The ChickieNob was going to the Barbie movie with a friend, and I was going to dinner with a friend a block away, so they caught a ride with me. It was nice to drive with kids in the car again.

After the movie, I asked them about that line that keeps getting repeated on social media: “We mothers stand still, so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.” It’s obviously about the individual journey: letting go of your parents’ hands and walking forward on your own path. It hits close to home right now. But it led to a conversation about how each generation becomes defined and the next one moves forward, defining itself.

And I pointed out that they are the first generation I can think of that have it worse than their mothers.

It was easier for my generation than my mother’s generation. We could get a credit card in our name and have legal, safe abortion. Just to name two things. They nodded, and her friend said, “Well, yeah. That.” But the more significant thing was that we had true freedom in that I could go where I wanted to go and do what I wanted to do. If those moments were documented at all, they were solely for the pleasure of the people in the group and lived on in paper photos or scraps of paper.

I’m not saying that people never endured their worst moments living on forever, but the scope of the damage was fairly small. A circle of friends. A town. I was free to make decisions and not think about how they may be interpreted a year, five years, or ten years down the road. No one knew what I looked like unless they met me or a mutual friend showed them a picture. I knew — pretty much — who knew me. Or knew of me.

That’s the thing about letting go of someone’s hand and moving forward. Are you free to become yourself — to find yourself with mistakes and all — if you trade your parents’ watchful eyes for the watchful eyes of smartphones and CCTV?

It was food for thought.

I knew what the letter would be even before I opened the envelope when I saw the return address: the NICU reunion.

Our hospital hosts a NICU reunion in the late summer/early fall. It’s a chance to visit and thank doctors and nurses, show off how kids have grown, and feel ill after jumping up and down in a bouncy castle after eating cotton candy. When the twins were little, it was a must-go event. We loved seeing their old neonatologist and favourite nurses, and I would swing by the NICU itself and talk to parents in the waiting room who had kids inside. That meant so much to me when my kids were in the hospital.

Mostly, it was lovely being part of this strange community of people who were all connected because our kids had to live in the hospital for a while.

Sometime during late elementary school, we stopped going. It’s geared towards younger kids, and the twins had moved out of the bouncy castle stage of life. It was bittersweet to skip the first year, but I barely thought about it in subsequent years until I opened this year’s letter.

It’s back in person for the first time in three years, but the date is after the twins leave for college. I will be home, but they will not be.

Part of me wants to swing by, but I’m not really a part of it now. Maybe it’s best to send a photo from graduation and a donation.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I found a tool that looked super promising. You plug in what you’re looking for in a trip, and it spits back out an itinerary. How brilliant is that?

But I didn’t know if it would plan a good trip, so I decided to begin with a place I knew very well. It sent me first to a restaurant that closed at least one year ago. Not a great start. But it redeemed itself with a fun free morning activity. Then it sent me on an expensive activity that was a repeat of the free activity, but it broke it up by sending me to cooking school in the UK for lunch, giving me a half-hour window to get from Virginia to the UK and back. The next day, they finished the itinerary with another closed restaurant. In the meantime, it missed the island’s two vegetarian options.

Maybe not.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

It’s hard to perfectly time life. In an ideal world, the final pages of the audiobook would be spoken the day before ChickieNob left for college, closing a (hopefully temporary) chapter of our walking club. But that’s not the way things went. The audiobook ended with weeks until school. The next book in the series would be about halfway finished when it was time to go.

Do we start it?

Do we wait?

It made things feel a lot more concrete to think about it in terms of unfinished stories, realizing just how soon she would leave. We decided to start the next book, and we would finish it separately. Or not at all. It’s a favourite series that we listen to a lot. No one would be left hanging if they decided it was too hard to keep listening to a story we were listening to together.

But it’s always on my mind now while we walk.

We went to the National Aquarium for the first time in many years. We were members when the kids were little, so we often went there. But over time, they switched their membership to an imaginative play place and then a science museum. We always got the membership that allowed us to take friends with us, so we spent most days off of school or random summer days looking at fish, learning about the pyramids, or conducting experiments. It was a good childhood.

The Wolvog asked that we go back to the aquarium for Wolvog Day, his yearly floating surprise birthday.

Our favourite turtle, Calypso, died early in the pandemic, but everything else was as we left it at least ten years earlier. Walking through it again was strange and emotional, especially to see the bubble water sculptures that the twins loved to stand behind.

I guess it’s time for new memories.

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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 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. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Weddings and Hope” (Finding a Different Path)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Dubliner in Deutschland captured a lunch date in a few words and pictures. I’m not sure why I loved this so much, but I did. Maybe because it captures a moment where she slowed down and realized that life is amazing because it is filled with expectedly delightful meals.

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix talks about the exhaustion that accompanies grief. She writes, “I will never forget that massively heavy feeling. I will never miss feeling so adrift and pointless. I will never take energy or inspiration for granted.” It’s an interesting study in noticing the difference between daily tiredness and grief tiredness.

The roundup to the Roundup: Back to the aquarium. 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 14 – July 28) 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.