So I read Kevin Wilson’s Perfect Little World.

The book opens at the turning point: A psychologist puts together a center where 10 children are raised collectively by 19 parents (1 is a single parent and all the rest are heterosexual couples) from birth without experiencing the concept of a nuclear family.  And now — at age 5 — the children are on the cusp of discovering which parent(s) in the group is/are their biological parent(s).  How will their world change once they know their origin?

I know.

I went into reading this book with a liiiiiiiiiiittle bit of baggage.

I spent the better part of the book wondering how the center in the story was different from the early kibbutzim.  I don’t know of any modern kibbutz that still has a children’s house, but when kibbutzim first started out, kids lived separately from their parents.  They weren’t kept in the dark about their origin — the spent a few hours a day with their biological parents — but they were raised collectively by the adults on the kibbutz.  So beyond the fact that the children in the novel had their upbringing regulated by an army of parenting experts, it didn’t seem all that different from kibbutz life.  And to that end, it seems a little more backward vs. forward-thinking since even kibbutzim have moved away from this practice.

But the rest of the book I spent considering the same question the characters grapple with throughout the novel: What makes a family?  What makes a parent?  What makes a child?  Can we choose our brother and sisters and have them become actual brothers and sisters and not just really good, life-long friends?  (And to that end, what is the difference?)  How big can a family get before you see some cracks start to form due to the weight of the relationship?

I didn’t walk away from the book with clear answers, even though the book wraps up very neatly — maybe too neatly — in the end.  I’m not sure why I expected to discover these things in a book if I haven’t come to clear answers in real life.

Do I recommend the book?  Yes.  I think so.  (At the very least, to have people to discuss this with.)  But go into it knowing that it may get under your skin; that it may poke and prod you a bit.

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

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This week, three big boxes arrived in the mail: Author copies for the twins’ book, Hello, Scratch!  I’ve been video taping each leg of the journey: telling them that they got the book deal, signing the contract, turning in the first chapter, receiving their first advance check.  And now holding their own book.

The book will be released on Thursday, and we plan on taking a ride out to a bookstore to see it in its natural habitat.  In the meantime, it’s the Deal of the Day that Thursday (that link will only connect to the book this upcoming Thursday) on the Manning site.  And the twins are answering questions all week over on CodeRanch.  Exciting times.

I think it’s extra sweet because they worked so hard for so long to get to this point.  I think other kids are going to enjoy their book and learn how to program from it, but moreover, I think the twins learned that they could take an enormous project and break it down into manageable chunks and get the whole thing done.

An important lesson to learn.

P.S. It makes a fantastic holiday gift. Just saying.

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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 finally got to Hooper’s Island.  It never loomed quite as large as Smith Island in my heart, but I’d rank it around number 5 on my mental list of Chesapeake Bay islands I’d like to visit.  The only problem was that no one in my life else felt that Hooper’s Island love.  We’d drive past the turn off, always on the way to other places, and I’d remark that I’d love to go to Hooper’s Island.  Everyone else in the car would remain silent, as if by not acknowledging it, I would forget that it was just 22 miles off the main road.

But then magic slid a plan into place.

We needed something to do, so I suggested Hooper’s Island.  Everyone suddenly got very interested in the books they were reading and couldn’t answer me.  So I Googled Hooper’s Island and discovered three things: (1) it was full of bleak, empty beaches (my true love), (2) it had a restaurant that served fried fish (the Wolvog and Josh’s true love), and (3) the restaurant was haunted (the ChickieNob’s true love).

We ate lunch at Old Salty’s, making our game plan to speak to Mary of Mary’s Ghost fame.  It turns out it’s pretty easy.  You just ask to speak to Mary and she’s happy to tell you all sorts of freaky stories about the ghost.  It turns out that the table we had randomly chosen for lunch is the place the ghost always sits, so we felt like we chose our booth well.  We also went into the banquet area and climbed up onto the stage.  (The ChickieNob got goosebumps down her arms and said she felt freezing, even though the temperature was the same as the rest of the restaurant.)

Afterward, we stepped outside, and there was a guy smoking on the porch.  “Get a good ghost story, girls?” he asked, and we nodded.  We walked a few feet, and I whispered to ChickieNob, “What if we turned around and he wasn’t there, and it turns out that he was a ghost?”  So we turned around to smile at the man again, AND HE WAS GONE!

Well that was a little freaky.

We drove all over the island, photographing some of the houses and the bald eagles and the bleak beaches. I pointed out all the houses for sale, but people suddenly couldn’t hear me.

And there’s still so much to do.  We didn’t have time for the new Harriet Tubman museum.  Or explore the churches.  Or take a tour of the seafood factory.  (Um… we may skip that since we don’t have a burning desire to watch people dissect crabs.)  See, it was a good idea.  Next one: Solomons Island.

Last week, we went to the movies and the woman behind the counter seemed familiar.  I asked her if she had ever worked at a shop in town, and she immediately said, “Was I rude to you?”

I was taken aback, and I said, “No, absolutely not.”

But she kept repeating, “I probably was rude.  That’s just how I was back then.”  I kept reassuring her that I only had fond memories of interactions with her at the shop.  She wouldn’t look at me; she just kept smiling tensely at the counter between us and repeating her assertion that she had probably been rude.

I was thrown off because I couldn’t tell if she had been fired over interactions with customers and she still carried baggage from that situation, or if she had left by her own volition and was in a constant state of inwardly cringing at her past.  All I know is that my subconsciousness associates her with kindness and good times and happiness.  So clearly the way she remembers herself is very different from how I viewed her as an outsider.

I guess I’m saying this because I’m still thinking about it, and that it goes both ways.  That outsiders may judge us harshly without knowing our story.  And, at the same time, we may judge ourselves harshly whereas strangers view us as a source of kindness.

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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:

• “Breaking the Silence: Why I Stayed” (Just J.o)
• “Who is Sitting Next to You” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Cristy!
• “#Microblog Mondays: Baby Parade” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “The Birth Plan: Pregnancy After Loss Style” (PALS)
• “Struggling” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “So, Why Didn’t We Just Adopt?” (Not So Mommy)
• “Advice Column Gets It Wrong” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

An Engineer Becomes a Mom has a post about the universe working in strange ways to bring the right thing at the right moment.  In this case, it was a telephone call last spring, and this old draft-post-pushed-live gives the backstory of the moment when someone from her biological father’s family reached out.  I found it incredibly moving.

NotMyLinesYet has a post about all the things missing: from her period to her willingness to interact with her own body.  It’s one of those important, must-read posts that give you insight into the world of infertility.  What we go through physically and emotionally.

Lastly, Anabegins has an eye-opening post about the FOMO that is built into Thanksgiving (and, frankly, every other holiday, too).  Either you feel the pressure to travel to be with people, even with the stress of traffic or high airfare costs, or you make something closer to home and deal with that stress.  Either way, it’s like the upside down of holidays: the part that Hallmark probably doesn’t want us to think about too deeply, but a really interesting question about how we set our stress and emotional-tugging limits.

The roundup to the Roundup: Sometimes we’re better than we think.  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 November 17th and 24th) 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.

Hopefully you are having a wonderful day.  I know the online world is always American-centric, even more so on Thanksgiving, so I’ll leave it at that: A wonderful day, however you’re spending it.

While you eat your turkey/tofurky (or don’t eat your turkey/tofurky), I leave you with this positive thought: Einstein’s Theory of Happiness.

Yes, he had one, and he scribbled it down on two notes that recently sold for over 1 million dollars.  Money, by the way, is not part of the theory of happiness.

The theory of happiness is: “A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.”

His second thought: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Wishing everyone a calm and modest life, with plenty of willpower.