We took the twins to see their first movie last weekend–Ponyo. It’s the story about a little fish who wants to be a girl, a weak plotted version of the Little Mermaid (where once the fish tastes human blood, all she wants in the world is to be a little girl. It’s just like when you eat a hamburger and all you want to do, with all your heart, enough to leave your family behind forever, is to turn into a cow).

Absolutely necessary to watch a movie in a theater for the first time: three stuffed animals, two necklaces, a bracelet, and a bag of chocolate chips. The Wolvog watched the first 80 minutes from Josh’s lap and finally decided that he could handle having his own seat even though movies are simply too intense to combine with eating. The ChickieNob handled the first 90 minutes in her own seat, but moved into my lap for the remainder.

The most exciting moment in the film came when the mother served the children ramen noodles. Ramen noodles! After our own successful ramen noodle chase which unfolded over Twitter last Friday night. There is only one vegan ramen noodle option out there and Josh drove to three stores to find it; a truer sign of his devotion than the sea king asking the little boy if, you know, he could love Ponyo whether she was a fish or human. Did you hear that, Fujimoto? My husband drove to three stores to buy me the saltiest food known to man. That is love; that is devotion.

Eating ramen reminds me of a spring in college where I boasted that I could eat for under $3 a day. And I did. Two meals of ramen noodles (which came to 40 cents), a cucumber (about 75 cents) and the rest on coffee. Such a healthy life.

But the absolute best part of the movie came when we walked into the theater. I am such a fucking wholesome person that I have only once stayed in the theater and watched a second film for free. I mean, I have seen two movies in one day, but I have WALKED OUT OF THE THEATER AND PURCHASED A SECOND TICKET. Because I’m that wholesome.

But once–once!–when I was pregnant with the twins, we went to see Shrek 2 and it was so awful that I started crying about how we’d never see a film again once the twins arrived and this was our last chance and it was a terrible film and we wasted it–we wasted it. So Josh told me that we were going to see Mean Girls too. And while I had a massive guilt complex, I went along with the plan, but bought extra popcorn to make up for the thievery.

Of course, I was seven months pregnant so I had to pee every few minutes and it order to get to the bathroom, I had to pass the ticket taker. I could tell that he knew that I had been in the theater and peed way too many times for a single feature, and I had such a huge guilt complex that my heart was literally beating out of my chest like the Tell-Tale Heart, but the man never said anything to me. He would just raise his eyebrows when I passed.

That was the man who took our tickets.

He was not as enthralled to see us as we were to see him.

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

Early in our relationship, Josh and I were in a used bookstore and we each purchased each other a book to read. I bought Josh Adam’s Diary by Knut Faldbakken. For some inexplicable reason, this book has been by the front door for the past three years or so amongst the gardening equipment. This isn’t the reason I’m telling you this story.

In college, I got special permission to take a high-level Scandinavian literature class. It was all graduate students and seniors and a nineteen-year-old me. The course work was really over my head. This was one of the books we read in class. One of the main characters was called Payk and it seemed like there was a joke surrounding this name, but I didn’t get it because I didn’t speak Norwegian and I was reading the book in translation, unlike some of the graduate students.

I called up a friend in Norway and asked him why this would be amusing. I kept saying aloud that the boy’s name is Payk (pronouncing in “p’ache”–like ache, with a p in front of it), never spelling it, and my friend said, “well, I’ve heard Falkbakken is pretty racy. He probably created a name that is close to ‘pikk’ which means ‘cock’.”

I took this information to class.

And I made sure I spoke first in class in order to work in this brilliant assessment of his name. “And, of course,” I said confidently, “Falkbakken continues the sexual themes of the book by working the word ‘pikk’ into the text in the form of Payk’s name.”

And there was silence.

And there were uncomfortable looks exchanged and a few people laughed and the teacher gently said, “the main character’s name is pronounced “Pay Koa”–the two letters “p” and “k” with the Norwegian pronunciation of those letters. Because his name is actually Per Kristian. So PK or Pay-koa (also written Payk) is merely short for Per Kristian. And it would help if you didn’t use words like that in my seminar again.”

Classy!

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (Important: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name. Links not going to a Show and Tell post will be deleted). The list is open from now until late Friday night and a new one is posted every week.

I am happy that in the first 24 hours, we already had over 50 people playing Blogger Bingo, but frankly, I want more. Because…well…the more people playing, the easier it is to find posts because you have more blogs to search. So, my goal is to have 100 for this first round.

Think of it this way, what if one day the whole world starts playing Blogger Bingo and it becomes a late night game show and people are walking around sporting “I freakin’ love Blogger Bingo and gave up my home life in order to play it incessantly” t-shirts? You could say that you were in on the very first round and were immortalized on the participant list to prove it.

Yes?

No?

Thank you to everyone who has signed up to play Blogger Bingo. Not just because it took three showers and a car drive to mentally piece together all the elements of the game, but because it is an enormous distraction right now. We are worried about some appointments this week; lay-in-bed-and-stare-at-the-ceiling-at-2-a.m. worried. But in the end, it’s not my story to tell, therefore, I don’t feel like I can be the one to tell it here.

I have tried other distractions. We cleaned the house tonight in preparation for a friend coming over, our heads down over piles of paper, sorting and tossing and filing and speaking about nothing. Cleaning is usually enough for me; organizing, settling, straightening. But after a half hour, we both stopped. I apologize in advance to my friend for the shoes in the front hallway but I’m not going to bother with them tonight.

Instead of focusing on what is happening this week, I will transport you back five years ago to this very time period, when the twins were finishing up their stint in the NICU. Some time during their second week in the NICU, I had bumped into a nurse practitioner by the elevators around 11 p.m. She asked me how I was and I sort of did that head nod thing you do when you don’t trust yourself to speak because you’re afraid you’re going to cry.

Even though I was on my way to pump (oh for the love, I was always on my way to pump), she steered me towards her office and had me unload all of my fears, starting with the smallest ones (that my breast milk would never come in…which…er…turned out to be true) to the largest ones (that the twins would die). And tucked somewhere in the middle of no breast milk and death was this event looming inside my head–my son’s bris.

The reality is that no mohel would touch him. He was two pounds with an inability to regulate his body temperature for longer than twenty minutes. I didn’t blame them and I knew we were exempt from the 8 day rule with circumcision, but I was terrified of putting him through a bris at home. He came home on a heart monitor for tachycardia and I couldn’t imagine how we’d get through the service emotionally. Not when he was so small, so fragile (and at the same time, so ornery, so feisty).

The nurse practitioner, an orthodox Jewish woman, told me that she couldn’t help with the breast milk thing and she couldn’t make promises about their future health, but she could solve the bris problem. We could hold the bris in the hospital on the day before they went home.

And that is how we held my son’s bris in the conference room at a Jesuit, crucifix-on-the-wall hospital. We found a mohelet who was also a surgeon. The nurses came down to help us care for the twins and be there in the event of an emergency (and one exclaimed afterward in her thick Southern accent that she was just so tickled to be part of something so exciting!). We brought some family and items from the two men the twins are named after. We had the traditional Jewish service and the nurses sensitively turned off his heart monitor for the moment of the circumcision so we wouldn’t need to hear the alarms going off when we all knew they would be going off.

After all of the worrying, all of the fretting, in the end, I got the traditional Jewish service I wanted. The service I needed. It may not have looked like the service we planned when they were still in-utero, but it was beautiful and unique and we made it our own.

I am distracting myself from everything going on this week by remembering how things have always turned out fine in the end; that people have helped us through and that the important things have always been cushioned with a safe landing. That so much of the worrying (except that damn breast milk thing) has never come to fruition. That humans are flexible and we roll with new information because we have no choice but to roll with new information. That we have been lucky. That regardless of anything else, coming through that beginning, we are one of the lucky ones.

The bris itself is the better story. More than how I locked myself in the bathroom and the mohelet had to come inside and listen to me cry for a half hour and only charged us her regular rate even though she also provided some on-the-spot therapy. Or how I was insane by that point, a reaction to the Reglan I was taking for the non-existent breast milk. Those aren’t really pleasant things to talk about and I am distracting right now.

I am placing my head back in the sand. Thinking about the bris. My grandfather’s hat on a chair. The melting ice cream. The ChickieNob’s head tucked under my chin as I bit my lip.

Welcome to the first ever game of Blogger Bingo. The prize for this round is a $20 gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. Please read the directions below in order to understand how the game is played and sign up if you wish to participate. Sign up closed on August 23rd at 11 p.m. (EST). Once sign up closes, you will need to wait until the next round to sign up to play.

Why Blogger Bingo? Why not? And I need something to battle the late summer blues and this game will spread around blog traffic, hopefully increase commenting, and celebrate blogging in general. And I felt drawn to the idea of making up a new game. And even if you don’t win the gift certificate, you will definitely win increased blog traffic (read below to see how this will happen). So…it’s win, win?

These bloggers are currently signed up to participate in this round of Blogger Bingo. If you would like to be added to the list, keep reading below the list.

1. Stirrup Queens
2. Late for a Very Important Pregnancy
3. Production, Not Reproduction
4. Confessions of A Cocktail Napkin
5. Weebles Wobblog
6. Baby Smiling In Back Seat
7. Building Heavenly Bridges
8. I’m a Smart One
9. Just Another Mommy Blog
10. Infertili- T & A
11. Opposite of Oops
12. A Little Sweetness
13. Just Multiply by 2
14. Sippy Cups Are Not For Starbucks
15. You expect my uterus to do what?
16. Mommy Someday?
17. Making Me Mom
18. Dragondreamer’s Lair
19. Relaxing Doesn’t Make Babies
20. I Digress
21. My Pathway to Motherhood
22. My Little Drummer Boys
23. Maybe Baby?
24. Baby’s Breath (tales of a brown-eyed-girl)
25. Okaasan Mommy and More
26. Hobbit-ish Thoughts & Ramblings
27. In Due Time
28. Woman Anyone?
29. My Life In Stirrups
30. Mrs. Spit Spouts Off
31. Conception Deception
32. Our Someday Family
33. One Who Understands
34. Elana’s Musings
35. IF You Only Knew
36. Once an Infertile
37. Semi-fertile
38. Twists of Fate
39. Thinking Miracles
40. Sparkly Things Distract Me
41. Perchancetodream
42. happy-go-lucky
43. Scarlet Baby
44. Justamere IVF
45. Our Family Beginnings
46. From Chaos Comes Clarity
47. Creating Motherhood
48. Yes, We’re One of THOSE Couples
49. Tantrums and Tequila
50. Child of G-d
51. Not Just About Cancer
52. Parenthood for Me
53. Alana-isms
54. Trying to get Knocked up by Another Man
55. Rottweilers Ate My Laptop
56. Three is a Magic Number
57. TheNewLifeOfNancy
58. We got hitched. We bought the 4 bedroom house. Now what???
59. Raining Raining
60. MeAndBaby’s Blog
61. All Aboard the Pity Boat
62. The Life and Times of KitVonD
63. Life, Family and the Pursuit of Sanity
64. HopeinBriarrose
65. In One Ear
66. Getting There
67. Infertility Instability
68. The Mis-Adventures of a Modern Day Farmer’s Wife
69. Beautiful Mess
70. All Grown Up
71. Blurbs By Jennifer
72. My fertility journey with PCOS
73. BillieGirl
74. Slaying, Blogging, Whatever…
75. Exile In Kidville
76. Isn’t TTC Supposed To Be Fun?!
77. Life After Infertility & Loss
78. Not a Fertile Myrtle
79. All My Peccadilloes
80. Run Amok Amok
81. Once A Mother
82. Reproductive Jeans
83. A Page In My Book
84. Are we there yet?
85. Ambivalent Womb
86. The Unfair Struggle
87. What a Shame about Me
88. Salvageable
89. Hold My Hope
90. Three of a kind working on a full house…
91. little birdhouse
92. Confessions Of A College Angel
93. Birds and Squirrels
94. Project Kjetil
95. The Light at the End of Our Tunnel
96. The Queen’s Rambles
97. I Won’t Fear Love
98. PCOS Blogger
99. Life with Endometriosis and PCOS
100. Sorry; the list is now closed. A new round will open soon.

How to Play (yes, it seems complicated at first, but if you read carefully, you will see how simple it is in practice):

1. Sign up to participate. If you are not on the list, you will not be eligible to win. You will need to provide a blog name, blog url (yes, you need to be a blogger to participate), the number for the card (see below) which you wish to use, and an email to use to contact you if I have questions. The categories on all the cards are the same though the order varies. Unfortunately, like IComLeavWe, you cannot participate if your blog is password protected. And another unfortunate thing is that sign up closed on August 23rd.
2. Please place this code on your blog and keep it up until the end of the game. It will help connect people to the project and show other bloggers who are participating that you are on the list. You will be sent a reminder to remove it when a winner has been named. You will not be added to the list until the code is in place.
3. The Participant List can be found above these directions.
4. You randomly chose a bingo card colour during sign-up. Scroll down to the bottom of this post and click on your card. Then print out a copy so you can have it at home. Feel free to take notes on it. You cannot switch cards after signing up.
5. Starting August 24th, I will pull one card each day. Each card has one category on it and that category will be listed in the top, permanent post on my blog (the one that contains a link to the current issue of the LFCA). I know, tricky isn’t it? You will need to keep on top of things in order to have the best chance of winning because the card will be erased after 24 hours and a new one pulled. As I said, the card states one of the categories that you see listed on the bingo cards at the bottom of this post. For instance, I may pull a card that states: “find a blog post that mentions coffee.”
6. In addition to pulling a card, I will also list a date. The post you are looking for comes before, after, or during that date (more below). For example, now the command might state: “find a blog post that mentions coffee written after April 22, 2008.” The date matters.
7. Read blogs that are contained in the participant list to look for a post that matches the card of the day. For example, if I pull the card that says, “a post that made you sad before August 15, 2009,” you will look for a post prior to August 15th that made you sad on any of the blogs on the participant list. You may not list a post from your own blog; it needs to come from another person. All posts need to come from someone on the participant list, it cannot come from a blog that is not participating.
8. Leave a comment on that post (even if it is an old post) and then keep track of the url of that post at home (bookmark it somewhere). When you call Bingo, you will need to turn in the posts you used to “mark your space.” Please leave a comment that shows that you read the post. Just writing, “nice post!” does not count as a comment.
9. Once you have found a post on a person’s blog, you cannot use that blog again during this round. In other words, if you use a post from my blog as your “a post that made me sad” you cannot use another post from my blog the next day when a new card is drawn.
10. When you get five in a row, email me with the word “Bingo!” in the subject line. In order to win you will need to provide the five blog posts that fit the cards drawn as well as prove that you left comments on those posts (and have the comments be left on different days–not clumped together timestamp-wise after realizing you have Bingo).
11. The first person who emails me with a winning card is the winner. The winner will be listed at the top of my blog in the space that normally holds the daily category.
12. If all goes well, I will do this game again soon after we have a winner.

Okay, so you’ve waited to sign up until you read all the rules–good for you. Here is a second space to sign up for this current Blogger Bingo round. Remember, the list will close at August 23rd at 11 p.m. (EST).

You have a lot of questions about Blogger Bingo? They are hopefully answered here. Scroll down to get to the Q and A session. It addresses what to do if you are reading this post after the game has begun, how I’ve deterred cheating from happening, and what to do if you can’t find a post that day.

The Point: this game fulfills three things that I think are fun: using blogs to get people to think and feel, ensure that people leave comments, and create community.

More questions? Didn’t find it on the longer post about Blogger Bingo? Then email me…