, we’d be back at our usual place.  I can’t even tell you how much it felt like I was walking into a hug to re-enter the building.  To be in that service again.  To see the rabbi and his family.  I didn’t realize how much it went beyond “like” until I had to be away from it for a year.  And suddenly, I saw its worth.

This Rosh Hashanah, we took our seats near the Cullens (so named by us because this vampire family never seems to age.  We have sat next to them for six years and while our hair greys and our midsections get fuller, they remain forever locked in youth — from the grandmother down to the teenaged grandchildren — who have seemingly been high school students for all six years).  And I could feel my entire body relax.  It didn’t seem that long a distance to drive once you saw what was closer.  And it turns out that we do have a lot of friends there, ones I had sort of glossed over mentally when I was convincing myself that I’d be happy with the move.

It felt so good to be home.

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You may have noticed little social media buttons at the bottom of my posts.  I added it on Wednesday since I felt like it was time to join the 21st century (or 5772 — woohoo! a shout out to all my Jewish friends!)  Also, a friend wanted to share a post and mentioned how difficult it is to share posts sometimes when you don’t have those buttons.  So now I have those buttons if you’d like to use them.  And frankly, I’d love you to click if something I wrote moves you to tell others about it.

Go on, I know you’ve been itching to tell the world about how my hamster pees in a handstand.

Apparently, you can only see the buttons if you’re in the actual post vs. being on the main url for the blog and scrolling downward.  Fancy!

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I want to see both Moneyball and 50/50.  I am debating whether or not I have the attention span to see them back-to-back on the same day.

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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:

• “A Fond Farewell” (Waiting for Our Miracle)
• “I’m Scared” (Where Do We Go From Here?)
• “Fuck It (Pun Intended)” (Les Terres Fertiles)
• “Tweeting a Funeral” (BlogHer)
• “What I Sounded Like 17 Years Ago” (Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed)
• “One Year Blogoversary” (Yolk)
• “One Day, Maybe My Mother Will Understand” (Trying Not to Scream)
• “Slowly Backing Away” (Whitney&Erick)
• “Feeling Restless” (Bodega Bliss)
• “Left Behind” (Mojo Working)
• “Let’s Do the Time Warp Again” (Four of a Kind)
• “This is My 66_th Post” (The Smartness)
• “My Toddler Bites” (Creating Motherhood)
• “What NOT to Say” (In Due Time)
• “I Couldn’t Bite My Tongue Completely” (Holy Crap! You Can’t Talk About Miscarriage)

Still Kicking Your Collective Ass: I am so proud of you again!  15 posts!  Keep up the good work: there is a whole world of blog posts out there worthy of a little extra attention.  This week, the dates are things written between September 23rd and the 30th.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Eggs in a Row has a post about how large numbers can loom in the mind.  While she rationally knows that 32 years old is not quite ancient, it also doesn’t mesh with what her heart knows about her desired timeline.  She admits: “Because honestly, in the scheme of things, I know that I need to just breathe.  Freaking out about my age (which I know isn’t that old whatsoever) is kind of like counting the hours of sleep I could get now, if I just fell asleep.”  This post resonated with me as a fellow clock-watcher/worrier.

Perfect Moment Mondays are back at Write Mind Open Heart, and I love Lori’s take on an adoption conference she attended.  She starts: “Now I know how Trekkies feel. Not during their “real” lives, but while at StarCon.”  It’s about spending time with your tribe, about meeting the people you’ve been conversing with online for years, as well as spending time with people who get it.

Geebaby has a post about processing the SA results and how it differed from her husband’s reaction.  The bad news brought for her relief and answers, parameters and boundaries.  For her husband, the results were life-changing, devastating.  Isn’t this a gorgeous description: “This week, we gave and received pain, rocking back and forth as our emotions allowed.  Two sides of the same coin.”

Lastly, Somewhere in the Middle has a post about sugar; about a churro that never appeared and cinnamon sugar chips that didn’t quite make her feel as good as she hoped.  In fact, they had the opposite effect.  The more she ate, the sicker she felt: physically and emotionally.  “I still felt so empty, so lost. and so angry.  And the more time that passed by, I started to feel worse about what I had done.  I can’t do that again. I can’t eat food to make myself feel better, that kind of thinking creates more problems than I’m willing to deal with. I have enough to be going on with, thank you very much.”

The roundup to the Roundup: I love being back at my old shul.  I have joined the 21st century and added social media buttons.  I want to see both Moneyball and 50/50.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 23rd and September 30th) 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 half-watched the roast of Charlie Sheen on Monday night.  I have to admit that I’ve never totally gotten the point of a roast.  Why is it amusing to bring someone on stage and say horrible things to their face?  Teasing, fine.  But the Comedy Central roasts are just cruel, starting with Seth MacFarlane’s joke about how he has Charlie Sheen’s obit ready: he just had to change the date and place on Amy Winehouse’s obit and he’s ready to go.

Which sort of begs the question: if all these comics are saying you need help, that you’re sick and grappling with addiction, isn’t it beyond cruel to bring you onstage and mock you publicly?  Say mean things to Larry the Cable Guy or Bob Saget if they volunteer for this.  But isn’t it irresponsible to allow Charlie Sheen to be the roastee, even if he agrees to it?

I don’t know… have I lost my sense of humour, or did the roast seem overtly cruel?

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We’re in the middle of IComLeavWe, so hello to all IComLeavWe’ers!

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Only a handful of people answered whether they wanted to do The Grateful Said this year.  Does that mean there is pretty much no interest?  Vote below or forever hold your peace…  I think we’d need 50 or so participants to make it worthwhile, and this would be in addition to the yearly Creme de la Creme.

Speaking of the Creme de la Creme, the prizes so far are fantastic.  Thank you so much for running with this, and a huge thank you to everyone who has offered up something.  We already have 12 prizes, so this is going to be fun.  You have until October 19th to submit a prize, and I’m going to approach a few places to see if they want to donate something to the mix as well.

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If I send an email from my mobile device, the signature reads: “sent from a device that makes me type a lot of things wrong” or something to that effect.  It’s one of those excuse-the-typo messages.

On Wednesday, the Wolvog sent me an email about the website we’re building together.  Last year, he was home alone with me one day while his sister was at school.  I asked him what he wanted to do and he said, “make my own website!” So I bought him a url and he has been tinkering with it.  He ran into a roadblock with something he wanted to do on the front page so I did some research and sent him an email  from my mobile device about what I found.  This was his email back asking when we could try out the software I found online.

I noticed that the signature on his email now read: “sent from a computer that makes me type a lot of things wrong.”  I burst out laughing and called him into the kitchen to ask about it.  And he just beamed: “I noticed it on your email and I thought, ‘well, that is a great excuse and people will now understand that computers and spelling can be confusing!'”

Well played, Wolvog, well played.

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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:

• “Finding the Place” (Bloodsigns)
• “Support” (By the Brooke)
• “Hi, My Name is Josh and I Have a Dead Baby Too” (Jack at Random)
• “A Possible Explanation” (Trying Not to Scream)
• “Seen This Look Before” (Chron.com)
• “A Little Relief” (Secondhand Happiness)
• “Pulled Together by Kindness” (Not a Fertile Myrtle)
• “The Gratuitous Post about My Cats” (Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed)
• “Life Lessons Peyton Taught Me” (Once a Mother)
• “Accepting that This is the Path We’re On” (Invisible Mother)
• “Just Be Enough: Someone” (Kir’s Corner)
• “The Speech” (From IF to When)
• “Over Before it Even Began” (In Due Time)
• “9/11: Remember & Carrying On” (Four of a Kind)
• “Nine Eleven, Ed McCaffrey, Stephen Covey and Me” (Write Mind Open Heart)
• “9/11 Remembered Through the Lens” (Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed)
• “How Strangers Change Your Life for the Better” (Too Many Fish to Fry)

Still Kicking Your Collective Ass: I am so proud of you!  17 posts!  Let’s keep it up: there is a whole world of blog posts out there worthy of a little extra attention.  This week, the dates are things written between September 16th and the 23rd.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Mommy Odyssey has a post about being kicked off of emotional auto-pilot by all the loss in her life.  It’s a tiny benefit she can find in what she has struggled through in terms of infertility and pregnancy loss.  I love this sentiment: “All I know is that I’m finally building myself back up, piece by piece. I am no longer trying to put a roof on a building with no foundation. I now realize that first you need to pour the cement.”  It’s a gorgeous post about learning to feel, about inviting life close.

Embracing the Rain has a post about being lapped about a threesome at work who all got pregnant together the first time and now are all pregnant together again.  She writes, “While I am genuinely happy for them, I am also finding it to be a very difficult reality check for me.   I wish that I was in their position, but the reality is I’m no closer to having even one living child now than I was 2.5 years ago.”  It’s a quiet post that ends with tears.

Notes from the Ninth Circle has a fantastic, tiny post about what she isn’t going to do on Facebook.  Seriously, it defies description — you just need to read it.

Lastly, A Half Baked Life has a post about feeling like her life is not her own; it’s one that she has borrowed from someplace else.  I get this feeling often, so I was glad to read someone else saying it too.  This is the paragraph that made me gasp: “On the train back from New York, N. was sleeping on my chest, and I found myself looking down at her, almost afraid to breathe, afraid that somehow this moment would evaporate, and life would be ‘same as it ever was’.”  Isn’t that gorgeous?

The roundup to the Roundup: I didn’t find the Charlie Sheen roast funny, but I also fear I’m losing my sense of humour.  Hi, IComLeavWe’ers.  Vote for the Grateful Said, and an update about the upcoming Creme de la Creme.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 16th and September 23rd) 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.

The strange coincidence that precedes the story I am about to tell you is important.  As we pulled up to the soccer field, the ChickieNob asked if all the other parents knew about my fear of crickets.  I told her that the ones who know me well already know that I’m a freak, and the ones who do not know me well yet don’t need to know what I freak I am so I’d appreciate her keeping my fear of crickets to herself.

So.

We are watching a soccer game, cheering on the kids, relaxing in the last strains of sunlight.  When I got to the field, I was wearing sunglasses.  Midway through the game, I switched to regular glasses.  By the time we left the field, we were in the gloaming, hurrying through the dim light to our car.

I let the kids into the backseat, congratulating myself for everything going smoothly with the evening.  Then I opened the driver’s door and that is when it happened.

A CRICKET JUMPED INTO MY CAR.

A quarter-sized brown cricket (which looked more like Hummer-sized cricket if you looked at it from the right angle) hopped onto my seat and began jumping around the inside of the car, disappearing from my view.  I internally flipped out, my Plan A being to ditch the car and kids entirely and run home screaming.  Then I realized that if I ran, I would be outside — WITH CRICKETS — so I went with my Plan B, which was to flag down another parent in the parking lot and beg them to rummage through my car until they caught it and killed it.

But in the three minutes since Cricketaggedon began, the lot had cleared out and it had gotten suddenly dark so that I couldn’t really make out if I knew any of the other people.  The only person I recognized at all was a new woman I met that very evening, whose name escaped my mind as I tried to remind myself that Plan A was not a feasible option.  So I did what any deranged, cricket-fearing woman would do.  I called out to her across the parking lot: “Jason’s* Mommy?  Can you come over here and kill a cricket for me?”

Mind you, she has just met me.

And bless her soul, she came over and bit her lip and said she’d have a go at it.  When I opened the door again, the light went on and she could clearly see it against the passenger seat (thank you, black seats).  She smashed it for me and removed it from the car.  And while she may have gotten into her vehicle and explained to her son that some women really are that pathetic and consider ditching a perfectly good car just because it contains a cricket, she — at least — did not laugh at me to my face and reassured me that asking someone to kill a cricket is perfectly normal.

I got in the car after pledging my eternal loyalty and gratitude toward her and then quietly told the ChickieNob, “I just wanted to ensure that everyone knows what I freak I am.”

And to her credit, she only said, “I guess she knows that you’re scared of crickets now.”

Yes, I believe everyone knows.

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

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I love the open notes to your old toys.  I’m alternating between cracking up and getting teary.

Toy I most regret not owning still: I had the knight set for Playmobil — the OLD knight set — and mine came with one of those elusive pure white horses with a matte finish.  I loved that horse so much that I would wash my hands before touching it because I was so afraid that I’d transfer dirt to it.  Goodbye, dear Playmobil knight set, I loved you so.

What toy do you miss?

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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:

• “Why I Learned to Dance” (Mrs. Spit)
• “That Facebook Thing” (Here We Go Again)
• “The First Year in Our House” (Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed)
• “So What’s a Fertile to Do?” (Yolk)
• “I Never Thought” (The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow)
• “The Unhealthy Truth” (Write Mind, Open Heart)

Still Kicking Your Collective Ass: We did so well two weeks ago with 11.  This week, you could only find six?  There is a whole world of blog posts out there worthy of a little extra attention.

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Infertile Bird has a post about those of us inside the computer.  When things became strained with her face-to-face friends, when no one around her understood, she turned to the Internet and found exactly what she needed: friendship, understanding, support.  She admits: “many of them I know only by their usernames, but their friendship is as real and sustaining to me as any other.”  It’s a beautiful post celebrating friendship.

Dreaming of Quiet Places has a post about hope and whether you’d banish it if you could.  As she says, “Hope gives us reason to get up in the morning, but it is also that Terrible Gray, that not-black-not-white space that won’t allow you to let go of the dream.”  Go join in the conversation happening in the comment section.

Thalia’s Infertility Journey has a tiny, bittersweet post about the grip infertility has on the heart.  It is the vague last line with the “it” undefined — is “it” infertility? hope? longing? — that twists the heart.

Lastly, Uppercase Woman got to meet Tertia from So Close and she has a great post walking down memory lane; the early days of the ALI blogosphere.  It was just fun to read and remember.

The roundup to the Roundup: A cricket pretty much tried to kill me — death by fear.  I love the open notes to toys, and what toy is missing from your life that you wish you could have back?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 9th and September 16th) 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.

Currently, I’m a little apprehensive with the report of the specific, unconfirmed threat on New York and D.C.  I actually had to read the alert twice when it came into my email from CNN because at first skim, I thought it was saying that officials knew 10 years ago that there was a specific, unconfirmed threat.  I was about to go onto the next email when I read it again and then said, “oh!”  Or maybe it was more like, “oh.”  It was sort of between an oh. and an oh!

We’re supposed to go about our lives but be alert, so it doesn’t really sound different from any other day.  But on other days, there aren’t headlines in the newspaper telling us about a specific, unconfirmed threat.  So it doesn’t really feel like any other day either.

It’s sort of in between everything and sort of nowhere at the same time.

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To ease that tension, on a side note, Cozy has taken to doing a daily urination handstand.  Now it feels a little bit like showing off, like he’s silently saying, “you have to sit down to pee, but check out what I can do.”

Apologies for the graininess of the image.  I took it with my blackberry because it was the closest camera.  And it’s not like he gives me a heads up when he’s about to saunter over to his very public bathroom.

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There is a second REI card giveaway over here.  BlogHer is taking care of choosing the winner from the first one so that person should be contacted soon if they’re not already in possession of a “you won!” email.

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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:

• “WTF Wednesdays: Beyonce Edition” (Theportofindecision)
• “F-You Uveitis” (Scrambled Eggs)
• “The Viewing” (Three Little Birds)
• “My Best Answer” (Rolling Around in My Head)
• “Spoilsport” (In Pursuit of Parenthood)
• “Those Dang Facebook Status Games” (Not Sugar Coated)
• “Regarding the Facebook Breast Cancer Awareness Games” (C. G. Ward Photography)
• “One of Each, or Not” (Life from Here)
• “Your Brother Henry” (Heart Heal Hope)
• “No More Suffering in Silence” (Making Babies on the NHS)
• “1460” (This is Not What I Had Planned)

Still Kicking Your Collective Ass: Okay, 11 is much better.  Let’s make sure we do it again this week.  There is a whole world of blog posts out there worthy of a little extra attention.

Okay, now my choices this week.

I loved Three Little Birds post about grieving enough.  She is trying to make sense of the different ways she is grieving the loss of her husband and the loss of her mother, and the post literally walks the reader through a path in her brain, explaining how she is coming to accept that not all grieving will look exactly alike.  It’s an emotional, beautiful post.

My Lady of the Lantern has a post about people who pretend they weren’t infertile after they are parenting.  She is frustrated with a friend’s rewriting of her own personal history and the story she is presenting to the world.  She asks a thought-provoking question: “Do you wish you could deny your infertility? Seriously, I want the truth. If given a chance would you do it? If you could wipe the memory of your friends and family clean, would you reinstall the infertile status in their memory?” Well, would you?  Go tell her.

I featured it on BlogHer this week, but I literally love this post that much that I need to also post it here.  Tales of a Batty Nurse has a post called “Loving Who I Am?” and it is about the struggle to truly love yourself.  My favourite part was this: “It also annoys the hell out of me to be feeling melancholy over this. I don’t want to feel like my life is only complete or happy if I have a significant other, or a baby, or whatever. I spent too many years like that. I’ve enjoyed the last year or so being happy with what I have and I want that back. ”  Go read the post in full.

Lastly, there were so many good posts this week on the fake pregnancy Facebook meme.  I just wanted to highlight two of them.  Too Many Fish to Fry has a brave post stepping out of the infertility closet (with an explanation of why she is doing it).  Family Building with a Twist has a powerful post about the various ways cancer has touched her life, and she implores those who participated in the meme or those who want to understand more to read The Emperor of All Maladies to understand the facts about cancer.

The roundup to the Roundup: Feeling a little nervous and a little not about the specific, unconfirmed threat for Washington, D.C. and New York.  Distracting myself by grabbing the camera every time Cozy does one of his handstand pees.  BlogHer is giving away a second gift card to REI.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 2nd and September 9th) 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.

Cozy Jackson endured many small, excited hands squishing him his first week in our house.  The twins brought in anyone and everyone to marvel at him, and he responded by giving me this continuous, imploring look as if to ask what the hell was happening between those hours of 4 — 8 pm.  During the day, he listened to me type and ate tiny bits of apple and carrot.  During the night, he frolicked around his cage (actually, I don’t know what the hell he does at night — I never hear him).  But from 4 — 8 pm, it is a constant barrage of children’s hands attempting to give him love.

One night, perhaps as a response to a particularly rough afternoon being over-loved by the neighbourhood, he backed himself into the corner and raised himself into a handstand.  He was practically vertical, his tiny feet pressing on two walls of glass about two inches above the cedar chip bedding.  I was marveling at his agility, impressed with the fact that he can so easily do a handstand when I find something as simple as turning a somersault to be nausea-inducing, when his tiny penis popped out like an oven timer in a plump chicken and he let out a stream of piss down the cage walls.  He lowered his legs and stared at me as if to say, “that’s what I think of your neighbourhood kids.”

Seriously, have you ever heard of a hamster peeing in a handstand position?  Is my hamster fantastically unique, ready for a solo in Cirque du Soleil?

I can feel myself bumping that thin line that divides sane pet owners from crazy hamster ladies (which is the less-work equivalent of the crazy cat lady).  I mused aloud one day that perhaps the twins would like to give up all their toys to make room for a few more hamster cages.  I purchased a tiny carrying case for Cozy so we can take him on the road.  I could see Cozy enjoying our next hiking trip or trying to chew a seashell on the beach.  Josh has warned me that we are not taking Cozy anywhere.

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The results from the poll are interesting, and I have some follow-up questions, so I’ll post that this weekend.  So if you haven’t yet voted, get on that by Saturday afternoon or so.

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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:

• “Same and Different” (The Mud and the Lotus)

Kicking Your Collective Ass: One?  You only found one blog post worthy of directing everyone’s attention to read last week?  I had four and I could have posted more.  You have to do better this week.  There is a whole world of blog posts out there worthy of a little extra attention.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Les Terres Fertiles has a post about the choices we make with assisted family building.  About finding our own comfort zone with the myriad of decisions one needs to make about utilizing treatments or pursing adoption or choosing donor gametes.  I like this post for the raw honesty; for the exploration of the difficulty in making these decisions.

Mommy Odyssey has a post about how her biggest asset is now her liability.  She writes: “Why I can’t break free from this and just LIVE until we get our baby. I’ve realized that it’s something that’s ingrained in me. You see – I have this thing about me, which in the past I’ve viewed as an asset, but is now a liability. When I get my mind and heart set on something I go for it like a guided missile and don’t give up until I reach my goal.”  As someone who shares that trait with her, I found her post thought-provoking.  As well as deeply honest: she explains how this has affected her sex life and comes to a conclusion by the end that will probably have many people nodding.  One of the most helpful posts I’ve read in a long time.

First Time Twins has a post about Beyonce’s pregnancy.  I have to admit that this post was where I first learned that Beyonce was pregnant because I am so far behind on reading People magazine.  I’m still back in Charlie Sheen’s breakdown, in fact.  So this post was both informative AND funny, and I loved this thought directed at the media: “When I finally have a bump, would you be so kind as to send camera crews and thousands of audience members to my house to applaud and tell me how wonderful it is?  Because if it actually happens here, it’s an accomplishment worthy of some frikkin applause.”

Lastly, Finding My New Normal has a post about ending a friendship.  She writes: “In no time flat my feelings would get twisted in a way to make her the victim and me the crazy lady whose baby died and can’t be happy for anyone else. This is not what I want. So I’ve got some decisions to make.”  You can help her make these decisions by weighing in with your thoughts in her comment section.

The roundup to the Roundup: Cozy Jackson has settled into his new home and I am still deeply in love.  Results from the sitemeter poll coming soon.  And, of course, lots of great blog posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 26th and September 2nd) 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.