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.

About five years ago, we went to Montreal during a cold snap. It was painful to walk outside, so we had to use the underground city to get anywhere, and we vowed we would go back in warmer temperatures to walk around above ground.

We traded super cold temperatures for super hot temperatures.

I’ve driven over the border crossing several times, and it’s usually a large operation — almost like a line of tollbooths on a highway. But when we drove up, we went through a tiny town with winding streets and finally pulled up to a single booth in a rural neighbourhood. The kind agent asked question after question about our trip, what we do in the US, and finally, why we were passing over the border in this random town that wasn’t a direct route to Montreal.

“Oh!” I said brightly. “Have you ever heard of the Three Pines books?”

With that, he rolled his eyes and waved us through. He did not want to hear about our Three Pines trip to see Gabri’s B&B and Myrna’s bookstore. Or that the town that inspired the books — Knowlton — has planted three pines on the village green where the Three Pines kids search for Easter eggs beside the pond.

I may have blurred fact and fiction.

We then spent a week in Montreal and Quebec City (the twins planned that part of the trip for us!), climbing to the top of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours chapel, learning everything we could about hockey, and eating St. Viateur bagels.

Did you see my squirrel friend in the picture above?

A final trip before they leave for college.