When I told the ChickieNob about the butter situation in Norway, she was absolutely horrified.  4 sticks of butter cost about $26 US (though Colbert reported $740 per box).  She immediately wanted to send the good people of Norway our butter, which I explained probably would go rancid on the way over.  And beyond that, we would be sending the butter blindly to a random address, and Mr. Pedersen at Ullevålsveien 1 in Oslo may not be appreciative to receive a random package of rancid butter regardless of our intentions.

Then she had the brilliant plan to make the good people of Norway brownies since they will not be able to afford the butter to make the brownies, and brownies ship better than butter.  Again, I told her that while this was a great idea in theory, Mrs. Eriksen of Tøyengata 51 may be a little scared to eat brownies sent by a strange American child who was heartbroken over the idea of her butter difficulties.

The ChickieNob is still at the drawing board, trying to solve Norway’s butter crisis.

*******

Fugazi is releasing all the old tapes they made at their shows and placing them up for sale on the Dischord website.  The problem is that I can’t remember which shows I was at (though including the location is helping somewhat — I totally remember being at Sacred Heart) and then there is the other fact that I prefer to have the original recordings (okay, so I moved from vinyl to CDs to now digital copies at some point) vs. the show versions.  But still, it was fun to peruse the archives.  I couldn’t help but notice that they recently uploaded a concert from Oslo, Norway.  Not that punk rock has anything to do with butter.  Mostly.

*******

A few months ago, I was standing in the kitchen, cooking brunch, when the ChickieNob opened the door to let in her friend.  I heard her say sympathetically, “I see that you now have a vision problem” and in my head, I immediately imagined that her friend, L, was sporting an eye-patch like a pirate.

But no, her friend, L, was merely sporting a pair of enormous reading glasses with the lens popped out.  Her mother followed her into the kitchen and explained that this was a new look she was trying out, a look that was enormously appealing to the twins.  They also wanted us to destroy two pairs of old glasses so they could walk around in enormous spectacles sans lens.  So for a few months now, they have been wearing glasses with the lens popped out, sometimes out of the house, but usually while they’re playing.  The ChickieNob especially enjoys wearing them while she’s reading.

Until last week when they wanted to wear them to school for the first time.  I was (1) worried that the other kids would make fun of them and (2) worried that the glasses would be disruptive, but I let them walk out the door with them because it wasn’t a fight worth having.  I totally forgot that I let them wear them to school so when I popped into their classroom later in the afternoon, my first thought was, “what the hell is on my child’s face.”

The glasses-to-school thing was a one time deal because while the kids did not make fun of them and they were not disruptive, the other kids did decide that it would be a great idea to poke their fingers through the empty lens slot and touch their eyes.  So they’re back in our spectacles case.

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The kids learned how to make a gingerbread house this year.  They made it with a nasty milk carton as the central support, covering the waxy cardboard with icing and attaching graham crackers to make the walls.  Needless to say, I offered them many things to dispose of said gingerbread house without consuming it.  They agreed to do so if I would let them make what Josh has dubbed a “Chanukkah Hut”: a house made out of brownies (that are attached together with nutella mortar) and decorated with blue and white candy.  Delicious.

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The Wolvog lost another tooth.  Rather than go through this again, I wrote the word “TOOTH” in all caps on a post-it note, and then placed my ring and thumb drive on top of it so I would not be able to get through the evening without looking at the post-it note again.

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I thoroughly enjoy some of my spam comments.  I mean, beyond the strange gibberish ones or the Viagra ones.  Some of my recent favourites:

• “I’d actually rather pee on the golf club but yeah, I agree with you, George.” — left with a link to an engagement ring site.

• “Did you ever think that making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.” — left with a link to a loan payoff site.

With some extra googling, I found the first one originally as a comment on a golf site, and the second is a quote by Lyndon B. Johnson.  I guess my question is why spammers utilize urine in so many of their fake comments.

What has been your favourite piece of spam lately — blogwise or emailwise?

This post is for the 99% of the blogosphere.

Every year around this time, sites trot out their top 100 lists (yes, I’m looking at you, Babble).  They open up their blog awards as click-bait, slapping advertisements down the side of the page while they encourage nominees to encourage their readers to vote for them.  They do calls for the best of… the best of the food bloggers and the best of the tech bloggers and the best photography.  They create clickable lists of people to follow on Twitter — declaring certain accounts the accounts you need in your feed if you’re going to have your finger even touching someone who is touching the zeitgeist, making us believe that we’re not part of the zeitgeist anymore since there is a 1% living it for us.

Because then there are the rest of us.

The 99% of bloggers who write the content that doesn’t get recognized in any enormous way.  The daily posts about both the remarkable and mundane elements of life.  The people we actually connect with and love and would cry if they left the blogosphere.  The 1% are the bloggers we’re dying to meet just to see what they’re like in the face-to-face world.  The 99% are the bloggers we’re dying to spend time with because we just know it would be a fantastic conversation with a likeminded individual.

Blogging was — at one time — about leveling the playing field.  About taking away the gatekeepers of publishing and allowing every voice to have the potential to be heard.  And that is still what it is, though it’s almost as if people are too scared to allow ourselves equality, so we create these “best of” and “top blogger” lists in order to remind ourselves of some old time that doesn’t actually need to exist.

And for anyone who makes the argument that these lists tune out the cacophony of the blogosphere, allowing voices to be heard, I’d accept that argument if the lists changed yearly.  But they don’t.  And we all know that.

Five years ago, I started the Creme de la Creme as a response to this idea of separating out some bloggers from others; giving 1% attention while ignoring the 99%.  Because we all have amazing posts — not just once a year, but actually quite frequently.  And I can prove it with the evidence of the Friday Blog Roundup, which has been happening for 5 1/2 years.  Every week, for 5 1/2 years, I have been able to find at least 4 posts from various bloggers which are remarkable; noteworthy.  And the point is that it’s not the same bloggers weekly.  Almost 100% of the time, there is at least one blogger on the list who has never been featured prior to that point and the other three bloggers vary, bringing in all areas of the blogroll.  So if you take 286 Roundups (yes, the Roundups are misnumbered as we discovered last year though kept due to laziness) and multiply that by an average of four posts, that comes out to 1144 posts that I found remarkable, written by an average of 500 or so unique bloggers.  And if we add in the posts that you bring to the mix each week, we add in several thousand more.  Which — in my not-so-scientific opinion — proves the point that there are more than one or two infertility bloggers who deserve recognition.  There are actually 100% of us who do.

Movements have a manifesto; a clear vision for what they hope to accomplish and change.

This is mine, the one I’ve been repeating in various ways over the years.

Occupy Blog Street.  Sit down on your blog and write something today.  Hit publish.  Read everyone equally — mixing the 1% and 99% together to create a single entity.  Ignore “best of” lists.  Declare 2012 as the year of telling YOUR story and then tell it. (Though you may only get to December 21st because that’s when the world will officially end.  We’ll all understand if you miss blogging those last few days of the year since none of us will be around to read those posts.)

Check your stats once a day, and then wean yourself to once a week, and then wean yourself to once a month. (I would tell you not to check at all, but how else will you know the amusing Google searches that bring people to your blog?)  Do not judge the worth of a post by how many comments it gets, but instead judge the worth of a post by how it made you feel to write it.

Choose a blog to read just because you like the look of the header and layout and not because you found it on a top blogger list.  Use StumbleUpon and find posts you would have never found otherwise.  Stumble other people’s posts that you like.  Make sure you let your favourite bloggers know how much they are appreciated.  Everyone needs encouragement from time to time.

And most important, don’t feel badly if you’re not included on a top blogging list; if no one bestows an award on your blog this winter.  You’re in good company with the 99% of us who never make those lists either (nope, I’m not on them).  Other people’s opinions do not matter as much as your own.  And you know, in your heart of hearts, that your blog is not only worth writing but it is worth reading.  So re-read your own blog, make a day of it to curl up on the sofa and re-read your own thoughts.  And marvel over them.  Give yourself your own reward; make it out of paper cups and duct tape and gold foil.  Put all of your blog posts in a Word file because your words are important and worth protecting (you’ve done this, right?).

Every voice matters.

Photo Credit: modified with permission from SludgeGulper.

Back when Josh and I first started dating, there was a television show that we liked in Israel called Florentine.  This was back in the olden days, when we had to walk to school uphill both ways and the only Israeli television you could get in the States was Rechov Sum-Sum which was inexplicably aired at 3 am for nocturnal preschoolers.  The way you could see Florentine in America was via screenings where they’d show six back-to-back episodes in a theater.

Whoever made the films simply put all six episodes back-to-back sans commercials but with the opening and closing credits.  Which meant that if you went to see the television show, you sat in the theater and heard the opening theme song six times.  And if you went the next week to see the next six episodes, you heard the theme song another six times.  And if you happened to see all of season one and season two in a one-month period of time, you heard the theme song a total of 26 times.

It was a very catchy theme song performed by the band Monika Sex, which was sort of the Soul Asylum of Israel.  By the fourth episode or so, the repetitive theme song portion of evening turned into a Rocky Horror Picture Show-esque version with everyone singing along and pretending to be Tutti spraying her chocolate milk (er… that was chocolate milk… right?)  And then we’d all settle down, watch the episode, and then go back to singing along with the theme song at the next section break.

I was thinking about the song — “Maka Afora” — this week, and I decided to buy it on iTunes as a reward after completing a very difficult scene in the sequel of Life from Scratch.  And Josh made it into our ring tones for each other.  Which replaces my old ring tone for Josh which was Jon Ronson reading from his book, The Psychopath Test.

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/psycho.mp3]

Which, you know, raised some eyebrows when the phone went off in the food store.

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We are so in love with our new ring tone that we have taken to calling each other from inside the house.  When one of our phones goes off, we rush to be in the same room and dance to the song while the children look on in horror.  I love it because it reminds me of those first awkward months when you’re dating and you don’t really know each other well and you’re making up all these private jokes with one another that you hope you’ll still be able to repeat ten years later and have the other person around to hear them.  And then one day it happens: you marry the person and realize that all the inside jokes you created years earlier while watching an Israeli tv show are still accessible and you can dance around the kitchen, pretending to be Tutti spraying her chocolate milk.  And the other person gets it.

Plus, this song is so much better than Jon Ronson listing off predatory animals, nu?

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/03-Maka-Afora.mp3]

I know the words aren’t exactly happy, but it sounds like such a happy song.  And it reminds us of such a happy, giddy time.  What is your happy song, and why the hell isn’t it your ring tone (if it isn’t)?

 *******

The Wolvog showed us how to switch to typing in Hebrew in Gmail (I believe it only works on Macs), which is supremely unhelpful because you have no idea which button on the keyboard corresponds with which letter.  I commented that back in graduate school, I had a paper template that slipped over the keyboard that told me where everything was if I was using my Hebrew program. (I had to type in Hebrew for the translation portion of my degree.)  Josh said, “I bet it would be much easier on the iPad because it has a pop-up keyboard.”

The Wolvog went upstairs and got the iPad, and lo and behold, he set it up so that it now has two keyboards — one Hebrew and one English — and I can switch between the two with a click of one button.  I really don’t have an enormous need to write in Hebrew anymore, and I’m fairly certain that if I started posting tweets in Hebrew, I’d confuse all but maybe two followers.

But the Wolvog is so smitten with being able to write in Hebrew that he has begun typing up long manifestos of gibberish with the program since he can’t really write anything more than his name at this point.  Which means that random people have received said gibberish manifestos since the iPad is tied to my email account.  Which is a long way of saying that if you get a long string of random Hebrew letters emailed to you, it is just the Wolvog.  Though we’ve been telling people that it’s our orangutan banging on the iPad.

When they were little, it was so hard.  It was so hard to have someone need you so much.  We all want to be needed, a little bit.  But then we are faced with caring for someone elderly, someone ill, someone newborn, and we get overwhelmed by being needed so much.  And that was what it was like in the beginning.  The quiet nights when it was just me and a single baby, rocking in the glider with a bottle, were sweet.  Were baby shampoo and crusty formula sweet.  The louder nights when it was two babies and two parents awake, swinging them in a side hold with our mouths constantly echoing Dr. Karp’s lesson of “shhhhhhhhhhhhh,” those nights were hard and it felt like it would never end, that we would forever be sleep deprived and guessing at their needs.

People would tell us that we had no idea what was coming next; that we didn’t know how easy we had it.  And they were frankly wrong.  It is not necessarily harder, but it is different.

Perhaps it feels harder because the problems now grow roots down into the tender places of our psyche, into the dirt of our souls.  When they are hurt by friends, it is not just about their hurt.  It also makes you question whether you gave your child the right emotional tools to cope with other people.  And if you trace that path back far enough, you finally ask yourself quite simply, “am I doing a good enough job as a parent.”  When they are struggling in school, it’s not just about their grades.  It’s about whether you are spending enough time working on the core skills needed to get through all the onion layers of education.  And again, if you trace that path back far enough too, it ends up at the same question of whether you are doing a good enough job as a parent.

It was easier when we had all the power.  When we controlled the situation.  Our child would take a toy from another child, and we would be right beside them, teaching a lesson in real time, making them give the toy back.  But it was also hard to always be on, always be working, always be teaching.  They knew nothing.  This was the time to lay all of the groundwork.  But laying groundwork is hard.  It is tedious to try to teach someone who can’t really comprehend anything beyond this exact moment in time why it is good to share.  It is like watching a cooking show in a foreign language.  You get that it has something to do with food, but beyond that, it is gibberish.

It is harder now when we need to place control in their hands.  By which I mean that on one hand, our lives are easier; we no longer need to take care of every small thing.  They have stepped in and made the decisions we used to make, and by default, we can step back and do other things — I can take a shower in the morning and pour myself a cup of coffee; tasks that seemed impossible to get to when they were babies.  But I send them off to various places — to school, to parties, to playdates, to classes — and they now have the control.  They need to suddenly remember watching that foreign cooking show and translate it into a meal.

They have all the tools, but now it is their choice to decide whether or not to use them.  They can choose to ignore everything I tell them when we’re in front of one another, and the person that reflects on is not just them but me.  Think of every story about a misbehaving child and the question always asked is, “where were her parents?” or “what sort of parent raises a child like that?”  You would think that we would stop asking that question knowing full well that our parents are currently no more in control of our behaviour than we are of the next generation.  But we can’t help ourselves, even though we know that autonomy is a lot more complicated than simply regurgitating what our parents tried to teach us.

The twins make 1000 choices every moment of every day.  We talk about our choices constantly, reducing this entire concept to a single letter “Y” that I sometimes leave on a note in their lunchbox or written on their hand in Sharpie or simply say one last time before they leave my car.  It is shorthand for the idea that every single person on this earth has two possible lives — the one she leads and the unfulfilled life that isn’t accessed because of choices she makes.  Each decision takes us to a fork, and I want them to take the path that is going to bring them what they desire in life: friends, success in school, a thriving computer company.  I make them sit and think about that other fork; that road not taken.  The one that takes them far away from everything they think they want, like some secular version of A Christmas Carol.

Sometimes I use the last five minutes before pick-up worrying about what they’ve done while we’ve been apart, even though the worrying is meaningless.  The minutes have already occurred, the decisions have already been made.  Maybe it’s just the anticipation of waiting to hear how they used that control, how they processed those lessons.

I believe that it will get harder than this.  By which I mean that it will be easier than those first two years when they needed me so deeply, and it will be harder than those first two years when their entire world fit inside my world.  So when I use the term harder, I mean that it will be more painful to have my heart tugged out of my chest, dragged away from me as the twins grow up and become entirely separate beings from us; from each other.  A long time ago, I had the physical pain of sleep deprivation; and now I have the emotional pain of watching someone process and internalize my words; internalize my lessons.  And I need to face how well I’ve taught them.  And I need to let go and understand that even if I delivered the information perfectly, the knowledge can still be lost in translation.  And I need to own the times that we all do take the right fork in the Y, and put ourselves closer to the place we want to be.

One morning, I wake up and have this really funny story that would probably only be amusing to me, Josh, and these two other men that we know.  So I log onto Facebook so I can write this man and tell him the story (knowing that he is going to crack up as much as we are), and I discover that at some point, he unfriended me.  He also unfriended Josh.  Though Josh is still connected to his husband.  Which makes me think that we only offended one person in the couple (I was never connected to his husband on Facebook).  Unless we didn’t offend him at all and this is all a tech glitch.  Or a misunderstanding.  Or a button inadvertently hit.  Because the man has several thousand friends, so it can’t be that he’s paring back his account to just those who know his middle name.  So it either has to be a mistake or I have to be an enormous bitch.  It’s one or the other.

Except I can’t really ask.  I mean, if it was a good friend, of course I could say something without looking too strange (though I might not).  But for someone who is just an acquaintance who may even need help having his memory jogged since it has been five years since we last saw each other, I can’t really write him a needy email asking why we’re no longer Facebook friends.  In those cases, you just need to slink away and wonder what the hell you did.  Or didn’t do.

And these are the times when I hate Facebook.  Because if it didn’t exist, I would have just emailed the man and told him the story, and we both would have had a chuckle over email.  But Facebook took what should have been a mindless, amusing exchange and turned it into this great big drama of what-the-hell-did-I-say-to-make-him-unfriend-me.  And now the story isn’t quite so funny anymore.

*******

And the winner of the #2 slot on the Creme de la Creme is…

Drum roll, please.

DSpence at Donating Hope, otherwise known as #71 (thank you, random number generator).  Congratulations, DSpence.

When the list goes up on January 1st in the morning, it will have — give or take — 222 blogs on it.  Doesn’t that sound delicious?  You can still submit to the Creme de la Creme, but your post will not be on the list when it first goes up.  It will be added during the month of January (the list it technically open for submissions until January 5th, though it will take me longer than that to write all the blurbs and get everything up).

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “My Big Announcement” (Write Mind Open Heart)
• “This Damage Runs Deep, Real Deep” (Becoming Parents)
• “Why Writing a Book is Like a Dysfunctional Relationship” (My Fascinating Life)
• “Article ‘Looking for Closure in All the Wrong Places’” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “A Broken Compass” (Bodega Bliss)
• “Dark Passenger”  (MissConception)
• “Raising Human Beings and Life Lessons from the Duggars” (Millions of Miles)
• “Holiday Blues” (From IF to When)
• “Emotions Choc-a-Bloc” (My Lady of the Lantern)
• “400 Words” (Outlandish Notions)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Stumbling Gracefully has a beautiful, raw post this week about what it really means to meet on that common ground.  What she is mourning is the ease in which decisions are made.  She writes, “I’m jealous that their relationship is strong enough to withstand the turbulence of two young children, that they have such confidence in their own foundation so as to entrust it with such an incredible and precious weight. I’m incredulous that their addition didn’t require negotiation or anger or anxiety or resentment.”  It’s just such a powerful post.

A Little Blog about the Big Infertility has a post about the upcoming holidays.  She gives her rating system, explaining where she usually emotionally spends the holidays and where she is on the continuum this year.  Where do you rate on her scale?

No Kidding in NZ has a post about acceptance; what it means and what it doesn’t mean.  She explains: “For me, acceptance means the ability to live our lives the best way we can, within the constraints of our lives.  In other words, we can’t have kids (whether short term or permanently), but we can still have a good life, enjoy ourselves, and appreciate the parts of our life that we wouldn’t have if we have children.  That latter part is the hard bit often.  Acceptance doesn’t mean that we are rejoicing we don’t have children, and it doesn’t mean we didn’t really want them.”  Go read the post in full.

Lastly, Hannah Wept and Sarah Laughed has a great post about what she learned about living and taking risks.  It’s about how we try to hold onto control, and why we may sometimes want to let go and jump without knowing where we’ll land.  She has decided to leave the safe path, the small path, and go big or go home.  And it just made me smile to see someone grabbing at the brass ring.

The roundup to the Roundup: The problem with Facebook.  The winner of the second slot!  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 9th and December 16th) 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.