470th Friday Blog Roundup

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving if you celebrate it, and that you weren’t too annoyed by all the Thanksgiving posts and Facebook status updates and tweets if you don’t celebrate it.

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I learned this week that the thing I’m calling a speckled doughnut in Candy Crush is really a nonpareil (or, I’m told a “freckle” as it’s known in Australia).  Like a Sno-cap.  Those things you get in the movie theater.  Once the person told me that, it made perfect sense — more sense than a speckled doughnut, since it wasn’t clear how doughnuts fit in with the whole candy world.  But I have to admit that I can’t stop calling them speckled doughnuts, even now knowing their real name.  It doesn’t sound right to say, “combine a rainbow nonpareil with a striped candy.”  Right?

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The FDA told 23 and Me that they have to cease marketing their product as screening for genetic information, stating the reason as a lack of accuracy in test results.  It brought back my thoughts on the fact that 23 and Me (backed by Google) is amassing an incredible wealth of genetic information on participants.  But if it’s not accurate, what is its worth?  In terms of marketing, if companies collect incorrect information to market to us, how valuable is that information if it isn’t accurately enticing the right people with the right goods?  I think of things such as the containers of formula I received while going through treatments, companies believing I was pregnant when I clearly wasn’t.

It feels like the information companies attempt to collect and believe is meaningful keeps proving time and again how little we can know about people at a distance.

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The 2013 Creme de la Creme is trucking along.  There are currently 71 on the list and two weeks to go until the hard deadline (December 15!).  So, are you on the list yet?  Extra love to people who submit early!

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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:

• “Confession Time” (Fox in the Hen House)
• “Forty, Fat, Infertile and Falling Apart” (The 2 Week Wait)

Okay, now my choices this week.

MoJo Working admits that despite recent posts, there is a lot of happiness she is feeling with her current pregnancy.  That happiness doesn’t necessarily make it into posts since she writes for the catharsis, to process darker emotions.  I think it’s the way a lot of people use their online space; to process their fears or sadness.  It may skew our perception, but only if we forget that the need to write is what drives some blogging and not necessarily a perfect recording of the daily world.

MissConception debates whether or not to return to work after having a child, and tells her story of how the unexpected costs of building their family chose her path for her.  It’s not a decision all women or men get to make — to have a stay-at-home parent — and sometimes the sacrifices need to continue into parenthood.  It’s a good post that give a complicated and frank answer to what is sometimes an assumption.

It is What It is has a post on “what it’s all about.”  She begins: “It’s true that I always wanted to have two children. I’m not sure why that is or how the notion of how many kids one wants to have comes into focus, but that is how I thought it’d be.”  She lists off a series of moments that she describes as having a feeling of deja vu that is “not so much repeating something I may have lived before, but something I longed to live.”  It’s just a gorgeous post of captured moments.

Stupid Broken Eggs has a post about her dog, Swish.  And, oh my G-d, he is so cute.  Click over for pictures of pure love.

Dear Noah has a post about how family avoids speaking about her son; his death has become the elephant in the room.  She ends the post with this very powerful thought: “it physically hurts not to talk about him. Why I need others to talk about him. I just don’t know how to get there. And if the silence is this bad after only one month, how bad will it be at a year. 5 years. 18 years. Because I won’t forget. But I worry they will.”  The next time you wonder whether to say something to a grieving parent, speak up.  Even if it’s just to open the door and invite them to talk.

Lastly, Constant in the Darkness has a post on what she wished she had known about adoption before forming their family.  It is a wonderful post, exploring the complex relationship that exists between all the members of the triad.

The roundup to the Roundup: Hope you had a good Thanksgiving.  It’s not actually a speckled doughnut.  23 and Me and the FDA.  The 2013 Creme de la Creme opened: is your post on the list?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 22nd and November 29th) 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.