503rd Friday Blog Roundup (and the 8th Anniversary!)

So this is it.

The 8th anniversary of the Roundup.

8 years, 403 posts, about 1600 posts highlighted.

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Yes, this is your weekly reminder to back up your blog, social media accounts, and email BUT, it is also an opportunity to point you towards a post that Keiko sent me.

It’s a checklist every blog owner should fill out and keep offline (yes, you need to make a paper copy) in order to have this information at your fingertips should the shit hit the fan with your site.

So an extra little task to throw into your weekly backup (because you are performing a weekly backup, right?)

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order 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.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Sailor on the Rainpool Sea” (Blood Signs)
• “Crying Over Spilled (Breast) Milk” (The Long and Winding Road… to Parenthood)
• “So… How Did it Happen?” (Just Stop Trying and It Will Happen)
• “Visiting My Sister” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Go Quickly” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Northern Star!
• “When Your Rainbow Baby Dies” (Diana Wrote)
• “Where Are the Health Professionals?” (Stillbirth Matters)
• “Broken” (Stop, Drop, and Blog)
• “Right Where I Am” (Still Life with Circles)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Something Out of Nothing has a post about anniversaries on the infertility calendar, in this case, a good one.  One year earlier was the transfer date that yielded her current child.  I absolutely love this line: “Prior to this week, he used to marvel at baby girl’s completeness and muse, ‘A year ago, you didn’t exist.’  He can’t say that anymore.”  But what I really loved was the idea of setting aside Fertilization Day as a day for all future siblings to celebrate with the embryos that came from that batch.  It’s a unique holiday only singletons born from the same embryo batch could celebrate.  A tiny silver lining?

Life as I Know It has an encounter with a stranger that leaves her unsettled.  She writes, “But I knew there were little ears listening–ears that miss nothing, that internalize everything. How I responded was important. Yet again, I was woefully unprepared for dealing with this kind of situation.”  Despite feeling unprepared, she handled the man’s question beautifully.

Bee in the Bonnet has an emotional post about losing fictive kin, her mother’s best friend who was a second mother to her.  How the outside world can’t wrap their brain around relationships; that we constantly ask (and judge) how close two people are based on what we assume about relationships.  And in this post, it is quite clear that the labels we put on relationships such as mother, daughter, aunt, or friend do not convey the amount of love that exists between two people.

Lastly, It Is What It Is (or Is It?) has a post about a breakthrough that came in therapy, connecting all of her current and past behaviours to a single event: feeling trapped.  It’s a fascinating post about how the brain works; how our experiences inform our future actions.  And how we can rewire our brains to think differently once we know what informs our decisions today.

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s the 8th anniversary of the Roundup.  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 July 11th and July 18th) 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.