Almost two years ago to the day, we started the Best Little Infertility Books in the World list to help compile books dealing with ALI (adoption/loss/infertility) topics. And it’s certainly helpful and I can see that people click on it. Sometimes people also ask me if I know of a book on a certain topic. I read a lot and I have a lot of books on my shelf still to tackle. It made sense to start talking about some of them here. And when I say “some” I mean the ones that have grabbed me.

On weeks when I don’t have a Barren Advice column, I will put up a Read Me post. They are short reviews of books that I think are worth reading. You can send me suggestions for future book reviews by leaving a comment below on this post. If I’ve already read it, I’ll post my experience with the book immediately. If I have it on my shelf, I’ll bump it up to the front of my reading queue. If I don’t own it and it sounds interesting, I’ll get a copy. If I don’t own it and it doesn’t sound like my cup of tea, I may ask you to guest blog about the book here or on your own blog and link to it. If I don’t own it and it sounds completely off-topic or offensive (I’m obviously for ART, so a book arguing that ART is ruining the world won’t be reviewed here. Though you could always do so on your blog), I’ll probably simply ignore the comment.

Old posts are archived below, helping you find books on a certain topic. Books may be cross-listed in more than one category and the key for abbreviations is at the bottom of the page. Within each review, I link buying information to an independent bookstore that has an online shop or the publishers if its a small press whenever possible. Almost all books can be found through Amazon.

Infertility (I)

• Infertility Survival Handbook by Elizabeth Swire Falker (old review)

Donor Gametes (DG)

• Coming Soon

Surrogacy (S)

• Coming Soon

Adoption (A)

• Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born by Jamie Lee Curtis (C)

Living Child-Free (LCF)

• Coming Soon

Pregnancy Loss, Stillbirth, Neonatal Death, and Infant Death (L)

• Something Happened by Cathy Blanford (C)

Books for Children about ALI (picture books or older readers) and Families (C)

• Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born by Jamie Lee Curtis (A)
• Something Happened by Cathy Blanford (L)
• The Different Dragon (GLBT)

Fiction about Infertility Themes (F)

• Coming Soon

Key for Cross-Listing
I = Infertility
DG = Donor Gametes
S = Surrogacy
A = Adoption
LCF = Living Child-Free
L = Pregnancy Loss, Stillbirth, Neonatal Death, and Infant Death
C = Books for Children (either about ALI itself or reflective of families)
F = Fiction
SPBC = Single Parent by Choice
GLBT = Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender

Welcome back to Show and Tell. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. In fact, we hope you do go back to your blog and post your own Show and Tell item and then return with the link to your post. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

Prior to the Cheeburgerization of the suburbs, the first place I got to use a fixin’s bar (beyond stealing pickles and eating them off of a damp paper napkin) was at Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Cafe* in Tomorrowland at Disney World.

Veggie burgers are now in every hamburger restaurant, but fake meat was an anomaly back then and it made me feel so incredibly American to get to eat a hamburger just like every other person in that restaurant (except for the ones eating the galactic turkey legs–they have not made a vegetarian equivalent of that yet). Fake meat has leveled the playing field–I know it makes some vegetarians as squeamish as real dead cow, but I love having every recipe in the world open to me again. BLTs? We make them with vegetarian bacon. Ragu Bolognese? Boca Burger’s sausage patties. There is soyrizo and chicken nuggets and even strips of fake beef that can be added to a stirfry.

The point is that eating meat is an all-American activity similar to building our white picket fences or baking apple pie. While other countries enjoy their meat, we have a beef-eating culture. I think it will be a cold day in Hell before we have a vegetarian in the White House (tofu loaf at the next state dinner!). After all, English brings you the old adage: never trust a vegetarian. But fake meat? It blurs the line. You don’t know who is a red-blooded American and who is a ersatz citizen, crunching their way through a burger made of soy instead of meat.

I had the same Missy-no-mates feeling about not owning an iPod every time an Apple commercial came on television. In addition to eating meat, Americans own. We are a capitalistic, consumerist culture and we need to buy electronics. Josh tried to get me one a few times, but I never saw the point. And then suddenly I saw the point and I wanted an iPhone very badly. I wanted music with me (yes, I only listen to three or four CDs period, but I needed that music with me at all times) and videos and Internet access when I’m driving up I-95.

But I couldn’t justify buying an iPhone. But an iPod Touch–an ersatz iPhone that looks like an iPhone and feels like an iPhone but costs a lot less than an iPhone (without an ongoing phone bill to pay in addition to the product?). Well, that was an investment this little vegetarian could wrap her mind around.

I love owning.

Having an iPod Touch makes me feel as all-American as the football players in the pizza joint and the cheerleaders gossiping about them in the bathroom. It makes me feel like I should jump up on a chair and belt out the anthem or, at the very least, “It’s a Grand Old Flag.”

I am a huge fan of blending. And I have never blended more with my fellow Americans than with my new iPod Touch. Oh, and all the features–they completely rock. We have been passing it around in our house, filling up the chip with Brothers and Sisters episodes (thank you, Lindsay!) and YouTube bookmarks.

And while I may have sounded sarcastic in this post, I really am a huge fan of all things American even if I don’t partake in the beef eating (which, perhaps, has fallen culturally by the wayside due to all those studies about the effects of red meat).

*According to this website, Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Cafe is the world’s second busiest fast food restaurant with the winner being a McDonald’s in Moscow.

What are you showing today?

Want to bring something to Show and Tell?

• If you would like to join circle time and show something to the class, simply post each Sunday (or earlier in the weekend or on Monday if you can’t do Sunday), hopefully including a picture if possible, and telling us about your item. It can be anything–a photo from a trip, a picture of the dress you bought this week, a random image from an old yearbook showing a person you miss. It doesn’t need to contain a picture if you can’t get a picture–you can simply tell a story about a single item.
• Label your post “Show and Tell” each week and then come back here and add the permalink in the comments section below (make sure you don’t just comment that you participated: add a link to your blog in your comment so people can click over). I post a new Show and Tell post every Saturday night or Sunday. I usually move people up into the body of the post every few hours.
• Oh, and then the point is that you click through all of your classmates and see what they are showing this week.
• If you want it…
  I’ve now placed a Show and Tell archive on the sidebar that will be updated each week in case you miss it. And click here for the icon code if you wish to have it for your blog. It links to the archives.

I did it–I bought the iPod Touch. After lunch on Thursday, I left the twins with my mother and snuck out to the Apple store where no one could answer my questions. But it came down to this: for $30 more than the nano, I could have Internet access sometimes, a wider screen for watching Brothers & Sisters, and all the functions normally found on a palm pilot. And when I boiled it down to that fact, it seemed worth taking the chance with how much I would like it and eat the $30.

After I bought it, I walked to my car and placed it on the seat next to me and locked my car doors (since I have read enough email forwards to know that crazy things happen to women who sit in their cars in parking lots) and stared at all of the people who were eating their lunch outside the mall. And I thought about what I had just done. See, I can’t even enjoy a little retail therapy. I need to analyze it to death. Actually, I believe my internal monologue was more akin to “what have I done? what have I done?”

I really don’t know why I wanted the iPod. I have never shown an interest in one before. I mean, Josh has offered to get me one as a gift and I’ve turned down the idea. But we needed a new CD player for the twins’ room and Josh suggested that we get an iPod because it would be more portable than lugging the CD player on trips. And this idea grew and grew until it became this insatiable desire for Internet access while outside the home. Even though I only use my cell phone for outgoing calls because I do not want to be reachable when I am away from home. It is completely out-of-character to want Internet access. But I wanted it.

Which raised my internal red flags.

Lately, I have been devouring food. Not always terrible food–one night it was a huge bowl of grilled asparagus. But I’ve been eating without being hungry. And it shows. I’ve been drinking more coffee, staying up later, buying toys on a whim. Consuming. And I really had to pause and think about buying the iPod because it felt like more consumption–this bottomless consumption where I was trying to fill something. And once I realized I was doing it, I told myself that it had to stop. The eating had to stop. Worrying about time had to stop. Buying for the sake of buying had to stop.

So was I buying it to fill a void or buying it to solve a music-playing problem or buying it simply to make myself feel good because life is short and we should make ourselves feel good when we can? I like to think that once I became conscious of where I was mentally, it became a healthier purchase. But that could be justification.

I also bought it for the Wolvog. His favourite thing in the world is to go to the Apple store and play with the iPhones. He was an iPhone for Purim last year and he has taught himself fancy tricks on the iPhone by memorizing Apple’s infomercials on their website. When he saw me download iTunes last night, he asked me why. I told him that I had bought an iPod Touch when he was at Grandma’s.

“It’s in the house?” he asked incredulously.

“It’s in my purse,” I admitted.

“Can I see it?” he questioned.

And when I brought it upstairs, it was as if I had delivered the Holy Grail into his preschool hands. He was shaking. Bedtime consisted of a lot of chatter to the ChickieNob about his happiness (hmmm…so I guess money can buy happiness for the preschool set) and then he had to pop out of bed when he discovered I was hooking it up to the computer and getting on the Internet for the first time.

It is making me happy, in this really-not-solving-the-mental-health-issues-but-
certainly-making-me-happy-in-the-small-sense-of the-word. I am getting used to it. It’s nice to be playing with Reader. And Lindsay taught me how to put music on it. I’m only putting on music that makes me happy such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and Jesus Christ Superstar.

So it’s a small good thing. I’m glad I asked you for advice. Thank you for guiding me towards the iPod Touch.

Life in the White House has a post that broke my heart following the negative from their first dIUI. The line that moved me to tears juxtaposed the night before the beta with the day after: “Of course, last night we both thought we would be parents in 9 months. We were just talking about how it’s scary. Matt was having to remind me of how badly I wanted to be a mom…that’s how scared I was. Today, all I want is to hold a baby and know that it’s mine.” It’s a gorgeous, albeit sad, post.

The Other Shoe has a post about fitting in and the residue of infertility. The post, aptly titled “Dislocation” is about that feeling of being out-of-sorts even when you know that those around you probably don’t notice what you’re feeling. She writes, “Partly it’s my old knee-jerk response. A room full of women with kids? Are you nuts? I keep forgetting I have crossed over. Or at least I am in the crossing.Another part is … I don’t know. As I come to these pregnant moments that I always wanted, all I do is notice ways that I don’t fit in.” I just loved this post and I hope she makes it to the social group.

Lastly, XBox4NappyRash, which is always an excellent read, has a post about the final week of the two week wait. Not only is the discussion of the continuous shifting of “what is good” brilliant, but I wistfully love this final thought: “I can sum up our chances of success this month as somewhere between fanciful and far fetched. Just about normal then…” I hope life
proves them wrong this Sunday and they get the happy ending to the two week wait.

The roundup to the Roundup: I have an iTouch (and you will most likely see it at Show & Tell when I have it loaded with more than elderly Jewish singers and Jesus Christ Superstar). The next 100 Words Project is running. The IComLeavWe list closes on Sunday and commenting begins. Have a wonderful weekend and I’ll see you on Saturday night with your items.

Still pouring drinks below so pull up a seat at the bar and tell us what has happened in your life this month. But I also wanted to draw from the collective minds of the Internet and ask for your opinion Apple products. Which I know makes me all over the place, but I blame my inability to focus on a given topic on the shake-up of my schedule and the fact that I crouched in the dark end of a school for two weeks (which makes me sound not just a little like a bleeding psycho).

Let’s say hypothetically that I am deciding between an iPod nano and an iTouch. I want music capabilities. I want video (and obviously iTouch has the bigger screen, but I also want to know if the nano one is too annoying for actual use). And I want to know if you can really get on the Internet often with the iTouch. Are there enough wireless hotspots out there to make it worth it? Are you without Internet most of the time? Is it reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally slow to load? Do you lose your connection just as you open your email? Only two options I’m considering are the new iPod nano or iTouch. Give me your opinion and experience.

And now, I’m getting back to pouring drinks. So scoot your bum over to the bar and tell us about your month.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who always seemed to have jury duty. The letter would arrive in the mail and she would exclaim, “jury duty again?” and try to remember if two years had elapsed between her last summons and the current one. She was so unlucky in jury duty that she once received a summons to appear on a month-long grand jury, but she begged and pleaded her way out of that one (and is well aware that there are people out there who would love to be chosen for a grand jury, but our heroine is not one of them).

She realized that admitting how much she despised receiving jury duty made her sound like a “bad citizen” and “un-American.” But she explained to all that she grew up in Washington, D.C. where she had a healthy dose of government shoved down her throat every which way she turned so she didn’t feel too badly if she was scared about hearing the details of a murder trial.

This little girl was praying that when she called the summons line to see if her juror number was called, she would receive a message telling her that she was dismissed for two years. While she waited to make the phone call, she invented a fine, alcoholic drink which she named the Jury Duty.

So…vote now…will I or will I not be chosen for jury duty when I call the service line?

It has been a little under a month since we met, bitched, cried, comforted, and caught up each other on our cycles and lives. Pull up a seat and I’ll pour you a drink. Let everyone know what is happening in your life. The good, the bad, the ugly. My only request is that if a story catches your eye, you follow it back to the person’s blog and start reading their posts. Give some love, give some support, or laugh with someone until your drink comes out of your nose.

I have a ton of assvice in my back pocket and as a virtual bartender, I will give it to you unless you specifically tell me that this is simply a vent and you do not want to receive anything more than a hug.

So if you have been a lurker for a while (or if this is your first open bar as someone who found this space through IComLeavWe), sit down and tell us about yourself. Remember to provide a link or a way for people to continue reading your story (or if you don’t have a blog–gasp!–you can always leave an email address if you’re looking for advice or support. If not, people can leave messages for that person here in the comments section too). If you’re a regular at the bar, I’ll get out your engraved martini glass while you make yourself comfortable. And anyone new, welcome. I’m glad you found this virtual bar.

For those who have no clue what I’m talking about when I say that the bar is open, click here to catch up and then jump into the conversation back on this current post.

So have an imaginary cocktail and tell us what is up with your life.