This post may make you throw up in your mouth a little.

I rarely feel an absolute compulsion to blog about something. Every once in a while, as something is happening or when I notice something, I think to myself, “oh…I should write this out later and explore why I felt this way” or something along those lines. But today, as I was holding the ChickieNob up to stare at herself in the mirror (she was wearing an oversized March of Dimes t-shirt as pyjamas, a crown, high heels, and someone’s old ballet skirt–you can see why she would need to check herself out), I was thinking silently, “I need to blog about this morning before I get down to work.”

It all began yesterday morning actually.

I noticed a glint of silver in the closet and moved some enormous containers of soup noodles (what? You don’t buy soup noodles by the case?) to see that someone or something had shredded the internal wrappers on some chocolate bars. The mouse was back.

And I did what any mouse-fearing fifties-throwback would do. I told Josh to take care of it.

The store was out of many kinds of traps and the only thing they could offer were traditional snap traps. He baited four of them with peanut butter and set them out before bed.

This morning, it was Josh’s turn to sleep in and I brought the twins downstairs, both going commando because I had left all of their clothes in the dryer last night. I decided to swing by the kitchen before I went down to collect the laundry and I hung away from the door, peeking inside at the traps. One had definitely been moved.

I ran upstairs and woke Josh, just as any mouse-fearing fifties-throwback would do.

“I love you so much and I know it’s your day to sleep in and I will let you go back to sleep after this for an extra eight hours but you are so big and I am so little and you are made out of strength and I am made out of skim milk and I. think. there’s. a. mouse. in. the. trap.”

He bolted out of bed and went down to the kitchen while I casually collected the twins and held them in the living room, chattering on about a huge mess I had made in the kitchen and how I needed Josh to clean it up because it was the sort of mess that a person like me simply didn’t deal with. It is just one of the drawbacks to being a skim milk constructed, tissue-paper-like kind of girl.

I hope they don’t turn out like me.

It was a mouse with a broken neck and Josh took it outside for a garbage can burial. Which made me ten kinds of sad (and I’m certain that someone will comment on animal cruelty on this post). But he did eat my chocolate bars and poop on my kitchen floor. Not that the crime deserves the death penalty, but I blame a lot of it on Home Depot for being out of other traps.

But wait, you say, that didn’t make me throw up in my mouth. Wait for it.

I went into the kitchen to look at the other traps and noticed that one was missing. I asked Josh if there had been more than one mouse. He came back and counted the existing traps with me and agreed that one was missing. “Is there a chance,” I asked, “that a mouse could have gotten trapped and dragged it somewhere?”

“Anything is possible,” Josh answered.

He started poking around the kitchen while I returned to the living room to fold clothes and try not to think about the fact that a dying mouse could be in this room at this very moment, dragging a trap behind him, wondering what kind of sick human would harm him like this simply because he wanted to partake in a little chocolate. Does this human maim everyone who comes in her house, seeking a little chocolate? The next time Lindsay swings by, is she going to have to contend with losing a body part if she muses that a square of Hersheys would hit the spot?

As I am trying to look and not look under the sofa at the same time (I don’t want to be the one who finds this thing), Josh calls out a grim, “it’s here.”

“With a m-o-u-s-e?” I ask.

“No…with a bit of t-a-i-l. No, wait, not with a bit of t-a-i-l.”

And I have no reason why that would bring me INTO the kitchen instead of running as far away from said trap, but I entered the room to see Josh staring at the trap in revulsion.

“It’s his foot,” he admitted.

I warned you that you’d throw up a little.

Somewhere, out there, there is a tiny hurt mouse missing a foot. Inside, we plugged the crack of space next to the dishwasher where he left the trap and silently thanked him for his great escape which showed us the door he was using when he came to steal my chocolate.

The fine ladies of Bridges have a project for you (I will call them the fine ladies until we get our first male editor. We’re currently at 27 editors…all female. Not that we have anything against guys. It’s just the way the cookie crumbled). We are calling it 100 Words and it’s just what it sounds like. Every once in a while, we will ask you to write 100 words on a given topic and submit them for a loop of posts. What do I mean by a loop of posts? Each paragraph will be its own post and a new post will load at regular intervals depending on how many people participate until the screen is filled with a mosaic of original thoughts all on the same topic.

We are doing the first one to mark the day of September 11th. Not everyone is from the US at Bridges and not everyone experienced the day in the same way. Therefore, we are asking for anything–your reaction; a memory; a story about a person you lost; an image–from that day. However you would like to use your 100 words (or a comparable image space if you’d rather work with a photo or drawing).

How long is 100 words and does it really have to be 100 words? Yes, it really can only be 100 words. And the editing will be sloppy, literally cutting off the post on the 100th word if you don’t edit it to the correct amount (you do not have to use every word, but you can’t go over 100). Just to give you a sense of size, see the paragraph below, which is 100 words.

So, just in case you were wondering what 100 words looks like in terms of length, this paragraph is 100 words. I checked it with that fancy word count feature on Microsoft Word (and you may want to do this too) before cutting and pasting it here. The posts are going to be set to upload once every fifteen minutes or so throughout the day, creating this long mosaic over a 24 hour period of the experience of 9/11. Oh—and if you don’t wish to present 100 words, you can also present one image. So this is 100 words.

Let’s say you want to participate because you think this sounds very cool and you want to be a part of the very first 100 Words at the Bridges site. Here is what we need: your blog name and url (if you want to submit your entry to run anonymously, please let me know. If not, it will be linked back to your blog). The 100 words or an image. All emailed to me. By August 30th.

I know, I know, that isn’t a lot of time. But I need to be able to layout every post to run on the 11th. Oh–and if you ever wrote a 9/11 post on your blog and want to take a paragraph from it as your submission, that is fine too. It is fine if it has already appeared elsewhere.

So that’s the little project of the moment. We’ll announce the next 100 Words in September.

Whoa…I just logged into blogger and…is it just me? The new layout for the dashboard? I’m so thrown off.

I almost forgot what I came on here to write.

I was closing the book, A Mother for Choco, when I asked the ChickieNob, “do you remember what that’s called? When the baby doesn’t grow in the mommy’s tummy and instead she brings the baby into her heart but it grows in another mommy’s belly?”

“It’s called breastfeeding,” the ChickieNob says confidently.

“No…it’s called something else.”

“Oh, I know,” she says brightly, equally confident in her next answer. “It’s called apple pie.”

Cross-posted with BlogHer…

Dara Torres: 9 time medalist in swimming, 5-time Olympiad, 41-years-old (and the oldest female swimmer), incredible powerhouse. And stirrup queen to boot. With 7.4 million Americans diagnosed with infertility, it makes sense that a portion of Olympic athletes would need a little help in the non-equestrian stirrups. But certainly Dara Torres’s openness in talking about IVF has made her a hero in the infertility blogosphere.

And her reason for speaking out is to remove the stigma of infertility. As she said back in 2004 when she was still doing treatments to conceive her daughter, “I only know of people who have spoken about their problems getting pregnant after they succeeded. That’s great but I felt that people who are struggling with this need to hear from someone going through it just like they are.”

Kicks ass in the swimming pool and kicks ass on dry land.

It’s interesting how the Olympics–like all major events–become entwined through infertility depending on when you are cycling. I guarantee you that the women who are going through IVF this week or are paper pregnant through adoption will have emotional moments when the next summer Olympics rolls through four years from now. They will remember giving themselves an injection as a male gymnast tackles the parallel bars. They will remember how they were holding their cordless phone in one hand, willing their social worker to ring. And every time the Olympics rolls around, they will be brought back to this time period.

Miss E from Miss E’s Musings has a post this week about how she felt watching the last Olympics vs. how she feels now, pregnant with twins after IVF. She writes, “During the last Olympics I was acutely aware that I had accomplished comparatively zilch in my life and yet was older than nearly all the athletes, so the games made for kind of sucky viewing. Thankfully I’ve gotten past that stage and now just lust after the young male athletes, especially the swimmers.”

Meghan and Bill’s Adoption Adventure is literally coming to a milestone during the Olympics. They are in Moscow, bringing their son, Nick, into his new family. Reading her blog this week, I became as emotional as I was seeing Michael Phelps screaming for joy at the end of his relay. She writes of this moment:

Now I’m sitting here, watching the Olympics and contemplating how our lives are going to change in the span of less than 24 hours. I know some of you out there are probably thinking, how dramatic, its just a child, everyone does it. The thing is, after years of trying to start a family, unsuccessful fertility treatments, disappointment after disappointment, you start to think that maybe it isn’t your destiny to have children, maybe you aren’t meant to be a parent, you can be the fun aunt. But you press on, desperately trying to make something happen, in hopes that your dream of having a family will finally come true. I can hardly believe that our dream is finally going to become a reality. I’m quite overwhelmed and very excited (and a little scared)!

It is this strange thing to watch this pinnacle of bodily achievement when your own body is not cooperating on the baby-making front. Stacey’s Thoughts on Infertility has a wistful post about living life as a SAHW when she always thought she’d be a SAHM. “It actually felt pretty great today because I got some house cleaning done to the tune of the Olympics on TV. It was pretty inspirational. I think I turned in at least a silver medal performance. But it doesn’t feel great day in and day out.” In the end, she admits, she doesn’t feel like she has contributed to the world, and there is nothing like the Olympics to bring out that emotion.

It is hard to watch people achieve their dreams when you’re not achieving your own. We’re not seeing the people who didn’t make it to the Olympics when we’re watching the games–we’re seeing the athletes who applied themselves and achieved their dreams. And there is a very bittersweet analogy for infertile people in the fertile world. No one sees the hard work or the sacrifices or the struggle when they see someone infertile. Our focus, as a nation, is with the woman who achieves. Who is carrying the baby or has the belly bump. Infertile women are like the athletes still stuck in Topeka, Kansas. The ones watching the games on television instead of executing their balance beam routine in Beijing. Wondering what went wrong, why they didn’t make the team despite their hard work.

My own infertility tie to the Olympics came from the premature birth of the twins. We were supposed to be watching the opening ceremonies at home. Instead, we were across the street from the hospital, in a hotel while our twins were in the NICU. Nothing was how I imagined it would be. It is impossible not to get emotional when the Olympics rolls around again and I see all of our legs tangled around each other as we lie as a family in a hotel bed on vacation, explaining Chinese brush painting to our four-year-olds. I’m sure I will still feel this rush of emotion, this memory of infertility, four years and eight years and twelve years down the line as each Summer Olympics is televised.

My only hope for those future games is that more Olympians–these pinnacles of health and bodily dominance–come forward like Dara Torres and use their moment in the spotlight to also show the fallibility of the body. And, as a result, ask all of us to tread carefully when huge emotions are at stake.

Updated:

Love is in the air. It’s the lazy days of summer. And the time felt ripe to share with you some of my more memorable dates after my mother brought up the county fair this afternoon (the county fair will feature prominently in one of my stories). I am sure that you have your own memorable date stories too, so cozy up, grab some coffee, and let’s start this first installment of memorable date stories (because, yes, I unfortunately have enough to fill about four or five entries if I load at least three per post).

A few details have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent.

One night, I am talking with a few friends at a bar when the man behind me interrupts.

“You went canoeing today? I love canoeing.”

Melissa turns her entire body around to face him. “We do a circuit of Paw-Paw to Hancock every weekend.”

We talk for a bit and I give him my number because we’ve made plans to meet up for canoeing on a future weekend. The man calls a day later–let’s call him Aaron–and asks me to dinner. I agree and we go to a nearby restaurant.

“I thought we were going to go canoeing,” I say as we sit down.

“Oh no,” the man tells me. “I only said that to get your number. I hate being outdoors. Hate it.”

“But you told me that you were a kayaker…you were going to give me lessons…”

“Nope, no. I’ve never been kayaking. I just lied to get you on this date. Do you want to order appetizers?”

I stare at the menu, trying to recover from not only the blatant lie, but the bold admittance of the shameless lie. Somehow the conversation continues and soon he’s telling me a story about some frat brothers from college. “…and I feel like I’m completely drunk. Not that I’d actually know what drunk feels like.”

“You’ve never been drunk?” I ask, taking a sip of my drink.

“No. Have you?”

“Sure. I mean. Everyone has been drunk a few times. College? Or back in high school?”

“Oh, Aaron,” he says aloud. “It sounds like you’re on a date with an alcoholic. How do you feel about this?”

“What? I’m not an alcoholic. I’ve just been drunk a few times.”

“Denial is one of the warning signs, Aaron. It sounds like you have a real live wire on your hands.”

“Who are you talking to?” I ask.

“Now she sounds belligerent, Aaron. She’s probably drunk right now. She probably had to booze it up just to pull herself together for this date. She’ll probably be dead in a few years. Cirrhosis of the liver. This is not the type of woman you want to get involved with; bring home to the family. It’s actually very sad.”

Aaron looks down at his plate for a moment and looks up brightly. “Let’s not talk about alcohol. Let’s just get through this date, okay? So, Melissa, what do you like to do at night?”

“At night? I don’t drink that much.”

“Oh, Aaron,” the man says aloud to himself again. “She’s still denying it. It’s really pathetic. She’s a graduate student and she can’t even pull herself together to admit that she has a problem. You have to concentrate. You need to get her off this topic. Melissa, I don’t know this area very well. Where do you hang out?”

“I don’t know. I mean, last night, a few of us went down to the National Cathedral and ran through the garden maze.”

“Oh, Aaron,” he sighs to himself. “I knew you shouldn’t have asked this girl out. What a live wire. A true daredevil. Running around at the cathedral. Trespassing. Probably littering. Smoking joints and drinking alcohol. Doing who knows what else. It’s so sad. It’s such a shame. She seems like such a nice, Jewish girl but she’s just like the others. An alcoholic, littering, live wire daredevil throwing her life around like it was garbage.”

“You know,” I finally interject. “I don’t know if we need to get through this whole date. I think that maybe we should just be satisfied that we tried this and get through the rest of dinner and call it a night.”

“Because you need to drink?”

“Because,” I agree, “I definitely need to drink.”