Category — Friday Blog Roundup

For 11 years, I have diligently avoided reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. (1) I don’t like epistolary novels. (2) The title annoyed me. (3) The fact that everyone gushed about it made me feel like there was a veeeeeeery good chance that I wouldn’t enjoy it. (4) It contains 0% magic or monsters.

But… The ChickieNob and I were looking for something to watch, and I told her that we should try the first ten minutes of the Netflix movie to see the scenery in Guernsey. We were about to give up because it was taking so long to get to Guernsey (at that point, I didn’t know the movie was shot in North Devon, so we were not going to see Guernsey… ever) when she received that first letter from Dawsey.

And then. Oh my G-d. I loved the story so much. I would say, “Why didn’t you all tell me how much I would love The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society?” Because everyone said it. And I didn’t believe it. And now I’m going backwards to read the book because it is such a great story.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “Being a Mom Is Kind of Awkward After Infertility” (RisaKerslake)
• “It’s All About Perspective” (Fighting Infertility)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I learned a new term from My Path to Mommyhood: Toxic positivity. She explains: “Nothing makes you feel lonelier than when you are honestly wondering what you did to warrant such utter horrible luck in every aspect of family building, if you can keep going, if people will understand if you CAN’T keep going… and you are faced with the following…” You’ll have to click over to read the list and understand, and I promise, it’s worth it so you don’t accidentally utter any of these in the name of positivity.

Raising the A Team has a post about setting a date (the next embryo freezing bill) for deciding on whether to try for a third child. She writes, “As a kid, I always expected to have two kids and it wasn’t until I met Laurie and we started planning our dream family that having 3 even occurred to me. But once I had it in my mind, it stuck there and now it’s grown into my plan.” Those thoughts are hard to shake out of your head, even when facing other facts. It’s an interesting take on the question.

By the Brooke explains the thoughts that went through her head after losing her baby: “In my weird grief mindset, having a baby shower was basically calling attention to your pregnancy and asking the universe to take it away.” Which takes her into the meat of the post. First of all, I love the title: “All the Luck in the Universe,” which she explains through a story that is just as good as The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society! A tale of two friends, two babies, and enormous love flowing between the families.

The roundup to the Roundup: Realizing that I love The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society after all.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 19th and 26th) 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 Roundup is the 13-year anniversary of the Roundup. The first one went up on July 21, 2006. (Very amused that I mentioned the garden in that post because it was only up for a single summer and it barely grew anything.) I’ve missed or we’ve had special Roundups 25 times over 13 years. But if I average 4 posts per Roundup and there have been 651 Roundups… that means that I’ve featured about 2604 blog posts. 2604 blog posts!

Happy birthday, little Roundup.

*******

Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

*******

And now the blogs…

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

• “The Universe Is Screwing With Me, Big Time” (The Road Less Travelled)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Life Without Baby has a story about a woman conveying that she doesn’t have children. “She didn’t pause for people to give her sympathetic looks, she didn’t elaborate on why she couldn’t have children, and she didn’t explain that she’d wanted to have them or tried to. She said it matter-of-factly, as if she’d been telling us she didn’t care for the taste of liver and onions.” She didn’t apologize or explain. It was just one fact out of many pertaining to her life. It’s a great way to live.

The Uterus Monologues has an amazing post about being in an in-between place after her losses. She writes, “Sometimes, like me, you exist in an in-between state. I may not have living children, or even a scan photo, but I’ve stepped over the threshold of motherhood and now I can’t go back. I’ve felt that all-consuming love for something both of yourself and bigger than yourself; the love for a child I thought I would have by now. I can never un-feel that.” Moreover, she’s pulling together posts for a project, so go over and add your voice.

Lastly, Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles has a post about not being on a same page with family building as her husband, and how that’s okay, too. She explains, “Which sounds quite bleak and like I’m not getting what I want out of my marriage, if you only look at this one element, which is not where I’m going with this.” Because it’s one tiny piece of a larger whole, though it’s the tiny piece that she needed to process this week.

The roundup to the Roundup: 13th anniversary of the Roundup. Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 12th and 19th) 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 is the 750th Roundup. I have written this post 750 different times. Except that the number is actually 650. Things got misnumbered along the way.

But that makes sense because this blog is 13 years old, and the Roundup is almost 13. And there are 52 weeks in a year. 13 x 52 = 676. Which means that in a 13 year period, I’ve missed a handful of Roundups. (Because some of the “missing” posts were actually Roundup Extravaganzas, something we did years ago for big milestone Roundups.)

So… congratulations, little Roundup. You made it to 750 (well, 650) posts.

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I’ve decided that I want to learn how to play poker. I’m going to run into a wall when it comes to betting because I hate gambling — I will never be comfortable putting actual money on the line — but I love card games. And it feels like a good… project. Something that comes with a lot of books to read and strategies to learn. Plus decks of cards are very small. You can carry them anywhere. I just need to find a group of people who equally like card games and hate gambling. They exist… right?

*******

Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

*******

And now the blogs…

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

• “Why aren’t you doing what I think you should do?” (Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles)
• “The Cost of My Freedom” (Infertile Phoenix)
• “21 Weeks: Finally feeling better, for real now?” (RisaKerslake)
• “On keeping calm and (mis)carrying on” (The Uterus Monologues)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about a feeling she had looking at a picture. Her friend posted a picture of her teenage child, and she realized that her own child — conceived around the same time and lost via an ectopic pregnancy — would have been the same age. Those moments hit you in the gut.

Infertile Phoenix explains how she feels changing her name back after her divorce. It’s a powerful little post about “shedding the last physical remnant I have left of my children,” one syllable at a time.

Lastly, My Perfect Breakdown has a post explaining why she isn’t writing as well as why she also feels the impulse to write. And I love this sentiment: “Life wont be perfect, because I’m confident there is no such thing. But, I am looking forward to a summer of mostly good, almost perfect days with my family.”

The roundup to the Roundup: 750 (okay, 650) Roundups! I want to learn how to play poker. Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 5th and 12th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I am skipping the Roundup this week (though please still add great posts you read in the comment section, and I’ll pull them in the next time the Roundup goes up) but instead unloading a post from one of my two saved link folders. I keep two. The first is for the Roundup. Whenever I read something that sticks with me after I leave the post, I drop it in that folder. On Thursday night or Friday morning, I pull out three or four for the post. I clear the folder after I write the post and start anew.

The other folder is an ongoing folder. Whenever I start reading something and think, “Oh… I really want to spend time with this” or “I am going to want to write about this,” I drop it in a folder. Sometimes I go back and read the whole piece. Sometimes it doesn’t grab me as much on the second try. Other times it ends up in a post, and then I remove the piece from the folder. I only clean out that folder once every year or so. It’s where I go when I know I want to write but I have nothing to write about. There is always something interesting in that folder.

That’s also how you keep a blog going for 13 years. Keep a folder of anything interesting you find.

So I am unloading an article that I love but have zero clue what to even say about it. It’s about a modern day, professional wizard in Brooklyn who tries to answer this essential question: “What would a wizard do in the modern era?”

“Wizards are people helpers,” he said. “They are who the hero encounters on their journey, and they’re able to give the hero a bit of advice, maybe a magical artifact, some sort of assistance that helps the hero get over their obstacle and on their journey.”

That is awesome.

So what is something you’ve saved recently to read later?

“Social infertility” is the term the New Yorker is using to describe infertility when “it’s your biography, rather than your body, that prevents you from having a child.” I already took my stance in my book: the inability to create and carry a child to term comes in many different forms, and calling it infertility in one place and something else in another doesn’t make sense when we can all join together and ADDRESS THE ISSUE vs. fighting amongst ourselves to determine who gets to wear the infertility crown.

I also don’t support the “it dilutes the disease designation” argument. We have the disease designation. We still don’t have designated disease-like coverage. Nor would I have been cool if anyone had pointed out that Josh could marry someone else and technically wouldn’t be “infertile” anymore, therefore, they didn’t have to pay for our coverage because it was his “lifestyle choice.”

If you cannot conceive or carry children, you are infertile. And it frustrates me to all get-out when I hear stories about people wasting time and money to fulfill a rule vs. getting medical care that directly addresses the issue in a cost-effective manner.

My shoulders felt tense after reading this piece.

*******

Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

*******

And now the blogs…

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

• “How to be Childless and Happy in 10,000 Easy Steps” (Life Without Baby)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about keeping the lines of communication open and wondering about the balance between sensitivities and emotional protections. She writes, “I’m trying to find a balance between my own indignation at attitudes about parents and non-parents, or comments that might trigger (a loaded word in itself these days) my own hurt, and my wish to keep dialogue open.” It’s not an easy line to find because context matters so much, and the same words may enter our ears differently on two different days (or spoken by two different people). It’s an interesting question about how do you not take offense but how do you also not get hurt.

Mine to Command has a non-IF post that totally fascinated me about the giving of gifts. I’ve never seen the Big Bang Theory, but I love that example from the show. And it’s just an interesting roundup of questions.

An Engineer Becomes a Mom got me with this sentence: “I’m deep into the ‘I can’t fix myself fast enough’ mantra in my head.” It is a tiny post, but that line packed a big punch, for me.

Lastly, My Path to Mommyhood has a post about Father’s Day and a cruddy moment of customer service that her husband found himself in on that day. Cruddy, actually, doesn’t really cover it.

The roundup to the Roundup: The New Yorker’s piece on social infertility. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 14th and June 21st) 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.