This list will always be open and updated daily so please check it from time to time to see if someone left a message for you. Feel free to link to this post from your blog in order to have a centralized place for people to leave googleable messages.

Directions: when leaving a message, make it as googleable as possible. Use the full name of the blog or if the blogger had a unique sign-in name (for instance, I also use The Town Criers which is more unusual–and therefore, more googleable–than Mel) use that too. I may have a blogger’s contact information on hand, so if you want me to pass along your email address or information (I do not give out email addresses, sorry), let me know that too. I will only pass along an email address if someone has given me concrete permission. Your message will go up on the list faster if you leave it in the comments section, but you can also email me your message (especially if you’re giving personal information like an email address and want me to hold onto it and have someone contact me instead of posting your email address) directly at thetowncriers@gmail.com. You can put up as many messages as you wish, but make each blog its own entry (for instance, search for blog X in one message and search for blog Y in a second message). I may edit messages for clarity or brevity. Once messages become extremely old, I will move them to a second archive post which will also be accessible through this post and can still be found via google and other search engines.

LOST

• I have missed getupgrrl from Chez Miscarriage for the last couple of years. I would love to know how she is and there is one particular post that I wish I could access. If anyone has information about how to ask her for access (and find out how her little boy is!) I would be so grateful.
• (1) Naked Ovary, naked ovary, naked ovary, naked ovary. Naked ovary. Come out, come out, wherever you are. (2) I desperately miss Karen at Naked Ovary.
• I would love to know what is happening with Kay/Hanazono who wrote Hanazono. Is she still adopting? Is she already a mother? Kay – write and let us know.
• How about Sube at Waiting for a Crumbcake?? I always wondered about her.
• Could someone help me out please? I would love to continue to read Baby Blues at I Will Be Mom, but it looks like it has been changed to invited readers. If anyone could contact her to let her know that I would love to stay as a reader I would very much appreciate it (FOUND! See below).
• (1) I drop out of the loop for a few weeks (OK, over a month) & everyone goes PWP 🙁
  First I find out about Baby Blues & now Vanilla too. I think I better get off my butt & back into blogging. (2) I would love to be able to read again Vanilla at Vanilla Dreams. If you are reading, e-mail me at wotpl@shaw.ca, or if anyone knows how to contact them, let me know! (FOUND! See below).
• I would love to be able to read A Few Good Eggs still. It has gone password protected. If you are reading, e-mail me at wotpl@shaw.ca, or if anyone knows how to contact them, let me know!
• (1) I’ve been wondering for years, literally, how Danae from Hardscrabble is doing. (2) I second the question about Danae–she is one of my favorite bloggers, ever, and sorely missed.
• I’d also love to know how the amazing Dead Bug is doing. Has her new baby arrived yet? (FOUND! See below).
• Another blogger I have wondered about for years is Sarah from Badlands. How are you Sarah?
• I would also love to hear from Beth (Prop Your Hips Up) about life after HG and now with Leah Catherine…
• How about Patiently Waiting, she turned her blog to invite-only, but I would like to know if the birth mom had her baby yet.

FOUND

• Gravida Zero adopted a baby boy who is completely delicious and wonderful.
• Baby Blues is alive and well. And still writing her blog even though it has gone invite-only. She writes: Please post my email for anyone I missed to invite. It’s babybluebabbles@yahoo.com.
• The Artist Formerly known as The Sunnie Side Up…has started a new blog! In case you missed her first blog, she is an African American Adoptee who started TTC in 2001, was diagnosed with PCOS in 2005, started blogging and ART, m/c twins in 2006, and adopted StillaBaby in Feb 2007 (she is now 6 months old). She says, “Yes, I want to be found, but just want a bit more privacy. They can email me at
  emailstillamomma@gmail.com.” You can also go to her blog: StillaMomma and follow the instructions on the page to get the password.
• From Dead Bug: Lovely ladies, thank you for checking on me. I am still around and dropping in occasionally to the IF blogosphere. This unearned pregnancy is now at 34 weeks, and I can still hardly credit it. Feel like I’ve made it up. If all goes well, I will post once he has arrived.
• Vanilla is alive and well. She can be contacted about the password at fluttershy@gmail.com.

CONNECTIONS

• I am looking for those who have immune issues and have used alternative therpies to correct them or IVIg (submitted by Grad3 from Motherhood). If you can help Grad3, please contact her via her blog.
• I would like to put a call out to anyone with recurrent miscarriage, either those who are still going through it or those who are pregnant/have given birth after recurrent miscarriage (submitted by Kristen at Sticky Bean). If you can help Kristen, please contact her via her blog.
• I am in an odd spot in life: a non-ttc infertile in a fertile world. Is there anyone else out there who is in this spot? I’d love to read other blogs from people who are dealing with this same thing (submitted by Tigger at Tigger’s Infertility Madness). If you can help Tigger, please contact her via her blog.

Lost and Found becomes my 500th post. Three things came together today to create Lost and Found. (1) The google discussion and google stories. (2) Meghan losing her blog and finding it ungoogleable. (3) Gravida Zero emailing me about her son.

When a writer stops updating his or her blog, there is still a space where you can leave messages in the comments section of the final post or maybe even an email address. But when a writer deletes their blog–either accidentally or on-purpose, there is no way to contact them or hear the continuation of their story. There are no resources to let people know why you’ve closed your blog or why you’ve gone password-protected. Or how to get that password if you want to read along. If you change your blog url, you essentially start over with only the handful of readers that you can email and give the new address. You leave behind all of your loyal lurking readers who didn’t comment even though they were reading along every day. There just isn’t a good system in place that is googleable. Why googleable, you ask?

Because the problem with all those classified-ad-like bulletin board systems is that it is difficult for the person you want to find your message to find those words unless they are reading in the same space. On the other hand, most blogs show up in google searches. Put in a title or a name in a blog post and a person who is googling themselves (or googling you if you are the one who has information to pass along) can find requests for someone trying to get in touch with them. For instance, to test this hypothesis, I googled “gravida zero” a half hour after I posted the roundup and the post with her blog came up on the first page.

Because my blog comes up high on searches, I’ve decided to start this post (or what may turn into a series of archive posts too) called Lost and Found. You can submit messages for this post either through the comments section (I will move them into the body of the message so they can be found by google) or by emailing me directly at thetowncriers@gmail.com. If you email me and want your email passed along (I do not give out email addresses for other people without their permission) in case I do have contact information, let me know too. This list will always be open so please check it from time to time to see if someone left a message for you. Feel free to link to this post from your blog in order to have a centralized place for people to leave googleable messages.

Here is a non-comprehensive list of possible things that could fall under each category:

Lost

• A blogger you read has suddenly gone password-protected and you want the password so you can read along.
• A blogger has closed their blog (either recently or a while ago) and you want to be in touch with them to ask a question or find out how they’re doing.

Found

• A person who has since closed their blog can pass on news to the community (think of this as something akin to an alumni update).
• A person who has accidentally deleted their blog or closed one/started a new one can give the new url to the community.
• A person who has gone password-protected can explain why/say goodbye.
• A person who has gone password-protected can tell people how they can request the password/invitation.

Lastly, there is a category called Connections. This is the space to post about a specific situation and ask for a call for blogs. In other words, if you are searching for blogs that mention PCOS because you want to connect to other bloggers with PCOS, you would put out a call for PCOS blogs and leave your email address. Bloggers who fit that profile can email you their url so you can begin reading their blog.

Directions: when leaving a message, make it as googleable as possible. Use the full name of the blog or if the blogger had a unique sign-in name (for instance, I also use The Town Criers which is more unusual–and therefore, more googleable–than Mel) use that too. I may have a blogger’s contact information on hand, so if you want me to pass along your email address or information (I do not give out email addresses, sorry), let me know that too. I will only pass along an email address if someone has given me concrete permission. Your message will go up on the list faster if you leave it in the comments section, but you can also email me your message (especially if you’re giving personal information like an email address and want me to hold onto it and have someone contact me instead of posting your email address) directly at thetowncriers@gmail.com. You can put up as many messages as you wish, but make each blog its own entry (for instance, search for blog X in one message and search for blog Y in a second message). Once messages become extremely old, I will move them to a second archive post which will also be accessible through this post and can still be found via google and other search engines.

Aaah, surely you have heard the news by now. Michelle Duggar has had her 17th child, a little girl named Jennifer (just like her 16 “J” named siblings). Which brings me to the pressing question I know we’re all wondering…

Does she prop up her hips after sex?

We were debating this last night–probably about the time Michelle Duggar was squeezing out young Jennifer VBAC-style. It’s an old habit that is hard to break. It doesn’t even matter if we’re doing treatments–if it’s pre-ovulation, it holds the possibility for conception. So…

But it seems like a big waste that only serves to give me a headache. It’s sort of like temping during IVF–what’s the point and yet you can’t stop. I am just trying to picture Nicole Richie’s skinny tush accidentally propped up on a mountain of pillows. How else would she get pregnant? Unless it was just one of those times that she was having sex in gravity boots.

Or is it all just bunk that we buy into because we don’t want to overlook any possibility–even the smallest one? We are attempting to take back the supine. But before we do, I wanted to conduct an informal poll–does anyone prop up their hips with pre-o sex? Do you only prop if you’re not doing treatments or do you prop regardless?

Of course, once I have this piece of information, I will be as fertile as the Duggars. Aunt Janes have asked me loads of times if I know if I’m doing it right. Because…you know…it’s a complicated process and I’m fairly certain that once I learn the inside secrets, I too will be spending 10.5 years of my life pregnant.

And now the bloggaful blogs…

Meghan at Perpetually Waiting is having the crappy sort of week that includes the accidental deletion of her entire blog. She is still working to get it back (and if people have ideas on getting it back, please email me or her and let her know. Also, if you can find her blog via google or yahoo please let me know the search words so I can find it too), but in the meantime, she has created a new blog, also called Perpetually Waiting. Even if you’re not a regular Perpetually Waiting reader, please head over there and give her some love. This just really really sucks.

Other news is that in case you were missing Gravida Zero who closed her blog last year, she has adopted a son! I’ve seen pictures and he is absolutely delicious. Congratulations!

Caro at Third Time Lucky and Heather at Big P and Me both asked great blogging questions this week. And I’m a sucker for great blogging debates:

• In this post at Third Time Lucky, Caro questions about what happens between partners/spouses when a person is blogging about infertility. Does it relieve tension and solve the need for incessant discussion? Does your partner/spouse read your blog? It’s a cool discussion–go jump into the comments section and read along.
• In this post at Big P and Me, Heather muses on the two sides of infertility: “It just seems like there is no middle ground. Either it is amazingly great news or completely devastating news. The only thing we can probably even call middle ground is the waiting and worry period before you know either. And that isn’t fun. Maybe the middle ground is the ground where people are when they are on a break…when they can actually enjoy life.” I was so interested in this thought and would love others to weigh in with a comment over there: do you think the waiting is the middle ground? How do you consider the two extremes of IF?

Grad3 at Motherhood has a wonderful post this week called “Houston, We Have Found Another Problem” where she learns that she also has immunity issues that may have caused her 5 losses. First of all, even amidst all of this shit, Grad3 still has her sense of humour: “So we may have found our ‘why can’t I keep a pregnancy?’ answer… or maybe just another answer to the ones I already have because 3 aren’t enough [insert bitter tone and fake smile]“–which is important. I think these posts, these pieces to the puzzle, are both a huge sigh of relief to have an answer in hand and tear-inducing because it is so frustrating to find these problems after the fact. After she already had to go through five losses. I hope this is it, Grad3, the piece to the puzzle you needed to find and treat in order to move ahead.

Samantha at Southern Infertility also had a really frustrating week where they lost her biopsy sample. How does a lab lose a biopsy sample? Where does it go? Do they find it weeks later in the technician’s lounge between two sofa cushions and shake their heads slowly while a laugh track plays in the background? I know the labs are juggling hundreds of thousands of samples each day, but aren’t they all kept in sound conditions so that even if one does get misplaced inside the lab, it is easily found again? I assume that samples are refrigerated until use, wouldn’t its location be somewhere inside the refrigerator? How did I never lose a student’s paper in all of my years of teaching (paper! Which could blend in easily with lesson plans or get lost at the bottom of a backpack or accidentally tossed in the recycling bin?) but I’ve had blood lost three times by the lab? I’m sorry, I forgot one. Four times. Four times I have had to have blood redrawn after waiting several weeks for results because they’ve lost my blood. Go over to Samantha and give her a virtual hug.

Schatzi at From the Peanut Gallery (which is another changed blog and you can probably guess Schatzi’s origins if you read the sidebar…) has a post that is a rallying cry of sisterhood and brotherhood (hint: there is a lot of sarcasm before you get to the heart of the message that comes in the final paragraph). It’s a nice, gooey note to end on this week: “Infertility heartaches cannot be quantified. They cannot be wrapped up into tidy little packages to be placed on a shelf and measured against surrounding ones. They cannot be placed into bar graphs to neatly be compared with the heartaches of others. However tempting that may be. They are, instead, woven into the fabric of our individual lives—framed by past experiences, beliefs, hopes and dreams.”

Check back a little later today or this weekend for the next bloggy idea that I thought up this morning…

And please leave your proppage situation in the comments below. Feel free to go anonymous if you don’t want everyone to know your post-coital position.

Many months ago, my cousin and I were talking about an old college friend and we googled her that night to try to find her. A quote in a newspaper article led us to her current hometown. A search with her name and her current hometown yielded her place of work. And her place of work yielded her email address. My cousin was back in touch with her.

The side note to this story is this strange idea of googling. Of finding snippets from another person’s life and piecing together a puzzle to find them. Or even not contacting them but building this mental story of their life since you last saw them. You know what they were like when you knew them, but somehow we disregard the idea that people change and we continue their story with the small facts that we find. So it feels like we still know them, even when we’re 10 years out from the last time we touched base. I love google stories. Gretch (oh…more on Gretchen in a moment) told the greatest google story of all time last night at dinner about her google twin–a woman who shares the same name (and therefore the same search results) but is her polar opposite. I am collecting googling stories at the moment. Leave yours in the comments section below or email me at thetowncriers@gmail.com. I love hearing how people either got back in touch or share their name with another person. Or people that you’re still trying to find. I love not only the reconnections with people we know but the new connections that form between unrelated people due to these searches.

Oh…but back to this friend. My cousin got in touch with her and then called me yesterday morning–could she come over that afternoon and could she bring Jess, the old friend? I went to graduate school in the same five-college consortium as my cousin while she was in college. We are two years apart and I think of her more as a sister than a cousin. While I certainly knew how much she and her friends meant to me at the time, seeing them step out of the car yesterday was like sailing back into a human harbour.

Graduate school was a really shitty time for me. I came into it from a bad place and I left it in a bad place. And in between, I was often sad and frustrated. I’m still glad that I went; if not for the degree and the opportunities that degree has opened for me then for the lessons I learned about myself and about others. It’s all going back to that damn silver lining (that I’m still updating–sorry if your comments haven’t been moved up to the list yet). I can’t imagine not having that grad school experience–it changed me so profoundly. It’s a little like infertility in that way. It sucked all around, but since it happened and I can’t do anything to change that, I have to marvel at the ways it has changed my outlook on life. Infertility has certainly made me a different parent. And my grad school experience certainly made me a different woman. If you think I reach out to people and place inclusiveness as one of my highest goals, it is due to those graduate school years.

When you’re in a shitty experience, you create human harbours–those friends or people who bring you comfort simply by seeing them or being with them. I’m sure you’ve picked up many of them during infertility. You may not even be completely conscious of their designation as a human harbour, but maybe this post is making you stop and think about how you return to the same people after a negative or when you’re in a terrible space emotionally. I say people because they weren’t always friends that I knew intimately. But if this were the movie version of Melissa in Wonderland, at the end of the film, all the people who would step out to wave me back to the real world while I bid them a teary goodbye and told them how much they helped me along the way, those would be my human harbours. Clerks in stores I frequently visited, a secretary in an office, and then my cousin’s circle of friends.

My cousin and her friend, Jess, ran a place on campus called the Kosher Kitchen (otherwise known as the K if you went to Smith). Every Friday, they spent most of the day cooking. At night, people would come for dinner. Then they would spend a few more hours cleaning up. Around ten or eleven, we’d either still be hanging out in the empty kitchen or going dancing at a nearby club (the Grotto for the two or three Northamptonites who read this). And it sounds so silly to write this, but my cousin and Jess and her girlfriend, Gretchen, and Nina and Marite and all the other women who had my back even when it was an unconscious unknown decision that they had my back–they were my human harbours.

I would sit in the K while they cooked and grade papers and feel like I could stay through graduate school. Being with them made things feel manageable. When we were dancing to Tina Turner while we cleaned, I felt empowered. I really meant it when I screamed those words with Tina: “you better be good to me!”–even if I forgot that confidence by the next morning. I love my cousin and by extension, I love her friends. I could not have made it through those years without them. Especially because my best friend, my lady-when-waiting, didn’t join me in Massachusetts until after my cousin graduated college and moved away.

Seeing Jess get out of the car yesterday was like Harry Potter walking downstairs to his kitchen in Book Five before he is brought to the Order of the Phoenix. That moment where he is back with the wizarding world and seeing Lupin who he didn’t even realize he missed. That’s how it felt seeing Jess come out of the car or later meeting up her girlfriend, Gretchen, at the restaurant. It was like returning to the Smithing world that I didn’t even realize how much I missed.

These people, these human harbours, I can never thank them enough. And yet they never really have a clue how much they meant to you in the moment. There’s no way to really express how tumultuous everything felt during that time period and how their presence alone was this space of calm. Thank you Lisa. Thank you Jess. Thank you Gretchen. Thank you to all of the lovely ladies of Wilder and the K. The ones who imagined into existence Brian-the-reunion-date and taught me how to make soup for 50 and who didn’t make me drive home that night when I just couldn’t be alone driving through the cornfields. I love you.

I’m still serving up drinks at the bar (as if the bar ever really closes), but I’m pausing from celebrating to muse on the string of pregnancy announcements that have come in the past week or so. You know how women who live together are supposed to get their periods around the same time because their cycles fall into sync (though I have vague, queasy memories that the study involved rubbing armpit sweat on the upper lips of the other women)? How do we explain the strange phenomenon that seems to strike the blogosphere cyclically? Pregnancy announcements and periods of loss seem to crop up not in series of threes, but in series of tens or twenties. I know others have noticed and commented on it too in the past. Sometimes it feels like the blogosphere is the saddest place on earth with failed cycles coming close on the heels of miscarriages. Weeks later, the winds shift and the blogosphere is suddenly like a giant cocktail party where we’re toasting half the guests. It can’t actually be in the water since we’re not drinking from the same tap. But how do we explain this phenomenon, especially right now when we’re firmly entrenched in the land of plenty?

Are these times harder? Happier? Do they give you more hope or make you feel more alone? Does knowing that it’s a fellow stirrup queen or sperm palace jester make the announcement easier or harder? What is the best way to announce good news or bad news on a blog?

Even more curious, if you receive good news during an announcement jag, how does that influence your feelings? If you receive bad news during a period of loss, how does the timing influence your feelings? And vice versa–when the bad news comes in the midst of plenty or you need to make a pregnancy announcement when we’re mourning many losses at once. When posting emotional information such as a pregnancy or a loss, what do you think about before you hit that publish key?

Feel free to go anonymous in the comments section as you weigh in (though anonymous still means kind). I’m going to state my opinion too (though you probably already can figure out my answer) but didn’t want to influence the discussion by placing it here in the post. I’ll weigh in below in the comments section. Perhaps even anonymously just to be mysterious…