The New York Times had a piece last week on the formation of accidental ritual in the form of YouTube videos after a stillbirth. It’s a form of connection and mourning that didn’t exist even ten years ago and is now an outlet for parents processing grief.

Findings from research into these videos after a stillbirth found:

[They] average about 5.5 minutes. And they tend to follow a familiar script. The first section shows happy scenes and color images of the pregnant mother, everybody smiling. Midway through, tragic news comes as a shock, symbolized with an abrupt change to black and white. This second section tends to include religious imagery, photos of the stillborn baby, and a mournful song, often one with lyrics about child loss.

And by following that loose script, the video becomes a crucial (and depending on your culture, missing) ritual: “The repetitive nature of a ritual imbues it with social meaning, which is larger than an individual.” It’s cathartic for the creator, and it’s cathartic for the viewer as a place to set their own grief, either due to their own stillbirth or because they have a connection to the video creator. “YouTube has become a kind of virtual cemetery for parents experiencing stillbirth.”

I love that the article also points out that the video becomes a way to mark a life, not just a death. “This also helped the Fishers to convey their loss to loved ones. ‘I think without the video it may have been more difficult for people to comprehend that she was here,’ said Ms. Fisher.”

I just did my first escape room. It was for the Wolvog’s special day. We got pizza and played pinball beforehand, and then went downtown to a VR escape room. It’s in this wonderfully creepy building; empty and tucked back from the street. The room they put you in is almost completely empty except for a few things on the walls and locked boxes. And then you alternate between exploring the room, trying to solve puzzles, and watching tiny video snippets that provide clues as it reveals the story.

It was so cool to run around the room and try to figure out the clues. I’ll admit that if I had been alone in the room, I would not have escaped because I would have sat down and waited out the hour after hitting the first wall. So it was good to be in the room with my children, husband, and father who DID solve the puzzles and allow me to jump up and down clapping as my contribution. We got out with three minutes to spare.

Oh! And the VR part was the final part. The Wolvog had to put on a VR mask and line up the controller while everyone else pressed these buttons on the wall. It was awesome.

Have you ever done an escape room? We want to go again.

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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:

• “How Infertility Affects Our World Views” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “Thoughts on 18” (Lavender Luz)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about connections between unconnected experiences. She dissects a person’s post about divorce, pointing out the similarities with the infertility experience: “In particular, she talked about people asking her if she had considered marriage counseling. Replace ‘marriage counseling’ with ‘adoption’ and I could have written the entire paragraph.” It is eye-opening to find other life experiences that echo the same patterns.

Family Building with a Twist has a post about how the feelings of infertility never fully go away, and she links to a piece she read recently on infertility and loneliness.  She explains: “It’s a sisterhood, a club, without formal admission requirements or meetings (or even desire to join). Just pain. It isn’t omnipresent like is was before D was born but it is still there, lingering.” So true.

Bereaved and Blessed marks the eleventh anniversary of Molly’s birth and death. I love hearing how the family remembers her, and also this nugget of wisdom: “As your sibling’s pediatrician told me, not long after you died, we’ll have to continue to explain what happened to Sean, as well as Abby (after she was born/joined our family), because the older they get their comprehension and perspective will grow and change.” And yes, I did get choked up when I read the parts about Harry Potter and the connection with eleven.

Finally, Baby Ridley Bump has a post about letting go of plans to make the best choice right now. She has decided to postpone her transfer in order to give attention to her daughter. She writes: “It’s hard because I wanted our kids to be close in age, but I’ve again learned the lesson about relinquishing control of things that I really have no control over.” It’s a wonderful post about the decisions we make.

The roundup to the Roundup: We escaped the escape room.  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 April 12th and 19th) 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.

A few days ago, Carolyn Hax had a great point about painting grief and disappointment with the same brush; treating both as something to get over or put in perspective.

A person wrote her because they were having trouble getting through a series of deaths, all in a row. Hax answered:

“I know there is so much worse stuff going on in the world right now.” This can be a useful thought exercise for dealing with disappointment, say, but for grief, especially on so many fronts? There’s no “first-world loss,” there’s just loss — unless your Mercedes-Benz has died.

I hate the usage of “first-world” as a slang term — it’s a demeaning term — but I love how she shuts down the Pain Olympics thoughts. Or really, the opposite of the Pain Olympics thoughts, since this is the person minimizing their loss and self-judging their ability to deal with it. Loss is loss. Marking your own as “better” or “worse” doesn’t change the circumstances or the feelings of grief.

I was thinking about it the next day as I watched the news about Notre Dame. Hax’s words came back to me: “there’s just loss.” This is a loss, and while it is good that so much was saved, it doesn’t minimize the deep grief at watching history go up in flames.

We shouldn’t need permission to mourn, but it’s always good to have the reminder.

My Mac laptop has started to insert an extra space in random spots. So nine out of ten times when I use the spacebar, it puts one space. But one out of ten times, it puts two spaces. It is really frustrating. And it means I need to constantly scan everything I write for weird spacing.

Has anyone else out there had (and solved) this problem?

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Yesterday, I drove to four stores to find a tube of my cinnamon-flavoured toothpaste. Once upon a time, this toothpaste was everywhere. Now it is pretty much nowhere. I’ve thought about switching to mint, but life is too short to give up a toothpaste that makes me happy.

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The twins just wrapped up their final middle school book battle. Their school has a book battle team, and they compete against other schools in the county in a giant book trivia fest each spring. So they have a year to read dozens of books as a team, and then they go and compete against other schools who have read the same books.

They’re thinking of expanding it to high school, but if they don’t, their book battle career is over.

I kinda sorta wish I was on a book battle team and that we went to book competitions. Does this exist? Like everyone gets the same list of books to read, and you have several months to prepare and drill each other on facts. And then you get together for a trivia competition that pulls the questions from those books.

If it doesn’t exist, would you join if I started this and the battle was online?

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

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If you asked me three years ago if I liked mystery books, I would have told you no. It was a genre I avoided. Loved fantasy, loved science fiction, loved non-genre fiction. Didn’t love mysteries.

But I went from not liking mysteries at all to pretty much only reading mysteries. I’m currently making my way through Brittany Cavallaro’s Charlotte Holmes books. (They are so much fun.) And Agatha Christie. And I just finished the 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. (Fantastic except for one tiny thing in the ending.) And Maureen Johnson’s Truly Devious books. (Loved them.)

I don’t know what changed, but I stopped avoiding mysteries and finally embraced them.

Are there any genres you once avoided and now love? Or vice versa?

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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.