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

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People magazine had an article about an infertility podcast called Infertile AF. It’s in its second season. The podcast’s description: “In this unfiltered podcast about infertility, Brooklyn-based journalist and mom-of-two Ali Prato, who went through IVF herself, talks to women—and some men—about the messy, frustrating, painful, heartbreaking, absurd and sometimes hilarious journey to have a baby. Or in some cases, to not have a baby.”

Or if listening to 42 minutes about infertility after living 42 months of infertility, I’ll direct you to my favourite new escape: Shedunnit. Someone linked to one of her older episodes, and I decided to download the first ones and listen to it in the car. It is FANTASTIC. I mean, especially if you love mysteries. But completely fascinating history stuff, too.

What are you listening to?

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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.

Okay, so I get that marketers don’t do their work with the intention of upsetting people. They’re just trying to get you to notice their product. And 99% of the time, their work ranges from helpful to annoying.

But this.

Abby, a 65-year-old retiree living in Central Texas, was shocked when she received a letter addressed to her daughter Hallie. Inside the pink envelope, Abby found a purple card with an illustration of a halved avocado with a heart hovering inside its pit. “Holy guacamole!” the card said. “You’re going to avo baby!” The inscription was vague. “Congratulations!!!” someone had written in quick Sharpie. “I’m so excited for you! I hope you like these.” Signed, with a heart, Jenny B.

It’s a marketing campaign, flooding the receiver with info, coupons, and gift cards for random baby businesses. Some people they hit actually are pregnant. But other people they hit, such as Abby, have lost their child. Or have miscarried. Or aren’t planning on getting pregnant at all.

So take the sting of getting a coupon from Gerber in the mail and multiply it by 10 because you’re getting this congratulations card in the mail along with a whole slew of baby-related crap.

The idea of it made me want to kick over my mailbox.

I know it’s doctors and not marketers who make the promise to do no harm, but… it just seems like a basic line one shouldn’t cross when they’re representing such a potentially fraught situation.

I haven’t seen any reboot shows yet. I barely like reboot books that try to recapture the original magic. It’s not that it can’t be done–The Testaments was wonderful. But there have been too many times when I’ve had deep regrets catching up with beloved characters (Cursed Child springs to mind) that it has kept me from tuning in to revisit old television characters. Visual mediums have an additional hurdle when the characters no longer look or sound the same. It’s like trying to reconnect in your forties with a favourite chum you haven’t seen since preschool.

But I’m really curious about how Thirtysomething will go, and it may be the show that tips me over into the reboot zone. It’s (1) apparently focused on only four of the original group, aiming for the strongest storylines and (2) it’s about that foursome watching their kids navigate their thirties. So… an interesting take.

Plus I loved the original Thirtysomething.

Would you watch the reboot? And do you watch any reboots?

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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 in order 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. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

You may have seen last week that Amy Schumer was asking people to text her about IVF, and Risa Kerslake did it. But this post is really about the comments Schumer received for putting her situation out there. She writes, “So Amy Schumer might be unrelatable to those of us who aren’t rich and famous, but she is still getting shitty comments like this, and that, my friends, is why infertility needs to be talked about from people of all walks of life.”

An Engineer Becomes a Mom has a post about arrival (getting through something) that ties in with infertility and resolution. How do you know when you’re resolved? When you’ve arrived on the other side of something? She writes, “For me, I’ve concluded that arrival is getting through the major crap-tastic-burn-it-down dark night of the soul so that when the next dark night comes around it’s not so earth-shattering.” I really love the questions and answers in this post.

Lastly, Dreaming in Diapers has the results from her ninth IVF cycle, and it’s upsetting. She explains: “I actually answered the call this time…most of the time I let it go to voicemail..especially if my hubby is not with me…but this time was different…I was expecting great news…and this is what I heard over the phone.” Please circle the wagons of support, but I also love this battle cry: “it’s tough………….but so am I….”

The roundup to the Roundup: Thirtysomething is coming back… maybe? 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 17 and January 24) 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.

I mentioned a week or two ago that I was reading Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind. (Am I working on a mystery? Perhaps…). There is this part on page 82 where Konnikova cautions people to think flexibly like Holmes vs rigidly like Watson. Holmes takes in new information and changes his line of thinking. Watson rejects new information unless it confirms the mental path he’s already on.

She writes:

You can set goals to help you filter the world, but be careful lest you use these goals as blinders. Your goals, your priorities, your answer to the “what I want to accomplish” question must be flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances. If the available information changes, so should you. Don’t be afraid to deviate from a preset plan when it serves the greater objective.

Infertility to the core. Goals as blinders? Changing circumstances? “If the available information changes, so should you. Don’t be afraid to deviate from a preset plan when it serves the greater objective.” Am I right?

Which is scary because goals feel close and greater objectives feel far away. But isn’t our greater objective to be happy? To be satisfied and use our time well on earth? To love and to be loved? Are there multiple ways to reach those greater objectives if we can be flexible like Holmes?

We go into our plans hoping they’ll come to fruition. But if they don’t, what next?

Food for thought.

As you know because I talk about it incessantly, I am a Carolyn Hax superfan. I will skip reading the news when we’re abroad. And I will skip doing my beloved New York Times mini crossword puzzle. But I will never skip reading Hax’s column.

My favourite moments are when she weaves a little of her own story into giving advice. She has mentioned divorce (her ex-husband is the person who draws the comics that accompany the column) and infertility several times throughout the years.

But last week, due to sloppy reading, I thought she gave us a peek into her parenting world. A person asked for advice on getting their child evaluated. She gave her advice (completely sound, as usual), and then she added some reader thoughts. Except, at first, I missed that they were reader thoughts, so I thought she had gotten super personal when I got to the comment about the daughter.

(For people who can’t read the column because it’s behind a paywall: “Do the testing yesterday, even if you have to sell your house. My daughter always had issues, but no one ever recommended we test her. We just essentially withdrew her from college yesterday, and life is hell right now.”)

So not her comment, but I thought it was her comment, and it made me realize how much I appreciate candidness from a professional. I know therapists and teachers are taught to put up strong boundaries, and there is a point to those boundaries.

But as a teacher, some of my most meaningful moments came when I let those walls down and admitted to the kids times I had struggled in school or things I was afraid of or mistakes I had made in life.

I’m grateful for the times when she does that, even if this was not one of those times.