I threw out my old toothbrush this week and got a new toothbrush. Even though this is a fairly regular occurrence, I forget in between new toothbrushes how lovely new bristles are against my teeth. It’s like making love to my mouth. I use the term “making love” instead of “having sex” because that’s how beautiful and pure it is.  Getting a new toothbrush is like arriving at a Caribbean resort and being told that the staff hasn’t allowed anyone else to book a room in order to give you complete privacy as you roll around with your lover in the sand, the warm ocean gently lapping your bare legs while he/she spills pina colada over your breasts and licks it off in one, long, moan-inducing…

I mean, I just really love getting a new toothbrush.  That’s all.

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I recently learned how to score a baseball game.   I should add that I know how to do this in the most basic way possible.  When the coach first asked me to score, I looked around at every other parent and tried to convince them that they wanted the task.  No one did.  So I sat down with the stubby, eraser-less pencil and started scoring.

It made me watch the game in a different way, helping me shut out anything that wasn’t happening on the field.

If you would have told me twelve years ago that I would be excited to score a baseball game, I would have told you that you obviously don’t know Melissa.  But then I married a baseball-loving boy and became the mother of a baseball-loving boy, and somewhere along the way, I decided to love baseball because I love them.  It’s funny how a person can change due to love.

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A reader asked me to make a PSA request: before Google Reader closes, make sure your blog is updating on the various blog readers others are now using — Feedly, Netvibes, Bloglovin, Old Reader, etc.  This is especially important for people who don’t post often because people may not know whether there is a problem with their new reader not getting your posts or whether it’s simply a time period when you’re not posting.

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All I can say is… it’s coming.  And it’s going to be good.

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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:

• “In Which We Discuss Sex” (Who Shot Down My Stork?)
• “One Day, This Will All Be Behind You” (Who Shot Down My Stork?)
• “In My Shoes” (Who Shot Down My Stork?)
• “Join the Movement for NIAW” (The Infertility Voice)
• “What IF: Three Years Later” (The Infertility Voice)
• “Secondary Infertility Stories: Just One More” (Bereaved and Blessed)
• “10 Gift Ideas for a Bereaved Mom on Mother’s Day” (Still Standing Mag)
• “How to Support a Friend or Family Member with Infertility” (Resolve)
• “Audrey Pearl” (Real Life & Therafter)

Okay, now my choices this week.

For the Love of Baby Liam has a very moving post about tearing down the old nursery and creating something new between the loss of her two children and the baby on the way.  She explains the difficulty she was having in marking her daughter’s birthday, and a conversation she had with a woman from her grief group whom she still speaks to once per month.  No suggestion for marking the day felt right.  But she was able to come home and keep moving ahead even with tears close-by.  It’s a great post.

Nuts in May has an incredible post about living child-free after infertility.  I love this so damn much: “Life without kids will not suck, will not destroy me, will not lead to my abandonment and feral death, will not burn out my retinas. Life without children will, in fact, be dandy. I will grieve, I will feel burning flailing resentment for the costs to my health and sanity trying to have children exacted, I will heal, I will pull by bloody socks up, and I will move on. This may take years, it may take months. But there it is, and there am I, and that will be that.”  Go read the whole post so you get the part about her retinas.

Lastly, A Life of Choice has a post about suddenly becoming fertile post-divorce after being part of an infertile couple for years.  It was interesting to me because it was the first post I read in the community that goes this direction — moving from infertility to fertility.  She writes: “In a strange way – I spent 7 years mourning the children that I could never have with my husband. I can now, finally, lay their ghosts to rest. I can stop wondering what our children would look like, be like. I can just be.”

The roundup to the Roundup: I love having a new toothbrush.  I learned how to score a baseball game.  Make sure your blog posts are updating on readers.  Secret Ode Days are coming!  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 3rd and May 10th) 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.

Truman Day is a May 8th holiday meant to commemorate Harry S. Truman.  And not to diminish his work as the 33rd President of the United States, but… you know… we have a Truman too, named partly after Harry S. Truman and partly after Truman Capote. (Okay, so like 20% Harry S. and 80% Capote.)  So we celebrated yesterday.

He ate extra lettuce and alfalfa cookies.  We had multiple cuddles.  I didn’t tell him stop when he started nibbling at my sweater.  And I gave him his first bath.  I sort of did it on a whim because he peed all over himself while he was playing out of his cage.  He didn’t like it or not like it, looking around confused while keeping fairly quiet.  When he’s happy, he makes a wheeking sound and kicks up his back legs in excitement.  So he was fairly chill in the water, and I rubbed him with Aveeno baby shampoo while I crooned that he was my baby.  And then I cradled him in a towel to dry him and told him that he was my baby.  And then he endured the hair dryer while I reminded him that he was, indeed, my baby.

We have settled into best-friendship, by which I mean that he listens to me talk all day long and in return, he gets back rubs and a lot of lettuce.  I just freakin’ love him to pieces.  I tell him that when I come downstairs in the morning and about 20 times during the day and then when I go upstairs to bed.  I love you, Truman Harper.  I am so glad that you live here.

The blogosphere has lost MLO to ovarian cancer.

You know her, even if you don’t think you know her.  She coded the “room” for the blogroll.  She is why I give away one of my Purim baskets every year.  She is a long time blog writer, one of the first I read.

She is a ketchup-maker and a vampire-sex-book sender and a crafter and a dancer and comment-leaver and an all-around wonderful woman.  And she’s gone.  I just really can’t believe that she’s gone.

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Yesterday, I wore grey for brain cancer awareness.  I lost my cousin to brain cancer many years ago.  Biogirl organized the grey day in honour of her sister, Missy, and it’s moving to see that sea of grey in her post.  Earlier this week, there was also a melanoma awareness day organized for JJ as she went in for more surgery.

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If you are looking for something concrete to do, please consider giving a donation to the Pan-Mass Challenge.  It is different from other cancer research fundraising events because the PMC donates 100% of every rider-raised dollar to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute through its Jimmy Fund.  A lot of other places, when you donate your money, it goes toward paying staff and advertising and other expenses.  And yes, sometimes it’s necessary in order to keep the organization afloat, but the PMC forwards every dollar that YOU donate straight into cancer research.  And that, to me, has a chance to make a difference.

Rest easy, MLO.  We’ll miss you.

Welcome to the online book tour for The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption.  Grab a cup of coffee and prepare to think.

We’re here today to discuss Lori Holden’s new book about open adoption.  Below are all the other stops on this tour.  Please click around and read everyone’s thoughts on this book.

There are a lot of children in the blogosphere that I’ve known pre-conception.  I knew their parent(s) wanted to have them, and I read their parent(s) thoughts and feelings during the endless cycles or their adoption plan.  And then their mother was pregnant or she got the call that she had been matched.  Fast forward again and now a child is here, and that child grows up, and that is part of the legacy of being in the ALI blogosphere: we know about children when they are only wishes in someone’s heart, long before they’re here.

This book, Lori Holden’s The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption, is like that.

I’ve known for years that Lori wanted to write a book, a how-to manual that would make open adoption easier for everyone in the triad.  Open adoption is something a lot of adoptive parents and birthparents want to do, but there are few books out there to serve as a guide to the experience.  How do you navigate the relationship in a way that places the child — the only one who doesn’t get a say in the arrangement — at the center?

And then one day she started writing this book, and then she queried agents, and then she got an agent with her book proposal.  Her agent sold the book and she started to write the manuscript.  And now, many years down the road from that first spark of an idea, that book has been born and is in people’s hands.  Isn’t that crazy?  To know about a book when it was only a wish and then to get to hold it.

It’s an important book.  It provides a much-needed panoramic look at open adoption, taking the concept of openness and making it a mindset more than a set of requirements.  And because it’s a mindset, it becomes a way of thinking that provides you with the answer to any unique situation that develops down the road.  I would argue that the ideas in the book are applicable to all parents; not just adoptive parents or birthparents.  But, of course, adoption is the focus of this book.  From choosing an agency that is going to set you on the right course to even building openness in adoption or donor gamete situations where the birthparents may not be known or accessible.

Which is a long way to say that I’m ecstatic it’s here, and I can’t wait to watch it grow up, changing the face of open adoption one family at a time.

Congratulations, Lori, on a job very well done.

Please return to the main post to read more opinions on Lori Holden’s The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption.