Happy National Infertility Awareness Week! So...um...it's not exactly "happy" like your birthday or your anniversary, but since you're living in the Land of If, and since you're going through this crappy experience anyway, you might as well embrace community, reach out to others, and educate.

So what can you do to create awareness?

Start within the community before even moving out towards educating the fertile masses. There are plenty of newly-annointed (or not so newly-annointed) stirrup queens and sperm palace jesters feeling lonely and confused and needing a bit of reassurance and information. Help them to start a blog or point them towards other blogs on a blogroll--reading can make someone feel empowered.

If they have questions, pass along the link to the Peer Infertility Counselor List. In fact, put the link on your blog so others can find it easily and use it. Post it on bulletin boards and spread the word through your fertility clinic or adoption agency.

Wear your pomegranate bracelet and connect with others. Look at other wrists this week. And spread the word! Blog about it, post it everywhere, make a t-shirt and wear it, write it in soap on your car, make bumper stickers, bring threads to other women in the clinic waiting room during your next day-3 bloodwork, make flyers, leave threads tucked into fertility books at the library with a note, tape threads to boxes of ovulation predictor kits at the local food store, write in to your local newspaper--anything you can do to get the word out to as many people as possible this week. Even if you have it as a link on your side bar, post about it this week so other people can find the story when they start googling: what is up with all of these pomegranate-coloured bracelets? If you need the link to the compilation, here it is: http://stirrup-queens.blogspot.com/2006/09/history-of-infertilitys-common-thread.html. You can snag the code for the icon from the bottom of that post. Please use the link in order to give credit to those chickies (and man-pies: thank you, Di-Dad!) who came up with the idea including (but not limited to) Paz, Royalyne, Mandolyn, Aah0424, KE, Ms. C, Piccinigirl, Carolyn, and Serenity.

Post about infertility every day this week on your blog. Flood the Internet with information about infertility so that any stirrup queen or sperm palace jester reading your blog doesn't feel quite so alone.

Oh...and if you're inspired to start a blog this week and start venting about your experience, let me know so I can add you to the blogroll.

And that, my friends, is my big public service annoucement to kick of National Infertility Awareness Week. Later posts will be about actually educating those off the island :-)
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Updated at 6:12 p.m.

I've been tackling the blogroll in pieces, trying to keep all of the categories current. I never remove a blog unless the person closes down their blog and removes it from the Internet. So if you see a blog missing from a category, it just means that it has been moved to a different section. Use the "find" function under "edit" on your toolbar to do a word search and you'll find its new location on the blogroll. Some of the "parenting after" categories have also been expanded to include people who are pregnant or close to adopting. Just so you know since this week is a fantastic week to start reading blogs similar to your own experience. Or to recommend a new blog to a fellow stirrup queen or sperm palace jester.