365th Friday Blog Roundup

You are probably waiting for an email back from me.  I use the singular “you,” but it’s sort of like shooting fish in a barrel — there is a good chance that many dozens of people reading this are awaiting an email back from me.  I can explain: NaBloPoMo.

I thought I had things under control, but that is the thing about NaBloPoMo: it’s like the undertow that you can’t see, the one that sucks you out to sea where — if you were in a storybook — you would end up on a grand adventure featuring you, a raft made out of thousands of discarded Coke bottles, and a pelican named Sam.  And if you’re not in a storybook, you simply drown.

I am firmly in the not-in-a-storybook camp.

When BlogHer took over NaBloPoMo last spring, they handed the project to me.  There was a bit of an uphill learning curve, but I felt like I entered the trucking-along stage after a few weeks.  Then, the site completed its physical move on November 1st, a day when nearly 2000 bloggers signed up to participate in the month-long project.  Since last Friday, I have been uploading those thousands of blogs (and linking them) by hand.  I’ve been writing posts and featuring posts and syndicating posts.  Everything I eat has started to taste like NaBloPoMo.  And I’m like a pet owner, morphing into looking like NaBloPoMo.  And even worse, the kids have started to talk about NaBlo as if its an additional resident in our house (“Mum is cooking with NaBlo so she’s probably going to burn the crepes.” — for the record, I didn’t burn the crepes).

I know that November’s NaBloPoMo has an end point — it has to calm down soon, right?  I mean, I know the whole thing starts up again on December 1st and on January 1st and on February 1st.  But at some point, it will go back to a mild buzz instead of deafening sirens.

Right?

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We’ve been watching The Parent Trap — the original one — which means that in addition to working on NaBloPoMo for a grotesque amount of hours each day, I’m speaking like Hayley Mills.  The twins are watching it in 20 minutes increments, so we go through movies at a painstaking slow pace.  I like to think of it as recreating the feeling of radio serials.  You know how you were left hanging until the next installment, imagining 1000 what ifs until you could find out what really happened?  The twins, by the way, agree with what you’re thinking right now — about how they should just get to watch the whole damn movie and not have things dragged out like this.

It is raising all sort of twin conversations, namely, would we ever separate them and send them to live on opposite coasts? (Wait?  What?  But I’m not divorcing your father.)  And why didn’t they get real twins to play the twins instead of making one girl pretend to be her own twin?  And why are people so weird about twins?  And how it feels to actually be a twin vs. playing one in a movie.

It’s interesting because since we started watching it, they have alternated between wanting to be close to one another (perhaps a little too close… perhaps the other person doesn’t actually want you in their lap…) and not wanting to be twins because it makes them different from all their singleton friends (and then wanting to be twins because it makes them different).

One night after watching their sliver of movie, I came into the ChickieNob’s room to check on her and saw a lump in her bed.  “Is there a child in there,” I asked, pointing at the blanket.  She pulled back the covers to reveal her brother’s beloved enormous black lab stuffed animal.

“Uh, does the Wolvog know you have that?” I asked, wondering how she stole something that large from his room without him noticing.

“He heard me crying because I miss him.  So he brought me his dog to hold because it reminds me of him when I miss him.”

And that, Hayley Mills is what you can’t replicate with acting.

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We have had two more winners with the Creme de la Creme lucky spots (and more on their way for next week).

Jen from Here We Go Again claimed the glass jewelry donated by Battlefish (thank you, Battlefish!) and  Brooke from Becoming Parents claimed the mugs donated by First Time Twins (thank you, First Time Twins).  No, really really really — thank you.

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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:

• “I Wasn’t Going to Post Today” (Egg Drop Post)
• “On Giving Up” (Bodega Bliss)
• “Perfect Moment Monday: Spending” (Four of a Kind)
• “Grief” (The Pursuit of Pregnancy)
• “Question 3 in a Series on Gender, Parenting, and Being Gay” (Regular Miswesterners)
• “Vulnerability” (Breaking into Blossom)
• “Maslow and Mompetition” (In Loco Parentis)
• “Milkweed” (Bloodsigns)
• “The Heartache of Infant Loss” (Jack at Random)
• “The Heartache of Infant Loss” (By the Brooke)
• “The Heartache of Infant Loss” (JSOnline)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I didn’t read this Thursday post until last Friday, so I’m counting it with this week.  What IF? has a post about how we identify as well as when and where we choose to discuss infertility.  The post begins by pointing out a discrepancy between numbers and the number of people out: “Statistically, how likely is it that I’ve made it to my mid-30’s without having one friend or acquaintance that I know of who has undergone fertility treatments?”  You are going to love, love, love this post.  You can tell her so in the comment section.

A Fine Mess has a small and sad post called “Broken” about Halloween.  I know people often speak about Christmas and Mother’s Day as difficult holidays for infertiles, but truly, Halloween has to rank up there as third.  Listen to all that is contained in this single sentence: “I was planning to write a longer post, but I just don’t have it in me.”  It stuck with me a long time after reading it.

Lastly, The Hairy Farmer Family has an explanation for why she hasn’t been blogging.  It’s a never-ending cycle of not blogging, and then wanting to write, and then feeling as if there is too much ground to cover, so she doesn’t blog, but then she wants to write…  Okay, I’m a sucker for blogging about blogging, but what I really loved in this post was this: “I was, in fact, the elephant in the church, which is not something you often get to be.”

The roundup to the Roundup: I am drowning in the NaBloPoMo Sea.  Loving rewatching The Parent Trap.  More winners in the Creme de la Creme (please keep helping to spread the word).  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between October 28th and November 4th) 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.