453rd Friday Blog Roundup

Congratulations, Atlantic.  You win for most obnoxious infertility-related story for dedicating inches and inches of space to mock the fact that people are curious about egg freezing.  No, you don’t need to click over to read it.  It just — and I know this is really funny — goes through how to freeze chicken eggs.  Get it?  You’re concerned about egg freezing so you ask the health editor at the Atlantic about egg freezing, and he tells you about freezing chicken eggs.  Hilarity ensues.

Just imagine the jokes James Hamblin could make about chemo.  I’m inviting him to my next dinner party, that joker.

*******

Amazon chose Measure of Love to feature as one of the books of the month for the entirety of August.  Which is all kinds of cool, and they’re offering it as a $1.99 deal on Kindle.  I’d love any help in getting word out there about the promotion.  And a massive thank you to everyone who has already Facebooked and tweeted.

*******

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:

• “Infertility is Like Getting Rejected from Your Dream Job Over and Over Again” (Stirrup Queens)
• “Travel Essentials and Learning to Let Go” (Invincible Spring)
• “Breakdown, Breakthrough – Part One” (Life from Here)
• “My Adoption Backstory and an Epiphany” (An Engineer Becomes a Mom)
• “Mama is a State of Mind” (Queen of the Slipstream)
• “Better To Be Too Soon Than Never At All (In My Opinion)” (Where the *Bleep* is Our Stork?)
• “Hard” (It Is What It Is (or Is It?))
• “Other People’s Pregnancies” (By the Brooke)
• “My Parenting Philosophy” (Anabegins)
• “Say a Little Prayer for Me” (Katydid Cancer)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Stupid Broken Eggs has a post about finding faith through her experience with infertility.  There are a lot of posts that go in the other direction, questioning religion in a crisis, so it was interesting — to me — to hear this perspective.  It’s a post about recognizing all the tiny things that are making her path a little easier, and I like this part: “I also think that this journey has helped me renew my faith. I’m not the most religious person- in that I don’t attend church every Sunday and some days I have a mouth of a truck driver. But, I do have my faith. I believe and I trust in God always. I have seen prayer work and I pray daily.”

The Question Now Becomes has a post about being settled in the reality that they are now a family of four.  They bring the twins out to see her in-laws and her husband says some beautiful words about how their family came to be.  I got chills when I read them repeated in the final paragraph: “But the most important thing is that everyone loved on A&P, passed them around so much they fell asleep within seconds that eve. And as we swept home in our newly minted mini-van the next day I felt like what he’d said had rung true, we are a family now, made and re-made again.”  Gorgeous.

The Destiny Manifest has a post about the changes she wants to make.  She got me with one of the first lines: “I apologize if it is tiresome to keep reading that “it’s been a hard week” — it is equally as tiresome to keep living hard weeks.”  She made me think about all the things I’d like to change and the step I’d need to take to change them.

Two Adults, One Child has a post about trying and not trying at the same time; namely, that she can’t really casually try (story of my life).  I love the rules she has made for her life (including her blogging) for the next three months.  Cheering her on as she puts them into action.

Lastly, The Great Big IF has a post about moving back and forth through grief, swimming in circles rather than grief being a trip across the pool and out the other side.  She does better and then she does worse and then she does better again, and it is all swimming; not drowning.  The entire post is very powerful, and this thought will gut-punch you: “Today my conclusion to share is that I have no conclusion. And for a girl who has to resist looking at the ending of a book before she’s barely past the beginning, you can imagine how much energy I’m spending in accepting this nebulous, grey future I have before me. There is no spreadsheet, no pick-your-own-ending. It’s a game of chance. It always is, but it’s getting harder to trick myself into thinking the opposite.”  Moving, right?  Go read the whole post from beginning to end.

The roundup to the Roundup: Most obnoxious health article ever.  Measure of Love is on sale (and I’d love your help to spread 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 July 26th and August 2nd) 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.