Link Love <3

I have a huge backlog of things to write about, including my upcoming trip to Brazil tomorrow which may or may not happen depending on whether my husband feels better,* but it just occurred to me that I should blog about something absolutely irrelevant -- blog stats (or measurable clicks here that do not come from feed-reading). Isn't that what blogging is all about? The utterly irrelevant side by side with the profound reflections about life! ;-D

I've been a member of The Truth Laid Bear blog "ecosystem" for a while now, and I think the farther up I had gone to was, I don't know, maybe "Slithering Reptile," but I had gone and become a bacteria or something again, until the day when my friend Kateri linked to me on her famous breastfe*eding photo post, and I shot right up to "Flappy Bird," I think. That lasted for a while, so I'm curious to see what will happen this time.

I was slightly depressed because I had gone back to "Multicellular Organism," but today I noticed that I've been upgraded to " and I knew the reason right away. Kateri linked to me again in her latest post. So, I wanted to say thank you!! I'll enjoy my fish days until they're over and I'm back to being a bacteria or something!

And, BTW, I'm a big fan of Kateri's writings. You should check out her archives for life-changing (at least for me they were) posts about birthmotherhood (these archives go way back, you've got to keep on clicking back). Reading her writings (together with those of Dawn [who has an open adoption] and other people who blog about this subject) gave me a completely new and refreshingly surprising (if utterly heartbreaking) view about adoption (she was also interviewed for a podcast and an article in the Chicago Tribune about Juno -- link no longer works :-( ). I hope that one day she can publish a book. Anyway... I'm linking back, and that post that I link to above has some powerful writing about the status of motherhood in our culture, particularly about teen moms: "If motherhood is punitive it's because we've set up our society that way, not because teenagers are inherently bad mothers." (do stop by her paypal "tip jar" if you can... she's also a single mom** of two beautiful girls without [steady] income).

OK, I really have to go pack my bags right now... Keep us (and mainly my husband) in your thoughts and prayer. Thankfully my father-in-law arrives tomorrow morning to spend a week with us. If it's nothing serious, requiring surgery, I'll still travel.


* He spent the day in bed with abdominal pain. He also has a fever (around 101), but the pain is not too bad. He's going to the hospital tomorrow, we hope he doesn't get worse tonight and we have to wake the poor kids to go to the emergency room (we're not sure an ambulance would be fully covered by insurance, at this point).

** divorced