This is the second part of a two-part blog post.  As I said before, one post simply grew too long to contain everything I wanted to say.  The first part can be found here (containing Takes One, Two, and Three).

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Take Four:

Five years ago, I started this blog.  The twins were still babies.  I was so confident that we’d have another child.  I didn’t know how we’d pay the bills.  I wanted to be a writer, but the only thing I thought I knew how to do is be a teacher.  I had a small circle of friends.

The twins are turning seven this summer.  We don’t have that third child and I don’t know if we ever will.  I’m able to work out of the house and be a full-time parent.  I have two books published.  I miss teaching from time to time, but it doesn’t feel like the only thing I could do with myself.  I know people around the world and my friendship circles are like rings, many deep.

There is a saying in DC that if you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes.

(Yes, I’m aware that other cities also have this saying, but it actually originated in The Washington Post on March 4, 1934.  So there.)

The same can be said about life.  Whether or not you like the figurative weather, it’s going to change.  That can be bittersweet when life is good.  And it can be a huge relief when things are bad.  It will not always be like this.

The same can be said about blogs, which is why I rarely unsubscribe from reading one.  Even if I don’t like the post I’m reading today, I may like the one the person writes tomorrow.  Chances are, if I took the time in the first place to subscribe to the blog, that more interesting things will percolate to the screen at some point in the future.

The same can be said about writing a blog — the stats of today, the comments of today, the readership of today — it will all be different tomorrow.  That can be a bad thing if you’re enjoying a creative period and the posts are flowing.  The readers are coming and the comments are being left.  Because that will dry up, sad to say.  It won’t dry up entirely, but we all have our good blogging days and our bad ones.

But it can also be a good thing if your blog or your readership or your comment levels aren’t where you want them to be today.  There is always the chance for a change in the future.

That is what makes life — and writing — interesting.

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Take Five:

Five years ago, I started this blog.  Every year on my blogoversary, I give myself a word to concentrate on for the year.

Year One (which ended up describing my first year of blogging): Connections
Year Two (set on my first blogoversary): Action
Year Three (set on my second blogoversary): Listening
Year Four (set on my third blogoversary): Tune
Year Five (set on my fourth blogoversary): Own

This year, I thought the word would have something to do with the Prompt-ly list since it is absolutely the project I’m concentrating on this year.

But I had to write a letter this week to someone who means a great deal to me to explain why she means a great deal to me.  I had to take this very emotional thing — love — and put it into words.

In trying to pinpoint it, the best way I could explain why she means a great deal to me is that she recognizes that the world is inadvertently a cold place.  That while we may do caring acts from time to time — helping an old lady cross the street or listening to a friend for an hour — our day is mostly spent in bubbles where we focus solely on ourselves even as we perform tasks for others.

We don’t mean to shut each other out, but we do it (and sociologists could probably explain why it’s actually necessary for humans to do this in order to survive and thrive).  Someone asks us for a favour, and we ignore them.  Someone admits they’re lonely, and we don’t reach out to let them know we’re listening.

So we shut each other out — albeit inadvertently (most likely due to the constraints of time).  At the same time, it is our relationships that make the difference in this world, that heat this cold world.  We notice those moments that people leave their bubble to enter our own because those moments are what makes the difference between people feeling supported and people feeling alone.

Humans are not meant to be alone.

Think about the emails you’ve saved because someone said something that meant the world for you to hear.  Or the times when we’ve gushed about how someone took the time to converse with us or read our blog.  We have such gratitude for human interactions — even the small ones.

Yet even knowing how good it makes us feel to have someone interact with us; to reach their hand into our life and let us know that we’re not alone, we don’t spend nearly enough time doing this.  Perhaps out of survival — we need to focus on ourselves in order to keep moving forward — though I can’t help but think this is counterintuitive.  Wouldn’t we go so much farther if we all spent more time focused on interacting with others since it could come full circle and have people interact with us.  Don’t we accomplish more together than we ever do on our own?

So, my word for this year, for year six (on my fifth blogoversary):

Pop.

As in, I’m going to take this year to try to pop my bubble each day.  To be conscious of reaching out to others and making that connection count.  To engage in conversations.  To help where I can help.

Even if I only increase my time outside by bubble by five minutes a day, that’s amounts to 1825 or over 30 hours of time each year that I am engaged in community by actively interacting.

Will I be able to always pop my bubble for everyone else who needs me to pop my bubble and focus on them?  Of course not.  I’m a human being who needs to practice guitar for at least a half hour each night, do my job and volunteer work, and spend countless hours trying to come up with new and interesting ways to annoy Josh and the twins (please, that takes A LOT of brain power).  So in advance, I’m sorry if you slip through the cracks and my bubble doesn’t pop.  It isn’t on purpose, though I know that’s cold comfort.

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Five takes for my fifth blogoversary.  Five years ago, I started this blog.  And I am so happy that I did.  And so grateful that you are here.

And you better not leave this post bare of comments just because you used up your blogoversary wishes on this first one!  Pop that bubble!

This is the first part of a two-part blog post.  One post simply grew too long to contain everything I wanted to say.

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Take One:

Five years ago, I started this blog.

The end.

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Take Two:

Five years ago, I started this blog.  When I read about blogoversaries back when I first started this blog, I couldn’t fathom celebrating my own.  Certainly not my five-year one.  And while you eight- or ten-year bloggers may scoff at my piddly five-year marker, those who are just starting out are probably looking at this number the way I did five years ago.  How the hell does it happen?

How does someone open a post box and write a new post, day after day after day?  I have never stepped away from the blog for longer than a few days.  How do you blog the same holidays year after year?  Life keeps revolving — years are circular — but blogs are linear.  They keep moving in a straight line of events while life circles back around, the same themes constantly surfacing, the same foibles revealed, the same struggles fought.

You feel love, you feel love, you feel love.

And you need to keep writing this linear project, keeping it fresh and interesting to yourself because if you’re bored, then what is the point?

You reach a five-year anniversary, you write several thousand posts, simply by doing it.  By falling in love with your blog and taking all that comes with that relationship.  The sweet moments when the comments are high, the dry moments where you can’t think about what to write.  The blog posts that bring you nothing but tears.  The blog posts that you would cry about if you ever lost.

Because love is never easy.  Love is messy; and it’s wonderful in its messiness.  And if you love your blog, you too will one day look at the calendar and realize that you are celebrating a five-year blogoversary.

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Take Three:

Five years ago, I started this blog.  People have asked me before if I’ve ever thought about walking away from it.  Of course I have thought about it.  I think it is natural to be in a mood and take out that mood on something or someone you love.  You know who will be forgiving and who won’t be.

You probably just made a face and thought to yourself, but a blog is an inanimate object.  It’s like saying that you’ve taken out your mood on a dish.

But you’re not inanimate, are you?  Every reader is a living, breathing human.

(You are human, right?  The aliens haven’t arrived yet, right?  I am a little freaked out from the Falling Skies opening episode.)

Therefore, you take a chance when you take out your mood on a blog because it’s like coral — you think you are standing on a rock, something that can’t feel pain or react to the pressure of your foot, and then you discover that coral is actually a living organism, capable of dying.

A blog is quite similar.  If you think of it as an inanimate object, you’re being careless.  Blogs are living organisms with very real people attached to the word core.  People who are affected by what you choose to place on the screen.  They will laugh or they will cry or they will think; but they can also walk away angry, frustrated, or filled with grief.

I am human, and I lash out just like every other human from time to time.  I take out my mood on this blog, and I think about walking away from it.  But like all good relationships, this blog has the elasticity to bend without breaking.  You pull away.  I pull away.  And then we regroup and come back together.  And I write yet again.

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Takes Four and Five coming soon.

I had this sucks-to-be-the-adult moment on Friday while we were getting ready to go out to the butcher.  I opened the front door and saw a cricket in the top of the door frame.  The kids had already walked through the door and I panicked and slammed the door on them, then opened it and shrieked for them to come inside, and then slammed the door again once they were behind me.

“There is a cricket in the door frame,” I explained.

“But crickets can’t hurt you,” the ChickieNob told me.

“They don’t even have mouths,” the Wolvog said.  (I personally think this may be incorrect, but I’m not going to Google crickets to find out.)

“Will you go outside and kill it?” I asked, knowing full well that there is no possible way for them to reach it.

“No way,” the ChickieNob shivered.

And it freakin’ sucks because as the only adult in the house, it was my responsibility to go knock it away.  But the only way to knock it away would be to run underneath it.  So I came up with a plan: I would open the main door, throw open the screen door and jump out, and the twins would slam the main door behind me so the cricket couldn’t jump in while I knocked it away.  Fantastic plan.

(First, though, I wasted a five minute chunk of time explaining to the twins why they don’t want to grow up and become the adult because you have to do stupid shit like this.)

Everyone was ready.  I grabbed a fly swatter and a bottle of bug spray and opened the door — slowly — and checked to make sure it was still in the frame.  Then I bolted through the second door and the Wolvog slammed the front door on me.  Triumphantly past the cricket and in a position to actually get rid of it, I turned around to see THE FREAKIN’ SNAKE!

It was actually not the original snake.  This one was black and only 2 or 3 feet.  It was skinnier.  BUT DID I MENTION THAT IT WAS A SNAKE?

So I have the cricket in front of me and the snake behind me.

Because I’m an idiot, I was actually more fearful of the cricket.

After snapping a picture of the snake with my blackberry (because that’s what you do in these sorts of situations), I went to work trying to kill the cricket with bug spray.  But the thing wouldn’t die.  It kept creeping around the door frame.  Luckily, a man was out walking his dog and he came by and helped swat it away for me.  He also told me to leave the snake alone because it was “great for eating mice.”  Which is all well and good, but did I mention that means we’re living around a SNAKE?

The man also turned out to be a plumber/electrician and lived in our neighbourhood, so I took this opportunity to make a new friend since he seemed totally fine with the idea of replacing our exterior lights and seemed like the sort who would come over and catch a snake for me if it ever got in the house.  Because, again, this entire time we’re talking, there was a black snake a few feet away.

I never want the twins to grow up, but part of me feels like the trade-off for becoming teens is that the responsibility on cricket killing and snake handling gets spread around.  I may still need to be an adult and pay the bills, but at least we can play rock, paper, scissors to see who is going to get the bug. (Please let me always win, please let me always win.)

The twins and I like to play a game in the car sometimes called “The Best Part of / The Worst Part of” where we name the best and worst things about being a kid or an adult.

For instance, the best part of being an adult is that if you want to have cookies for lunch, you can have cookies for lunch and no one can stop you.  The worst part about being an adult is that if a snake gets into our house, I’m going to have to put on my big girl panties and deal with it.

What do you think the best part and worst part about being an adult is?

We are currently having a  Harry Potter lovefest (which I refer to as a verb: Pottering) because I’ve let them watch the first film.  My rule is that we can only watch the films for the books we’ve read and since I’ll only let them near the first two books right now, our pickings are fairly limited.

But I loved watching their mouths fall open when the brick wall moves to reveal Diagon Alley.  I remember crying in the movie theater when I saw that, wishing so badly that I could actually be there. (To be fair, it was also the day before my wedding so I was on an emotional hair trigger.)

On Wednesday night, right before bed, I caught the Wolvog standing in front of the mirror, pushing his hair off his forehead.  The Wolvog was born with a red scar on his forehead, a scar the neonatologist swore would probably fade within weeks.  We are now nearing on seven years and it is still visible.  It looks like a crooked V and we all absolutely love his scar (including him), especially because we’ve always called him “the boy who lived” since he was born prematurely at 2 pounds.

So he was staring in the mirror with this hopeful expression on his face and the ChickieNob was whispering something to him.  Afterward he climbed into bed and he finally burst out with: “I really think I might be magical, and I can’t wait until I’m 11 and find out!”

I did nothing to help matters.  I just encouraged it, somehow forgetting that Hogwarts isn’t real.  We spent an extra half hour dreaming up what life would be like when their letter arrived.  When I became the parent of a little witch and wizard (oh, because I assured them that with twins, if one is magical, the other is definitely magical too).

And seriously, somewhere in that conversation, it was like seeing Diagon Alley on the screen all over again.  My heart just exploded over the idea of it all being real.

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As part of our Harry Potter lovefest, we watched clips from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying on YouTube before dinner.  We are trying very hard to convince Josh to take us to this.  So far, he has not budged.

But isn’t Daniel Radcliffe a great dancer?

Help me convince Josh to take us.

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Somehow, Life from Scratch made a special list on Amazon for top rated humour writing.  The list is Jimmy Fallon, Adam Carolla, Christopher Moore, and… me.  I have been told many times in my life that I’m just not funny, so this was great vindication — to have a book powerhouse like Amazon knight me amusing.  It made me want to call up everyone from high school who told me that I wasn’t funny and rub it in their face.  And then I realized that no one in high school told me that I wasn’t funny because I was completely invisible in high school.  Then I went back to eating candied pecans.

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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:

• “Right Where I Am Project: Two Years and Five Months” (Still Life with Circles)
• “Right Where I Am: Two Months, Twenty Days” (Here We Go Again)
• “Sex, Infertility, and Where to Shove the 40 Beads” (Stirrup Queens)
• “First Time Being Called Twins” (Three Times the Fun)
• “Mommy’s Garden” (Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed)
• “Barometers” (Two Kayaks)
• “One Year Ago Today” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “One of Those Days” (Taking the Statistical Bullet)
• “2011 Has Turned, Finally” (Just Two Lines Away)
• “Who is this Person?” (The Elusive Embryo)
• “The Pink” ((In)fertile Mrytle)
• “Unintentional Rant” (My Little Blessing in Disguise)
• “On the Subject of Staying Home” (Three is a Magic Number)
• “Two Solitudes” (Mrs. Spit… Still Spouting Off)
• “The Day We Said Goodbye and She Rode Around the City Alone” (Jack at Random)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Eggs in a Row has a post about her guilty pleasure — reading mommy blogs.  She reads them because they present a world so different from the one she grew up in, but she also admits: “Sometimes, I let myself dream.  I read these blogs, and let myself imagine a future where I am a good mom, instead of a wishful, waiting infertile.  And you know what?  I can’t wait.”  Do you also read those blogs, letting yourself dream?  Or do you avoid them like a plague?  Or somewhere in between?

Just Us and the Cat explains why she can’t watch Glee.  The show is like a location casualty, bringing with it memories of her loss.  She writes, “I never did finish watching that episode of Glee.  For a while, Glee episodes became a marker for how long it had been since I’d discovered that the pregnancy was going badly wrong.”

Lastly, Raising Kvell has a beautiful post about a loss (thank you, Jendeis, for sending it my way!).  The line that made me pause comes towards the end: “I’m not going to be a Mama again after all and I went through almost an entire trimester pregnant, with nothing.”  It’s a post that is ultimately filled with a lot of hope, but that line just got to me.

The roundup to the Roundup: We very well may have a witch and wizard in our house.  Help me convince Josh to blow through our savings to see How to Succeed in Business.  Someone thinks I’m funny.  And lots of great blog posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 10 and June 17) 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.

And I’d like to thank you for such a robust list of posts last week in the comment section.  Can we do it again?  Plus, revisit the posts above and give them a little extra love if you didn’t last week.

The school calendar came home this week in the twins’ school bag, and it had on it the final day of this school year as well as the first day of the next school year.  I took down the family calendar and added in the date because I am — if nothing else — responsible.  And then I counted the number of weeks in the summer.   What originally felt like this fantastic sea of time now feels like a scrunched up, half-used tissue at the bottom of a purse.

We have a lot of things eating into the summer — namely, camp and trips — and even though they are both for very tiny amounts of time, my calendar looks like a monster ripped out enormous bites from the days, leaving behind some sinew and bone.

I often have this problem.  Before the thing has even begun, I’m mourning the end.  Instead of looking at all the days and hours we do have for the pool or side projects or amusement parks, I am stressing about that end date when summer is over.  If I’m not careful, I’m going to spend my whole summer scowling at that back-to-school date and then get to the end and realize that I missed actually enjoying the moment.

Just putting that here so I don’t do that.  I’m ignoring the end date.  I am pretending this is an endless summer.  Chase the wave.

But seriously, did they have to send the back-to-school date on the same calendar as this year’s end-of-school date?

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It feels awkward to post your own good news, but I’m really proud of this so forget modesty: I’m a finalist for the Bloganthropy awards.  There’s no voting; it’s decided by a panel at Bloganthropy.  They announced the finalists this week and they’ll announce the winner on the 24th.

Of course I love awards that look at my writing; I work hard at finding the right words for a post or book.  But this award is different.  It is given to those who use their blog to make “a difference by using social media to effectively promote a cause or charity.”

So it was emotional to have that recognized.  Next week will mark the fifth anniversary of this blog — 5 years of trying to use this space to build community, support those experiencing infertility or loss, and disseminate information.  I’m grateful to have that work recognized.

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The Prompt-ly listserv is no longer this quiet, docile space.  It is now jumping with conversation and ideas.  And I freakin’ love it.  All are still welcome to join and start talking/listening.