This is it.  Last day to get Life from Scratch for 99 cents.  Measure of Love is also on sale.  (I believe on all platforms.)  Please help me spread word.

Please Tweet about it. Or throw up the announcement on Facebook. Or email a friend about the sale. Or buy a copy for a friend and send it to them. Or Pin the book cover. Or… Instagram yourself reading the book… I will be eternally grateful.

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How am I wasting time now? With the app WordBubbles. I am really not digging this new trend to offer the removal of ads as an in-app purchase (vs. offering a free and paid version of the same app with ads or no ads), so I haven’t yet removed the ads.  But I am on level 111.  And I like that you get a daily puzzle, to boot.

The game makes me feel smarter than I actually am.

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I found this explanation from author Robert Munsch of Love You Forever to be very moving.

I made that up after my wife and I had two babies born dead. The song was my song to my dead babies. For a long time I had it in my head and I couldn’t even sing it because every time I tried to sing it I cried. It was very strange having a song in my head that I couldn’t sing.

I’ll never read the story the same way again, and I’m so grateful that he shared that story.

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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:

• “A Note to Self” (Infertilityhonesty)
• “An Open Letter to My Fertile Family” (Waiting for Baby Bird)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Lavender Luz has another installment of her adoption advice column, and I thought addressing the adopt-a-baby-fast mentality was of utmost importance.  Without shaming the asker, she points out the problems inherent in this mindset, especially in doing what is best for the child.  I especially loved the wedding/marriage analogy.

It Is What It Is has a picture post that packs a punch.  (So much so that I need to write with alliteration.)  With a single image, she speaks volumes.

Inconceivable has a gorgeous post about parenting after a loss, marking the moment of a first unbirthday.  I started to highlight the sentences that made me catch my breath, but really, it’s the whole thing.  It’s the whole, brief, beautiful post.

Lastly, Mom, Eventually has a post about fighting to find happiness.  I love when she explains, “My happiness is like a house of cards – so hard to build and yet so fragile and quick to fall down.”  I think this post will resonate with a lot of people.

The roundup to the Roundup: Please help me promote the Life from Scratch sale.  Waste time with WordBubble.  The real story behind Love You Forever.  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 July 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.

It turns out that when you get rid of vaccines, you bring back infectious diseases that otherwise wouldn’t rear their ugly heads.  For instance,  we’re seeing outbreaks once again of diseases such as measles or whooping cough.  While the conversation around vaccines is complicated, seeing the benefits of vaccines is not: vaccines protect individual and public health by eradicating harmful diseases.

So that’s where this starts.

I was reading an article recently on the anti-vaxxer movement, and I started thinking about all the shitty advice individuals and the media dole out when it comes to fertility and whether we are witnessing the start of the next health crisis.

Because we’ve definitely moved from the Louise Brown, IVF-as-a-last-resort phase into an you-can-always-do-IVF ideology.  In fact, it’s become so commonplace — this thought of getting assistance to conceive — that we now have egg freezing parties.  Egg freezing parties.  I mean, I’m all for egg freezing, especially if you need egg freezing because you’re not currently in a space for family building or you are engaging in a therapy that will compromise your fertility.

But when did we take our fertility out of the doctor’s office and into the cocktail bar?  Or to a random woman’s living room as if our ovaries are a Tupperware container?  Is the casualness we’re bringing to the discussion creating the next anti-vaxxer-like situation; where we’re going to need to live the outcome of our choices down the road?

It’s one thing for a doctor to discuss the possibility of egg freezing with a patient, knowing her situation.  It’s another for a business to encourage women to freeze their eggs so they don’t feel that silly pressure to… you know… build their family.

Is all of this — the mainstreaming of IVF or egg freezing — really going to ensure that more people can become parents?  I really don’t know.  I think that it will help certain individuals become parents whom without egg freezing or the like would find the task impossible.  But I think collectively, in terms of public health, we’ll see lives changed by this conversation.  And not in a good way.

At least, that is my fear.

Did we know how those first celebrities would affect public health when they first took to Twitter or gave interviews with their anti-vaccination comments?  Probably not.  And I don’t think we know now how articles like this one will inform a woman’s decision to delay child-bearing.  (Really?  “Whether it’s a case of art imitating life or the other way around, the over-40 baby boom shows no signs of stopping. Check out which celeb mamas haven’t let their biological clocks get in the way of important family business.”)  Or whether celebrities like Maria Menounos are helping or hurting when they actively promote egg freezing.

It’s complicated, and the two situations are not comparable.  But I do think that we should look hard at the messages of yesterday and how they affect the reality of today.  It will help us to speak carefully today in order to not negatively affect tomorrow.

There is enough infertility in this world without adding more people to the statistic by making them believe that their biological clock will keep ticking as long as they wish it to tick.  Fertility has a shelf life, and we need to talk about that, even if I love the fact that Kim Kardashian can talk about doing IVF and no one bats an eye.  That is a good side to the you-can-always-do-IVF ideology.  Sometimes it feels wrong to kiss one cheek while slapping the other.

I got some fantastic parenting advice from a woman who called herself not-a-parent before she delivered it.  She was sitting on a panel, and I asked a question about a problem we had encountered with one of the kids.

The first panelist gave some advice, and it was sound advice, but we had already tried that route and it hadn’t worked.  Even when I told her that it hadn’t worked, she continued to emphasize the same thoughts.  The second panelist repeated the words of the first panelist, giving the exact same advice.

But the third panelist looked at me thoughtfully and said, “you know, I’m not a parent, but…” and then she launched into the most helpful take on the situation that I’ve heard.  A combination of tough-love and realism coupled with supportive and nurturing warmth.  Her words just clicked with me.  She got it.

Afterwards, we spoke for a bit so I could thank her for the advice and also point out that one doesn’t need to be a parent to know how to parent or to give other people advice on getting out of sticky parenting situations.

Because here’s the thing: there are plenty of places in life where being an outsider to the situation means that we probably can’t give very good advice.  For instance, she cannot give advice on what it is like to navigate the world as an African-American woman because she’s not — and never was — an African-American woman.  She can’t speak to what it’s like to be an Asian man, or what it’s like to be deaf.

But everyone was once a child (unless you’re still a child whereas this post will be applicable to you in a few years).  And everyone knows what resonated with them when they were a child; which words permeated their goldfish brain and which ones bounced off the surface.  Every person can sit with the situation for a moment and consider what they would have wanted to hear from an adult when they were a child.

If she were giving me advice on how I feel as a parent, that may be a different story.  Then her life situation would matter a bit more; it is hard to give advice on something you haven’t experienced yourself.  But she wasn’t.  She was giving kid advice.  And since she was once a kid, she was completely qualified to give kid advice.  Obviously — since it was kickass kid advice.

I’ve been very cognizant lately of times when I negate my own expertise in order to couch every word in some polite version of “but I could be wrong!”  Well, yes, all of us, at any point, could be wrong.  But we’re usually not.  We’re usually spot-on when we’re speaking from a place of knowledge.  And when we’re not right, there will be plenty of time to apologize and correct ourselves.  But… you know… no need to do that beforehand.

So, yeah, I take parenting advice from anyone who was once a kid.  They’re experts based on experience.

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

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Mental Floss had an article about Disney’s abandoned Discovery Island.  I don’t have strong feelings about the space like I do about the abandoned River Country (I loved that place!), but I was totally intrigued by an idea floated in the article:

Soon after the island closed, Disney met with Robyn and Rand Miller, the creators of the hugely popular computer games Myst and Riven, hoping to recreate a real-life version of the adventure game. A certain number of guests would be admitted to the island each morning and would have a set number of hours to explore, unlocking secrets and finding hidden passages in the process. No two experiences would ever be the same.

I clicked around and read more about the abandoned project.

What?  I want to go to the Myst-themed amusement park.  I want my own real-life adventure.

We have something similar-ish sounding here in DC (and I know it’s in a lot of other towns).  You get locked in a room and have to solve a mystery and get out.

What do you think: sounds fun or not your cup of tea?

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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.

This moment defines BlogHer ’15 for me.  I looked down at my hand and my ring wasn’t there.  IT WASN’T THERE.

I immediately flipped out, tossing everything out of my bag and crawling underneath the table.  But here’s the thing.  No one sat there and watched, but only one person at the table knew me before I sat down with my plate.

In other words, a bunch of strangers helped me search for my ring.  Two people looked around the top of the table.  A woman turned on the light on her phone and held it out while Journeywoman crawled on the floor beside me, calmly repeating that we would find it.

And we did.  It had apparently fallen into my bag when I went to pull out something.

And that’s BlogHer.  You keep running into that impulse throughout the conference, whether we’re talking about lost rings or getting someone to connect you with the right person to make your dream project a reality.

You meet up with people you know or you sit down next to people you never met before, and you immediately find yourself in a supportive environment.  It is immediately collaborative.  You will find people who will help you look for your ring, or you will find people who will champion your project.  And it’s all part of the same story.

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There were so many good keynotes.  The conference kicked off with the brilliant and moving #BlackLivesMatter keynote. It’s really hard to summarize the talk into a quick paragraph, so instead I will focus on a single moment.

At the end of the keynote, Patrisse (one of the founders of BlackLivesMatter) led us in the chant done at every BlackLivesMatter event: It is our duty to fight for freedom.  It is our duty to win.  We must love and protect each other.  We have nothing to lose but out chains.

We started with a whisper, then spoke the words in a normal volume, and finally shouted the words.  It was a really powerful sound.

The one that made me dive for my iPad and take the most notes was the one with Shireen Mitchell and Brianna Wu.  Such smart, articulate women.  My brain is still churning around everything they said.

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My mother made Gwyneth Paltrow choke up.  So here is the story.  My mother once heard that Bruce Paltrow took Gwyneth to Paris so that her first experience in the city would be with a person who loved her completely.  And my mother wanted me to have the same experience.  She didn’t want me to throw away my first Paris experience on a backpacking trip.  She wanted me to go to the city in love — whether that was romantic love or familial love.  Just love.

Elisa told Gwyneth the story during the keynote, and Gwyneth filled in her end of the story.  I didn’t think to record it for my mum until it was half-over.  This version cuts off the first part which gives you the context where Elisa told Gwyneth my mum’s story, but SheKnows got the rest of it (thank you, SheKnows!):

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I got to hang out a lot with Journeywoman from Pages, Stages, and Rages, whom I’ve read for years and years and years.  It was amazing finally getting to be in the same room with her.

And I got to meet Hopeful Luna, too, but realized we didn’t take a picture until I had sat down for the next session and couldn’t find her again.

That is one of the best parts about BlogHer, walking around and meeting people face to face that you’ve been reading for years.  I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again.  It feels a little bit like falling into Wonderland.

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There’s this game, Wishbringer, where there is a seahorse dying on a wharf.  If you toss the seahorse in, you can solve a different puzzle later in the game.  In other words, the action makes a difference.

Soledad O’Brien told a similar story about starfish.  The sea washes in millions of starfish, and they’re dying on the sand.  A little boy goes down the beach, tossing as many starfish as he can back into the water.  A man stops him and points out that it is an impossible task.  So many starfish will still die regardless of how many he tosses in. It doesn’t make a difference.

The boy looks at the starfish he’s holding and says, “It makes a difference to this one.”

And that’s sort of the point of BlogHer, too.  You go and realize you can make a difference for another person.  You can connect them to someone else or help them with their project or just give them positive feedback so they continue to use their voice.  And you get that back, too.

Does it solve the problem for ALL the women who are inadvertently and purposefully silenced online?  No.  But it makes a difference to this starfish, and I like to think that my actions make a difference to other starfish.

That is BlogHer — the conference and the site — making a difference one starfish at a time.

I’m back.  I’m recharged.  I have a bit of a BlogHer Hangover this morning; that feeling when you thud back to reality and you’re wondering how to take that energy and run with it.  But yeah, it was a really really really good conference this year and I can’t wait to see what’s on the plate for BlogHer ’16.

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  Get writing your post.