Right before the new year, Atlas Obscura had a post about the luckiest people of 2017.  It’s sort of a strange idea.  I mean, yes, I knew that the list would include people who had things work out for them in some amazing way, but it’s the idea of describing a person based on a moment in time.

We describe people as smart, which means that we think they are always intelligent albeit human and therefore capable of making bone-headed decisions every once in a while.  We describe people as pretty, and we don’t mean that they’re pretty on Monday but ugly on Tuesday.  We mean that we think they are attractive every day of the year.

But luck is a single moment.  Actions can certainly be lucky, but can people be lucky?  I mean, if that’s the case, take one of the people in the article.  If a tree fell on their house tomorrow, would they now be unlucky?  Could they be lucky on a Monday but unlucky on a Tuesday and then lucky again on Wednesday?  That is a slippery adjective.

It also feels judgmental when applied to a person vs a situation.  It designates some lives as unlucky in order to define the contrast of lucky.

Is this making sense?  Can people be lucky?

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

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Before we got into geocaching, we tried letterboxing.  It’s the same concept, except you follow clues instead of coordinates.  We kept our notebook in my purse so we could mark it if we found a letterbox while we were out.

I just read about the origin of letterboxing, and it made me want to drop our notebook back in my purse:

Letterboxing began in the mid-19th century, when a man knelt in the peat bogs of Dartmoor, England, constructed a small cairn, and placed a glass jar inside. He told other hikers to leave something in the jar if they came across it, and people began to leave messages for future visitors.

With that act, James Perrott unwittingly laid the foundation for a hobby that continues more than 150 years later.

Don’t you love that?  To be a hiker and know that there is this jar out there filled with messages for you if you can find it?

Have you ever been letterboxing?  Want to start?

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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.

I love reading or listening to Annie Duke.  If you don’t know her, she’s a professional poker player.  While I have zero interest in poker, she is fascinating because she speaks often about strategy, especially strategy when you don’t have all the facts at your disposal, such as when you’re playing cards or making major life decisions (like family building).

Her book — Thinking in Bets — is coming out in early February.  I will definitely be reading it.  I’m going to guess you will, too, when you read the central question as per this article: “If a well-reasoned decision leads to a negative outcome, was it the wrong decision?”

Well?

We live that question every single day.  We make well-reasoned decisions that do not lead us to parenthood.  And then what?  How do you evaluate that decision, distancing your brain from the outcome?

I love this thought: “Wrap your arms around the uncertainty. Accept it. Know that the way things turn out has a lot of luck involved so don’t be so hard on yourself when things go badly and don’t be so proud of yourself when they go well. Focus on process instead.”  I have more thoughts about luck that I’m tossing around, but I think that word works here.

Read this interview if you have time because she says some very smart things about evaluating your decisions so you can make better decisions in the future, not so you can beat yourself up about past decisions.

Linus turned one this week.  I like to remind him that he will always be my little baby, especially because he is much smaller than Truman and will never be allowed to run around unsupervised because he can squeeze himself into tiny, hard-to-reach spaces.  Plus he still acts like a baby.  If you tell him, “jump, jump!” he will jump in the air and then land and run in a circle because he is so happy with himself.

I love my boy so much: he is my furry bestie, my squeaky co-worker, my chatty companion.  He likes car rides and cookies.

Happy birthday, big boy!

(I had to push the button so he could take a selfie because his paws are a little short.)

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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:

• “#Microblog Mondays: The Upside” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “Complete” (It Only Takes One)
• “Nope” (NotMyLinesYet)
• “The Dreams That Didn’t Come True” (Stirrup Queens) — thanks, Cristy!
• “Day 24 — The End” (The Barrenness)
• “Von ‘ohne Kind’ zu ‘OK’” (Elaine ohne Kind)
• “The Christmas Tree Story” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Searching for Our Silver Lining has a post about a strained relationship due to infertility.  This post actually stayed with me due to a phrase: “I am an infertile who is parenting.”  Infertile first, parent second.  Both true, but the order they go in makes a difference.  And it also makes a difference when the people around you acknowledge YOUR order, even if they would order those descriptions differently.

Today’s the Day writes about doing a DNA testing kit with her son.  She explains: “This past summer Liam expressed interest in finding out more about his ancestral background, so we ordered 2 DNA testing kits – one for him and one for myself. As the adoptees of the family, we felt this would be fun to do together.”  It is an amazing story of how a DNA test opened the door to finding family.  You will want to read this post.

Lastly, NotMyLinesYet has a post about the financial side of infertility.  She has worked out how much she has paid towards family building so far and then points out the true cost: “It’s bought me near constant physically pain and months missed from work. It bought amazing, touching connections with friends and family members who have reached out. To echo what appears to be a recurrent theme: it bought us hope and the loss of hope.”  Go read this whole moving post.

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s Linus’s first birthday.  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 December 22nd and January 5th) 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.

Montreal boasts the world’s ugliest Christmas tree.  How can you stay home when you know that a short flight can deliver you to a world of unending crepes AND the ugliest Christmas tree?  We had to see it with our own eyes.

But going to Montreal in the middle of winter was not our smartest move.  It occurred to me after we landed that I had only been to Canada during warm(ish) months.  I mean, we had coats with us.  We had mittens and hats.  But flimsy fabrics are no match for -23 degrees.  The mucous froze in our nostrils the moment we stepped off the plane.

Still, as much as the cold thwarted our ability to do certain things, such as visit Olympic Park, climb Mont Royal, or go to La Ronde (for some crazy reason, they close the amusement park in the winter), we have zero regrets about going to Montreal in December (though we will never ever do it again).  It was beautiful.  Walking in the snow and looking at Christmas decorations is beautiful.  The city is pretty quiet in winter, with most people bundled up at home rather than venturing into museums and churches.

We ate vegan poutine (yes, it exists) and became regulars at a crepe place in the old city (go there — it’s fantastic).  We saw Aura, a laser light show in the Basilica.  We adored MontVR, a virtual reality arcade.  You need to set up an appointment to go, but they’re super flexible about it.  We could tell the twins were feeling a little frantic about using their hour well because the VR menu was in French and they’re slow translators.  Not only did the guy help them and give them a little extra time, but no one had the slot after us so we got to take a second hour on the fly AND the guy running the place sweetly talked computer specs with the Wolvog.

The highlight of the trip — for me — was finding Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel.  It’s a church in the old city — one of the oldest in Montreal.  The ceiling is decorated with little ships placed there by sailors seeking protection before they went out to sea.  It was such an emotional space, and I fell in love with Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys, the nun who founded the church, as well as its patron Jeanne Le Ber, who is buried in its walls.

My only regret about the trip (besides it being so cold that we couldn’t think if we walked more than two blocks at a time) turned into a non-regret.  On our first day, I saw a t-shirt about poutine that I really liked, but I decided not to get it for myself because it was the first day.  Rookie traveling mistake.  By the last day, I hadn’t seen anything I liked as much, and I decided to release myself from trying to find a t-shirt to bring home.  It wasn’t meant to be, and I had dozens of great photos from the trip.  Plus I knew we’d be back, and maybe the store would still carry the shirt.  In our last hour in Montreal, we were running out to pick up our last Kinder Surprise (the twins just learned the joy of the Kinder Surprise this trip as well as the disappointment that all Kinder eggs needed to be consumed before going home) and we passed a store with fun pillows in the window.  I decided to duck in to see if they had shirts and they did — SHIRTS WITH SLOGANS ABOUT POUTINE.

The lesson here: Act like a leaf in the river when you travel and the universe will bring you the right t-shirt at the right time.

Other highlights:

An art installation in the sewer walk (yes, you read that correctly) in a museum:

Learning everything I never knew I wanted to know about hockey:

Going to the Barbie Expo with the ChickieNob:

Finding one of my books in a Canadian bookstore:

Dinner at Schwartz’s deli where the guys were so nice to us and didn’t laugh at my dinner of two half-sour pickles and a Cott black cherry soda.  (What?  There is nothing else vegetarian on the menu.)

Cannot wait to go back to Canada… when it’s warmer.  I loved being surrounded by French and seeing the kids trying to figure everything out.  And, you know, crepes and vegan poutine.  Does it get any better than that?