Category — Friday Blog Roundup

Our town has a peacock problem. Peacocks keep escaping. They are all different peacocks and different peacock owners reporting the birds on the loose. There is now a peacock hotline so people can let the peacock catchers know whenever they see one walking down the street.

Our town listserv is usually filled with petty arguments, but the last few weeks have been a running conversation about the birds. People either (1) mention where they just saw a peacock, (2) muse on why the peacocks keep getting free, and (3) lament that they have not seen a peacock.

I’m in the third camp. I haven’t seen an escaped peacock… yet. That’s my growth mindset reminding me that there will always be peacocks and always be a chance that this could be my lucky day if I keep trying to see one.

Was I aware that this many people owned peacocks prior to this point? No. Am I delighted to know that I am surrounded by so many clever peacocks? Yes, yes, I am.

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

In Quest of a Binky Moongee compares two graduations; her feelings during one four years ago when she wondered if she would reach parenthood, and her feelings now, knowing that her children are here and a graduation is in her future. She writes, “Being able to celebrate my kids at their middle school, high school, and even college graduation is not a far-fetched dream anymore.” I smiled reading this.

FinallyMyLinesNow has a post about attending Day of Pediatric Remembrance, a loss event at the hospital. She went to remember her three daughters. She writes, “They recognized both the pain of our loss and the joy of A & T in a meaningful way … It also felt wonderful to honor Alexis, Zoe, and Quinn. The last 14 weeks have been so focused on A & T that I was glad to spend some time on our other girls.” It’s a moving post about remembering and grieving as a group.

Lastly, it is Father’s Day this weekend in the US. Life Without Baby writes about childless men on Father’s Day. She begins with an interesting question: “Mother’s Day is pretty much the worst day of the year for those of us who didn’t get to be moms. But what about Father’s Day and the men in our lives? Do they feel the loss of fatherhood in the same way we feel it for motherhood?” Join the conversation over on her blog.

The roundup to the Roundup: Peacocks on the loose! 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 7th and June 14th) 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.

Is your fertility app funded by an anti-abortion group or individual? It is 2019. We actually need to ask that.

It has been a long time since my days on FertilityFriend (which is now an app, too!), but it feels like a really simple time where websites were owned by humans you could reach and your data kept private and no one was trying to manipulate your emotions, with the exception of that one girl who would always sprinkle everyone with baby dust. (You know that every site had one.)

Something else: I was moved that Nick Foles announced the reason he was absent from practice was because his wife had a pregnancy loss at 15 weeks. I love that he was upfront about it, and that the family took the time they needed to mourn. When people talk about it, others can give support and comfort AND it makes it easier for the next person to speak up, too.

*******

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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inconceivable! is hit by a wave of sadness when she considers her upcoming (and final) transfer. She writes, “That’s life, though, isn’t it? At least after a certain point? Where the most extraordinary exists among the prosaic of every day and the deepest, darkest muck that can be dragged up?” It is a gorgeous, bittersweet post about all of life’s “ands.”

Dreaming of Diapers has a post about her uterine lining. It’s one of those posts I want to send to people when they say, “But you can always do IVF.” Um… this is what IVF is like. These types of difficult moments and emotional highs are part of the process. She writes, “I’ll be honest. It terrifies me to think about transferring one of my precious embryos into my uterus. I mean TERRIFIES. I just want to give it a chance. But maybe by confirming that my uterus is actually ‘receptive,’ that will give me some confidence? Even if I have extremely thin lining?” Sending her so many good thoughts for the transfer.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a book that has been on my TBR list forever. (I secretly keep waiting for it to go on sale as an e-book.) Her post is about finding those IF connections in non-IF spaces and stories. The book is a reminder that “We don’t always know the full story. Sometimes, we need to skip the speculation and the judgment, and just give the other guy a break.” Which book is it? I guess you’ll need to click over to see…

The roundup to the Roundup: Check who funds your fertility app and other news. 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 May 31st and June 7th) 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 went down the rabbit hole twice this week. The first was looking up Brideshead Revisited, a book I’ve never read and now totally want to read. (Or, more accurately, I would love Jeremy Irons to read it to me so will need to purchase from Audible.) A character in a book was reading it, so now, once I start reading it, it’s like a book inside a book inside a book… if that makes sense. I’m picturing it like two mirrors facing each other, reflecting the reading of Brideshead Revisited 1000 times.

The other rabbit hole was the Holocaust document archive. I found both brothers. One ultimately died at Mauthausen. The other went from Flossenbuerg to Buchenwald. And in finding these brothers, I also found their sister and now I’m exploring her story and two of her children. (One other child got to Israel, another got to Paris, and the third died of natural causes.) Various family members have sent me their notes over the years, and using old census forms, scanned records, and conversations, I was able to put all the siblings in birth order. And now they are in a neat row, lost information known.

I feel like I end the week with more order in it. And a book to read.

*******

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:

• “Happy Retirement, Dr. Ob-Gyn” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “Regulating What We Don’t Understand” (Stirrup Queens) — thanks, Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Uterus Monologues has a post about the logistics of life after a miscarriage, namely, her inability to plan a holiday because… what if? She writes, “Even things you know in your rational mind are statistically very unlikely seem eminently possible in pregnancy after loss(es). Bad luck is your entire evidence base. And as for the thought of actually miscarrying again while away….” Her description of your life shrinking––that is exactly it. It makes your world feel so small. As well as her description of how it feels to go away and unplug from the endless cycles and family building thoughts.

The Gayby Project is back with a post! She writes, “But I’m back, and I need this space. And I need the friendships I once built here, even though I think many of ‘my people’ have moved on from the blogosphere. And so, maybe there will be new people who I will find and who will find me?” Indeed! Clearly all of us. Her child’s diagnosis has thrown her for a loop, and she needs––like so many of us––to talk it out to find sense. Go circle the wagons.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ writes about the Pain Olympics and their purpose. She explains, “Playing Pain Olympics helps me to put my own pain into perspective.” She continues later with the point: “Someone else can’t put your pain in perspective for you! … Equally, I can’t try to tell anyone that their pain is less or more than mine (even if I think it). I can however tell myself where my pain fits on the scale.” It’s a beautiful post, marking the Pain Olympics as a part of the healing process.

The roundup to the Roundup: Brideshead Revisited and family members found. 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 May 24th and 31st) 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 so excited for the Downton Abbey movie. We’re currently only in season five, but we’re furiously working our way through the remaining episodes so we’ll be ready to go to the theater on September 20th when it opens.

We came to Downton Abbey late in the game–we often wait until shows have ended before we begin watching them–but we are so in love with the family and staff. ChickieNob and I are awful about reading spoilers before episodes, so we mostly know everything that will happen in the series. I will be very sad when we finish the last episode, though we’ve already planned to try Victoria again. We couldn’t get into it when we tried the first episode because we associated Jenna Coleman with Doctor Who. But maybe enough time has passed that we’ll be able to see her in something else.

Who else is excited for the Downton Abbey movie?

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Measure of Love is still on sale for a few more days for only 99 cents. It’s the same price on every e-book platform. So… grab a copy for the beach? For a friend? For someone who wants to hear about the olden days of blogging?

*******

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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Road Less Travelled writes about the series finale of The Big Bang Theory, where a child-free-by-choice character is suddenly happily pregnant. I don’t know much about the show, but this would have made me cringe, too: “Perhaps this abrupt shift in character development wouldn’t have been quite so eyebrow-raising/infuriating if Penny wasn’t the show’s SECOND child-free-by-choice female character to wind up pregnant.” Loribeth makes me want to stand up and cheer with her final paragraph. Click over and cheer, too.

It’s Inconceivable asks how people answer when they get asked whether they have children. She explains, “Obviously, I have no (living) children, but it doesn’t mean I want to necessarily explain my whole childless existence to someone casually inquiring, or being more probing, or fishing for information.” She explains how she decides how to address it. Great post for anyone grappling with how much to reveal.

Lastly, Life Without Baby has a post wishing that one person had “acknowledged that my inability to have a child was an enormous loss for me and that I needed to grieve that loss, as if my children had existed.” In other words, we express condolences over a death, but we rarely express condolences or see infertility as a loss, too. She breaks down the hierarchy of loss, pointing out, “people have no idea how to react when they can’t see the thing that was lost.” It’s an excerpt from her book, Life Without Baby, so you can get a taste for what you’ll find in the pages.

The roundup to the Roundup: So excited for Downton Abbey. Measure of Love is still on sale. 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 May 17th and 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.

I ended up needing to go back into my old blogspot website this week, which I haven’t been in since building this space in 2009. It felt like I was strolling through a ghost town, except it wasn’t really a ghost town since all of that old content migrated over here. For three years, I wrote there, and for ten years I’ve written here. Triple the length of time that I wrote over there, but that space feels so much like home still. I’m not sure what that means.

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Speaking of looking backwards, Measure of Love is on sale for the next two weeks for only 99 cents. It’s the same price on every e-book platform. So… grab a copy for the beach? For a friend? For someone who wants to hear about the olden days of blogging?

*******

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:

• “What Does a Mother Look Like” (Mrs. Spit)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inexplicably Missing has a post about the outer calm and the inner turmoil. She made it through Mother’s Day weekend, but then found herself emotional when she started to pack up her house for a move. She writes, “As we dis-assembled our furniture and took art off the walls, it felt as though we are completely pulling apart our lives. Which actually was the whole idea, I guess… It’s just I’m starting to get cold feet about it all.” It’s about crumbling internally so you can build something new.

Risa Kerslake also has a post about Mother’s Day; though this year she’s pregnant. In the past, she has always had a moment where she cries in the bathroom, and this year she didn’t. She describes that change in Mother’s Day: “There’s a lot of joy and gratefulness and indescribable love that comes with it, but every Mother’s Day, I allow myself those moments in the bathroom.”

Lastly, CD1 Again ties off her blog with a goodbye post. She goes all the way back to 2008, so it’s bittersweet, even if she hasn’t been blogging as of late. She writes, “Thank you to everyone who ever stopped here and said hi or offered support when I was at my lowest, so sure I was worthless because my uterus didn’t work. It meant more than I can ever convey here with just words. I looked back and the anguish I read in old posts just hurts, but it helped shape who I am now. I’m leaving all of the posts here for anyone who needs them.” Go read the whole post and say goodbye.

The roundup to the Roundup: Spending time in the past. Measure of Love is on sale. 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 May 10th and 17th) 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.