Welcome back to IComLeavWe. It stands for International Comment Leaving Week, but if you say it aloud, doesn’t it sounds like “I come; [but] leave [as a] we”? And that’s sort of the point. Blogging is a conversation and comments should be honoured and encouraged. I like to say that comments are the new hug–a way of saying hello, giving comfort, leaving congratulations. Here is the vital information, pure and simple (a more detailed set of rules follows below the list):

• The list opens the 1st of every month. It remains open until the 21st. You can add yourself at any point. The list is open to everyone in the blogosphere–blog writers and/or blog readers.
• Add yourself to the list by filling out this form after adding the icon below: The January list is now closed.  The February list will open on 1/27.
  
• Click here to cut-and-paste this bit of code to add to your sidebar (if you have the old code from another month, remove it and replace it with this one). You need to add the icon or a link to the current list on your blog (see below) and will not be added until it’s up.
• Commenting kicks off every month on the 21st. Please mark it somewhere (calendar, post-it note taped to your computer…), though I will be sending out an email reminder on the 20th. Commenting week runs from the 21st to the 28th. Every day, leave 5 comments and return 1 comment for a total of 6 comments. You are highly encouraged to choose the blogs you comment on from the participants list below, but this is not required.
• I will send a second email on the 28th to remind you to remove the icon from your blog.
• Read below if you want to find out about Iron Commenters.
• The commenting ends on the 28th. We catch our breath and the whole thing starts again the next month on the 1st. Drop in and out according to what is happening in your life between the 21st and the 28th.

The January 2015 List

1. Stirrup Queens (twins, books, writing)
2. Breathe Gently (IVF, recurrent miscarriage, toddler-mum)
3. Comatised (love, life, survival)
4. Recovering Beauty (love, life, recovery)
5. Constant in the Darkness (open adoption, toddler mama, waiting #2)
6. MissConception (parenting, pcos, ttc #2)
7. The Courage In Me (life-story, lessons, resilience)
8. Lifestyle Of A Professional (anecdotes, beauty, travel)
9. Who Shot Down My Stork? (donor egg, miscarriage, IVF)
10. Infertility Unfiltered (infertility, honesty, unfiltered)
11. Journaling Through Infertility (infertility, pcos, life)
12. Four Years Later (pregnancy, stillborn, RPL)
13. Amateur Nester (infertility, faith, encouragement)
14. Hopeful Luna (pregnancy, nutrition, baby)
15. In Due Time (waiting, natural, faith)
16. Life As I Know It (parenting, twins, life)
17. A Little Bit More (ttc, pcos, life)
18. Muddy Boots and Diamonds (toddler, baby, SAHM)
19. Life of an Army Wife (army wife, parenting, donor gametes)
20. Get Pregnant After 35 (improving egg quality)
21. Joyfully Infertile (infertility, loss, faith)
22. Zabie Love (twins, life, love)
23. A Virtual Hobby Store and Coffee Haus (books, news, life)
24. The January list is now closed.  The February list will open on 1/27.
    

Q: What if I miss a day?

A: Catch up the next day by doubling your comments–12 comments instead of 6.

Q: What if I have two blogs? Can I sign up twice, listing both blogs?

A: Yes, but you also need to double your comments. If you have two blogs listed, you should be leaving 12 comments per day.

Q: What is an Iron Commenter?

A: Not for the faint-of-heart. People who wish to be an Iron Commenter and be entered on the Iron Commenter honour roll need to leave a comment on every blog on the participants list (exceptions are blogs that require you to have a special log-in, such as some LiveJournal accounts or other similar situations). You can spread out this commenting any way you wish over the whole week, but the final comment needs to be left by midnight on the 28th (EST). Reaching Iron Commenter status is done on an honour system. Please email me if you earn Iron Commenter status so I can add you to the wall of honour.

Q: Why do I have to add that bit of code to my sidebar?

A: The code is the latest icon (the icon changes colour every month so you know that you’re on the right list). This month, the icon is silver, the next month it will be pink, etc. The reason is two-fold: (1) it enables more people to find out about IComLeavWe and (2) it gives you easy access to the current list once the commenting week actually begins and better ensures that you’ll use it. Too many times, people sign up and forget to actually do IComLeavWe and this icon gives you a daily reminder (with the dates on it) every time you open your own blog. The icon is linked back to the current list. On the 28th, remove the icon from your blog. A new one will be created for the next month.

Q: It’s the 23rd and I just saw this for the first time on my friend’s blog! I want to join the list–why can’t I?

A: Because IComLeavWe happens every month, once the list is closed, it’s closed. If you’re finding out about this on the 23rd, you can’t join the current month. But leave yourself a note to check back in a week on the 1st and you can sign up for the next month.

Q: You said the list closes on the 21st. Well, it’s still the 21st where I am. Why aren’t you moving my information onto the list?

A: All dates and times are U.S. Eastern Standard Time (UTC/GMT -5 hours). The list closes around 11 p.m. EST on the 21st.

Q: What if no one comments on my blog and I have no comments to return?

A: Well, that really doesn’t happen for the most part, but in that case, simply choose another blog and add an additional comment. The goal is to hit 6 comments daily as a minimum. Going over that is fantastic and encouraged.

Q: Mel, my question wasn’t covered at all. What do I do?

A: Email me; I’m quite friendly. It helps to place “IComLeavWe” in the subject line. You could also check this post which contains the history of IComLeavWe and see if you can glean anything there.

Looking for the comment section? It has been closed on this post. Use the form in the directions to add yourself to the list.

Hello, very quiet Internet. Hopefully you’re recovering from yesterday’s festivities. Or non-festivities if you don’t celebrate Christmas.  As a bookend to the last post, break down your day into the following categories: high point, low point, best gift, delicious eat.

High Point: Time to read!

Low Point: Not enough hours in the day.

Best Gift: Bought myself “Hedwig’s Theme” as my new wake-up music for my phone alarm.  I was my very own Santa.

Delicious Eat: Appetizer-only dinner for Christmas Eve.

You go now.

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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:

• “Somewhere Tonight There is a Woman” (Waiting for Baby Bird)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Persnickety Chickadee went to Japan for Christmas, but before she left, she gave us a lovely post about the calendar circling around again.  She reflects on what has changed and what hasn’t come to fruition yet since her last trip to Japan.  I loved the jumps backward in time.

My Path to Mommyhood makes a fair point about the way the general public talks about genes.  She writes, “If we can talk about passing genes along so casually, then we should be able to talk about NOT passing those genes on equally as casually, no?”  It’s a great post.  Click over to read it from the beginning.

Lavender Luz writes about an exchange with her daughter, and how the way she first heard the words were not the way the words were maybe meant.  She explains, “I’ve lived on this planet — I’ve thrived on this planet — for a long time.  That’s not nothing; that’s not bad sense. In fact, my goal as her mom is that she do the same.”  I love the way the words twist in this post.

Lastly, Constant in the Darkness talks about how it is different waiting on the adoption list this time around.  I love this so much: “It’s not the ‘longing for another baby’ that’s eating away at me right now …  it’s the not knowing when this is going to happen that is.  It’s not a new baby that I’m craving, it’s this part of my life, the infertility, trying for a baby, when the hell is this going to be over thing that I really want to put an end to.”  You need to read the whole post to understand.

The roundup to the Roundup: High/Low/Best/Delicious Christmas (or Non-Christmas, as was the case for me).  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 19th and 26th) 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.

This is always the quietest time in the blogosphere.  It’s as if a giant snowstorm has buried all the keyboards.  Even when it’s not a White Christmas, there’s sort of a figurative snow.

I sort of imagine all of us like dots on a board — little pinpricks of light when we’re online and a sea of darkness when we’re offline.  Most of the time, this fictive board is an expanse of white light — people furiously typing and reading and typing and reading.  And then this two day period rolls around and suddenly the board is mostly black except for tiny pinpricks of light like stars that pop up across the board.  One person here and one person there, and you can suddenly see that we are all individuals with our own dots of light vs. part of a large expanse of electrical energy.

I sort of like these quiet times.

I am here, online most of the day while I simultaneously read and drink hot chocolate.  If you are online and would like to pull up a chair and bring over your own cup of hot chocolate, let us know what you’re doing today or what you’re thinking about or how many drinks you’ve had to get through the festivities or the movie you’re watching.  In other words, if you want company, it’s here for the taking.

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

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Apparently, first date selfies are a “thing.”  As in, kids today are taking a picture together on their first date and posting it to Instagram with the tag #firstdateselfie.

It took me many months to work up the courage to take a picture with Josh.  I mean, taking a picture together — that was serious shit.  You didn’t just take a picture with someone you had just started dating.  Telling someone that you wanted a picture of them meant something.  It meant you wanted to show your friends what the person looked like.  It meant you wanted to look at a picture of them when you were apart.

I mean, I wanted a picture on the first date, but I would have never had the guts to take a picture.

The technology certainly existed back then — I had a point-and-shoot camera with film in my purse at all times — but I would have never had the guts to suggest taking a picture together on our first date.

What about you?  I think we would all want the picture in retrospect, but would you have the courage to ask to take one?

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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.

So I saw an interesting photo on a friend’s Facebook wall:

Which is an interesting point and one I never thought about before; mostly because the gifts my kids receive (with the exception of money from the tooth fairy) comes from humans they know.  Discrepancies with money from the tooth fairy can be explained with the idea that there is more than one tooth fairy.  There is a tooth fairy army.  And the fairy assigned to our house gives X amount, and the fairy assigned to your friend’s house gives Y amount, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.  Regardless, the difference in amount is usually a couple of quarters.

But how do you explain to a child that Santa brought the bully in the class the XBox he always wanted and brought your child some new underwear, despite your child also asking for an XBox?  How do you explain to your child why Santa didn’t fulfill their wish items and instead went rogue with the gift giving whereas stuck to another child’s entire list that they uttered on his lap at the mall?

The first recess after winter break seems to be a big conference on “what did Santa bring you for Christmas?”  Kids tell each other what they got.  And I know the message is supposed to be of gracious acceptance; being happy with whatever gifts you are given.  But let’s be frank — how can you not internalize the discrepancies when you see one being (Santa) treating various children differently?  How can you not think you are the best kid ever or the worst kid ever if you see how different your experience is from your classmates; especially when the message of Santa is that he is judging you, seeing when you’re sleeping and awake, and giving out toys (or a lump of coal) befitting of your behaviour?

And yes, I know that most people don’t present Santa in the manner of omniscient decision maker, but even if you don’t state it outright, you can’t sing “Frosty the Snowman” or read Elf on a Shelf and not expect your child to pick up on that message.  Even I know what is said about Santa, and I’ve never celebrated Christmas.

Life isn’t fair or equal.  People have very different experiences interacting with the same person.  I know this and you know this.  And kids will learn this, too.  But somehow, Santa seems the wrong person to inadvertently teach this lesson, you know?  He’s supposed to embody happiness, generosity, kindness.  So how do you explain why he isn’t consistent with the gift giving?

I’m curious how other people react to that woman’s request to keep the smaller gifts from Santa and make the bigger gifts from parents in order to even out the story.  Do you do something similar?  Do you wish this was the case?  Do you think kids just need to deal — I mean, this isn’t a new thing.  Poor Laura Ingalls had to deal with this when Pa brought her a tin cup, and I’m sure Nellie Olson got something like a doll.  How do you handle/explain this?

[Side Note Reminder: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  Write your post.]