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

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Thank you to everyone who sent along the Time magazine or the Jezebel article about that hashtag #ObamaAndKids.  We were out all day, so I didn’t know that was happening on Twitter.

That photo of the twins that they included actually marks an interesting moment. It was the first time I let the kids go off with a stranger.

The ChickieNob had questions for the President, so one of the staffers arranged for the kids to go over to the other side of the room to meet him. I wouldn’t be able to see them during that time because there was a crowd around the President. I must have had a look on my face when they told me what was going to happen because the woman touched my arm and said, “I will not let anything happen to them. They are in the safest place in the US, and I will stay with them the whole time.”

(In my defense, it was a really big room. And they were really small kids. And I couldn’t see them. And I’m a really nervous person, in general.)

She clearly returned them to me, unscathed. And while they were over there, this super-nice photographer we met earlier in the day photographed them for me at the same time as Pete Souza so I could see what was happening while they were out of my sight line. The whole experience made me chill out (a bit) but was moreover a really good reminder that there are a lot of kind adults out there who are going to watch out for your kids when you’re not around. And those adults that day — none of whom had kids and therefore weren’t doing it from experience because they knew how nerve wracking it can be to be separated from your children in a crowd — were good people who set my heart at ease that day.

And to keep me from sounding like the only anxiety-prone woman on the Internet, tell me what makes you nervous. And has anyone ever helped you quell your fears?

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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 posts.

I’ll admit I looked up my doctor on FertilityIQ, the new “Yelp for Fertility Doctors.”  Why?  I have no clue since I usually don’t go on review sites.  But there I was, typing in his name on FertilityIQ.

I reasoned that it’s not as if I’d suddenly think crap of him if he had a low score and a bunch of negative reviews. I mean, my experience has only been positive, even caring. Still, I held my breath as the page loaded, as if his score was a comment on my common sense. Had I picked a good doctor or a total dud?

8.8 out of 10. A B+ in report card terms. Nothing to be ashamed of.

On the other hand, the doctor my mother used for having me got a 10.

Which made me sort of wish I had used him instead.

What the fuck am I talking about? My 8.8 doctor was not only kind and smart and helped me conceive the twins, but before I looked on this site, I would have said nothing but positive things about him.  He talked me through a bunch of hard moments.  He even called personally to apologize on a weekend when another doctor at the clinic forgot to call me back about test results.  He is a good guy.

Yet seeing other people’s complaints made me feel… I don’t know. Like I missed something?

This is precisely why I don’t go on actual Yelp. I like my opinions to be my opinions. I don’t mind recommendations from people I know, but with complete strangers, I don’t know their motivation. Maybe they got pregnant easily with my doctor and therefore have warm feelings toward him. Maybe they never got pregnant and blame him. Maybe he told them something truthful that they weren’t ready to hear, or maybe he offered them the same compliments he offers every patient but they thought they were unique.

And now my opinion is my opinion plus that number — 8.8 — which didn’t come from my brain.

But still, knowing this site existed, I couldn’t help but look him up.

Have you looked up your doctor? Can a number change the way you feel about him or her?

Bio Girl is my book twin; my identical book twin. We not only like and dislike the same books, but we discovered this week that we even start liking books in the exact same place.

I recently started reading Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On since my book twin liked it. And it was at a solid 9 out of 10. Very likable but I couldn’t understand why she was sooooo gaga about it. Could this be the novel that threw me out of sync with my book twin?

But then I got to the point in the book where it shot past the 10 ceiling firmly into 11 out of 10 territory. Oh my G-d, it’s so good. Suddenly I understood why she told me she reread it immediately after the first read. When I wrote her to let her know that my fears of our book twinness have been resolved, it turns out that she had the same reaction in the same place.

So good. And I love having a book twin.

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Speaking of books, the winners of the Life from Scratch and Measure of Love audio books:

Jessie
Illustr8d
Charlotte

Sent you the codes so let me know if you have any trouble with the download.

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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:

• “Privilege, for Flint” (A Half Baked Life)
• “Deciding or Escaping” (Inconceivable!)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Two Adults, One Child has a wonderful post about looking closer at the years she misses from her youth.  Were they really as fun as they seem in retrospect?  Was she really that happy?  Is she forgetting about the loneliness or the fear?  It’s an important look back on the good, old days, appreciating them but also knowing that she will one day remember these years like she remembers those years.

The Road Less Travelled has a post about marking milestones but also how we stop celebrating things as we age.  She muses, “But most people get to relive, or improve on, the rituals and celebrations and milestones they experienced as a child with their own children as they grow up. Those of us without children don’t get to do that.”  It’s an interesting post about how celebrations change over time, while looking closely at what we mark and what we allow to pass without fanfare.

Res Cogitatae has a heart stopping post about her father’s accident that left him paralyzed and a look at whether the perfect life really exists.  She writes about people who led seemingly charmed lives in their twenties, “Now that I’m in my mid-thirties, I don’t think I know anyone like that anymore. Life and the universe have slowly, inexorably, crept up on all of my friends. And we’ve all lost something or someone.”  And then she points out that none of us are immune to accidents, the ones that catapult us from the lucky side to the unlucky side in seconds.

Lastly, Twangypearl the Elastic Girl writes about having her adoption profile shown and ultimately passed over by a new mother.  She writes, “I went to see Room later that day, which may not have been the best choice given the circumstances, but I enjoyed it in a weep-freely-in-the-dark way.”  That image of her crying in the dark, really of all of us at one point or another crying in the dark, stuck with me since I read the post.

The roundup to the Roundup: My book twin and I fell in love with Carry On at the exact same time.  Audio book giveaway.  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 February 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.

How did I end up on a folding chair in a middle school gymnasium, listening to their next principal tell me about the world the twins will inhabit next year?

No, I mean, really.  I remember them entering Kindergarten.  How can I forget?  I spent a few days sitting parked outside the school, reading a book, because I was too worried to be a few blocks away.  (I clearly take anxiety to a whole new level for you, don’t I?)  I remember circle time and cutting out yellow construction paper squares and the dazed look on their face during their class Valentine’s Day concert.

And then life sort of jumps to now.  My brain rationally knows that I’ve lived five years in between those moments and now, but it’s hard to sort it all out in my mind.  If you ask me to think about third grade, I can remember the night they found out their teacher assignment or how much the ChickieNob adored her teacher’s shoe collection or the Wolvog bringing home a worksheet on tetrahedral numbers or that special teacher bringing out their inner writer.

I can remember each of these individual moments if I concentrate on them.  But overall, it feels like elementary school went by in the time it took me to walk from the front door of the school back to my car.

And I am so sad that it is almost over.

Unlike a lot of other parents, I have never dreaded this age.  I taught middle school for many years, and I enjoy kids in this segment of life.  What can I say: I like talking about feelings, and middle schoolers have a lot of feelings to discuss and dissect.  Of course I’m worried about peer pressure and anonymous texting apps and general preteen cruelty.  But I’m not dreading living in a house with two middle schoolers.

But sitting in that gymnasium, I felt old.  I felt like I was on a roller coaster, barreling towards the end of the ride, and all I could think about was how long I waited in line to enjoy this two-minute amusement park attraction and how it was ending so quickly.  Yes, yes, yes, I know the end is not really the end.  I still hang out with my parents and enjoy their company.  But things will change the moment they leave home for college.

We’ve been building towards this: the moment we release them out into the world and say, “do your thing.”

I want that to happen.  I want them to be happy and healthy and find their way in the world.  I want them to go off and do cool things and then report back about those accomplishments.  I have put all of this hard work in raising them for that to specifically happen.

But I don’t want this moment to end.  Each time they pass through one set of doors and walk through another, we are one step closer to that moment when I will need to tell them that I agree with them; they’re ready.  Because I am well aware that they will tell me they are ready much earlier than I am prepared to let them go.

Before my wedding, someone told me to make sure that we took a moment to step away from the party and consciously observe it.  To stand together and mindfully think, “We are at our wedding and look at all these people gathered together in a room to celebrate with us.”  If you don’t do that, the whole day can be over and you’ll realize that you barely took it in because it’s so enormous.

I do this a lot with school.  I take two minutes to step back in the room and observe the twins in action.  I will say to myself, “I am at their last Valentine’s Day class party.  Look at how much fun they are having and how we were all in this moment.”  And then I step back into the action and let it pass over me knowing I grabbed my mental snapshot.

And it’s not enough.

It wasn’t enough at my wedding to make me not crave more time in the festivities, and it isn’t enough now to make me feel full of their childhood.  And it really sucks that it’s the best a person can do — take a mental snapshot — and not get to return to a moment over and over again, trying to soak it all in.

I didn’t bother with my Friends Day video from Facebook, but I did like their post that told you how many degrees of separation you have between yourself and everyone else in the world. Apparently, it’s no longer 6, Mr. Guare.

3.57.

That’s how many degrees of separation we have between ourselves and everyone else in the world. It drops a little lower to 3.46 if both people live in the US. Mark Zuckerberg is separated only by 3.17 degrees, as am I. Isn’t that weird? I have the same web as Mark Zuckerberg? That doesn’t sound right. But there it is.

How far apart are you from the rest of the world?