1021st Friday Blog Roundup
The kids left a few days ago to return to school, and I still feel empty. Winter break is deceptive because it looks long on the calendar but moves so quickly that it feels over in a second. At least, it does to me.
It was lovely. It felt too quick. And now it is back to a quiet house and talking to Beorn and missing them.
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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.
Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.
As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.
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And now the blogs…
But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:
- “Accepting a Childless Life Should Not Be a Crime” (Childless by Marriage)
- “Shifting Mindscape” (The Barreness)
- “Collective Waiting” (Infertile Phoenix)
Okay, now my choices this week.
The Barreness processes the California fires. She is the keeper of many family photos, and she writes: “To help me work through the constant onslaught of sadness, fear and grief from the fires and the election I started scanning all the images. I can share them with my cousins and niblings. That way I would not be the only one to hold them and there will be other locations to view them/save them.” The story about the book pages raining down on the yard was haunting.
Lastly, Finding a Different Path writes about an ultrasound picture that ended up in her work mailbox. She realized things would only change if she spoke up. She writes, “I explained that ultrasound pictures are triggering even though they are EVERYWHERE (facebook, emails, CHRISTMAS CARDS, profile pictures, ugh), and that we have a lot of people (the WORLD has a lot of people) that saw that and it opened up a wound.” Luckily, the conversation went okay, and the person took her words to heart. As she writes: “how will anyone ever know unless we talk about it?”
The roundup to the Roundup: Missing the kids. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between Jan 10 – 31) 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.
January 31, 2025 No Comments
Repeat: The Saddest Chapstick Story You Will Ever Read
I am not writing my blog right now because I want to spend time with the twins before they return to college. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty and I could have space to best use the end of their break. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.
On Thursday evening, Josh bought the ChickieNob her first cherry chapstick. She had been coveting one for a while and he was at the grocery store, so he picked one up to surprise her. Needless to say, she instantly fell in love with her lip balm. So much so that when I took her brother to his guitar lesson, she brought it along just to hold it in her hand because she didn’t want to leave it back in the house.
And then she visited the school of chapstick hardknocks.
She did what ever single person has done at some point in her life, that quintessential moment of childhood when you absentmindedly (or in some cases purposefully) twist the bottom gear until the chapstick is up as high as it will go. For a few moments, she marveled at the red brick of waxy lip balm. And then she was taught the lesson every child learns the hard way: that twisting the gear to its limit brings about instant chapstick death.
January 29, 2025 No Comments
Repeat: 25 Things About Me
I am not writing my blog right now because I want to spend time with the twins before they return to college. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty and I could have space to best use the end of their break. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.
1. I love long names–the twins each have two middle names for a total of four names each.
2. I have a mortal fear of mayonnaise.
3. I hate surprises so no surprise parties; but I also hate surprises so much that I rarely see a film unless someone else has already seen it and told me everything that will happen. Even with non-scary/sad films. I also made Josh give me a three month window for when he was planning to propose so that I could prepare myself for it.
4. I also don’t like receiving flowers. Seeing them outside the house is great. Inside the house, not so much.
5. When I travel, I carry a picture of myself taken in the Galilee after our boat broke down.
P.S. Though I often wear scarves, so that one is no longer true.
January 28, 2025 No Comments
Repeat: The Last Gift
I am not writing my blog right now because I want to spend time with the twins before they return to college. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty and I could have space to best use the end of their break. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.
A few months ago, we received a gift card for $75 when Josh’s aunt was closing up his grandmother’s accounts after death. I know the natural initial thought is: what fun. But we were also told the gift card would expire on January 21, 2013, and we suddenly felt a tremendous amount of pressure to get something that would honour her and help the kids remember her; a final gift from their great-grandmother.
By the time we returned to thinking about the card, we had two weeks left before it expired. My stomach was in knots every time we thought about it. We couldn’t put it toward a trip because we needed to use the money by the 21st and we hadn’t time to travel. While there were things we needed insofar as home repair, there wasn’t enough time to make an informed decision. We didn’t want to squander it on groceries or media. We wanted the gift to be monumental, yet we had no ideas what sort of gift would feel monumental.
January 27, 2025 1 Comment
Repeat: The Other Mother
I am not writing my blog right now because I want to spend time with the twins before they return to college. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty and I could have space to best use the end of their break. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.
So right after I posted that manifesto on defining womanhood and Josh moved the stroller back to the basement storage room, a woman wrote that she saw my posting on the listserv and wanted to know if she could buy it. I froze not knowing what to do. The woman was pregnant with twins, due in August. Josh’s thought was that if I didn’t give it to her, it would one day end up in a landfill because we couldn’t keep something this large forever — and even if we did, whoever had to deal with our stuff afterwards would likely dump it. Whereas giving it to her would mean that another woman gets to use it and have that moment of pushing her twins in it.
But it felt (irrationally) like someone else got my moment.
January 26, 2025 No Comments