652nd Friday Blog Roundup

I’ve been trying to convince the kids that when adults get together, we like to put on a record and dance in the middle of the living room, mostly doing the robot.  The reason they have never witnessed this is that adults would never engage in this behaviour if there were children around.  But yes, the moment they are out of the house, or when I go over to another person’s house, we’re dancing in the living room.  Or the kitchen.  I mean, we aren’t picky.  We’ll just all gather in a group and do the robot for hours at a time.  And then laugh and laugh and laugh.

Do you realize how much brain power I use trying to annoy the twins?

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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 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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Battlefish is back with a post after a long winter.  She talks about the depression that caused her absence: “It wasn’t like this every single day, but most days (even now still to some extent) I was able to get by without thinking about anything and it would be an okay day. And then there were days it would just all crash in on me.”  It made me smile when I saw a post pop up in my rss reader, and reading it felt like a fragile thaw.  Like a corner has been turned, or, at least, someone has peeked their head around.

No Kidding in NZ tells readers to stop apologizing for the fact that they don’t have children.  She points out, “But our existence is not offensive, our No Kidding lives are not discourteous to any others, and therefore having increased visibility as people without children – talking about the fact we have no children, whether in a casual one-line comment, or in response to others, whether correcting assumptions, or by refusing to justify our lives or respond to invasive questions – is not impolite either.”  I love the ending, and if we were in a movie, I would have been standing up and cheering while she walked by in slow motion.

Infertility Honesty has a post about coming out of the grieving stage and moving into the overlapping rebuilding stage.  She is simultaneously dealing with a nervous system disorder, but she writes, “My mind then did something it has rarely been able to do for the past seven years, it skipped around the meadow of possible endings and transitions.”  And I love this: “My losses and experiences will always be a part of me, in need of being tended to and integrated into my life, but perhaps there does come a time when the foundation is built, the legwork not so extensive.”  It’s a gorgeous post.

Res Cogitatae has a moving post about visiting a beach for the first time since her father’s accident that left him paralyzed.  But it’s really about what we carry with us due to our life experiences, the unique struggles we each have based on what we know first hand.  She writes, “One day my children will not want to swim in the rock pool. They will want to dive into the waves, just like their father, just like I once did. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it again.”

Lastly, Jewish IVF has a post about how she feels differently about things this week.  It’s not one thing, but it’s several things all coming together; feeling like she’s taking care of items on her to-do list, setting and respecting her own boundaries, pushing herself to join with things.  She tries to explain her feelings at a baby naming ceremony: “It was beautiful and I felt overwhelmed but not so much that I had to run out. Or cry. It was encouraging rather than not. I’m not sure I can explain it.”  I think it’s encouraging because you realize that you’ve gotten through something. That you endured.  And that’s not a small thing.

The roundup to the Roundup: Bothering the twins.  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 June 23rd and 30th) 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.