After Sandy Hook, my friends put me down as their emergency contact. We figured that I lived closest to the school and worked from home. In the event of a true emergency, everyone was okay with me packing the car full of kids and getting them out of there. We talked out possible situations. We even had a rendezvous point set in Western Maryland in the event of a nuclear situation. We were prepared.

There was a shooting at the twins’ school this week. We got an email from the principal that there was a “medical emergency” that they were dealing with and the school was in lockdown. We texted the kids to find out more, and they let us know that the medical emergency was that a child was shot.

I got in the car and drove to the school. By the time we knew about the shooting, it had been a half hour since the child was found, and every road around the school was lined with police vehicles and helicopters were hovering overhead. I parked so I could see the front doors and waited for news. SWAT teams entered the building. Police officers closed off access to through traffic on the main road. The twins texted that they were sitting on the floor in the dark. It took about two hours from when lockdown began until the suspect was found. We found out later that the SWAT team entered a classroom and arrested the shooter in front of his stunned classmates.

And then it took several more hours before the kids were released. I sat in my car, turning the engine on and off to stay warm. A kind neighbor walked car to car with his elementary school-aged child, passing out bottles of water and granola bars to the waiting parents. I started sobbing because it was this enormous moment of kindness on such a scary day.

In the evening darkness, five hours after the lockdown began, four and a half hours after I parked in view of the school, the twins and a few of their friends made their way very slowly to my car. I had been in close contact with their parents — I was the emergency contact we designated all of those years ago, certain it would never happen to us. Never happen to our kids. But what if, right? What if it did? We should have a plan.

This week, we had to use the plan. I never really thought we’d have to use the plan, but like so many parents in America, we had to use the plan.

I want every gun manufacturer to have to sit in a cold car, shaking for four and a half hours. I want every person who puts up the plans for ghost guns on the internet to watch flashing police lights for four and half hours, unable to get to their loved ones. I want them to have to drive home four stunned teenagers. I want them to feel what I felt.

I want them to feel that fear and uncertainty. And sit with it. And own their part in the gun-violence-in-schools story.

Even though I skipped purchasing at-home tests multiple times, I knew I would have regrets if we didn’t fill out the government site and claim the four tests they’re sending out next month. We still won’t change our behaviour — we wouldn’t trust a negative test and remove our masks indoors. But if anyone starts to feel ill, it’s worth having confirmation without needing to leave the house.

This is not a topic I thought I would still be writing about two years later back in January 2020.

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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:

• “Choosing My Thoughts” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

PocoBrat sent me down a Googling rabbit hole with her post on Pongal. I didn’t know about this festival until this week. I loved learning something new. The fact that she references Klara and the Sun is a bonus.

From the sun to the moon…

Family Building with a Twist has a post about wolf moon, which is the first full moon of the year, but it’s really about the illuminating realizations about your life. She writes, “I feel like some parts of me have been frozen and frozen for a very long time. But they are thawing. And that’s horribly messy and confusing for someone like me who does prefer to feel in control and felt like she had a good understanding of herself.” Such a gorgeous way of describing it. And this: “what are warm tears but melted ice?”

Lastly, JewishIVF writes about that moment of shifting from needing support to giving support. She is answering questions for people looking to use her clinic. She explains: “At this point in my journey, where my role has shifted and life looks very different, I still feel connected to people who are struggling and want to offer any help I can.” She talks about how she walks that fine line, knowing how it feels to be asking the questions.

The roundup to the Roundup: Did you order your at-home test? 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 January 14 – 21) 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.

The Atlantic had an article that was passed around the Internet a few weeks ago about how it’s okay if you never get “baby fever.” The sub-headline: “A deep, sudden longing for babies is certainly real, but it’s not a prerequisite for having kids.”

And just in case you were wondering, infertility was mentioned as a possible cause of this feeling:

In fact, some researchers think baby fever is a reaction to infertility struggles, not a ubiquitous maternal urge … It’s a consequence of you wanting to have children and not being able to have them.

Okay.

But what wasn’t really discussed was the flip side: Your baby fever never breaks. You go through life with a scorching case of baby fever that burns long after the point that family building is on the table. I know I’m not the only person who feels this way — many others of you have written about it, too. If infertility was the cause, then family building should have been the cure. But… it wasn’t. I still have baby fever; I’ve just learned to live with it.

At the risk of sounding bananapants, I keep a record of every e-book I buy. The reason is that you don’t actually own your e-books in the same way that you own your paper books. You license them. Which means that a book that you “buy” with real money can be removed from your account without the money being returned. So I keep a record of the title and date of purchase.

On a colour-coded multi-tab spreadsheet. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that while I’m not subscription averse in the sense that I have a Washington Post subscription, this article about our rental future filled me with dread. I like things being simple. Without a lot of bells and whistles. To me, something easy is not connected to the internet or automated. I like holding onto things for a long time. This article made me very very tired.

Though, of course, the thing with predictions is they are just that: musings about a possible future. I’m sure my grandparents — who rented their telephone — couldn’t imagine this strange world where people not only owned their telephone but sometimes didn’t even have a landline because they only used their mobile device.

Going back to updating my book spreadsheet.

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

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Prior to the pandemic, Stanley Tucci flew under my radar. I knew who he was — as in, if someone said his name, I could conjure up a mental image of his face — but I couldn’t name most of his films. But early in the pandemic, I read a great essay where he recounted a day in his life during lockdown. It was such a great moment of art making me feel less alone.

Later in the pandemic, we watched Searching for Italy and enjoyed dreaming about a time when we’d be able to travel again. And now, finally, the ChickieNob and I are listening to his new book, Taste, as we walk. His stories make us lose track of how long we’ve been exercising. He has been such a bright spot every time he loops back in front of us during the pandemic.

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.