If you already read Kids Health Notes, you know Grace is a smart cookie. Well, she came up with another great idea and asked the Health and Wellness bloggers to round up their favorite posts from the month of April. Here are mine!

• Oh Wait, Are We Sure We Want to Do This? - Second thoughts about trying to have a baby, that will eventually grow into a tweener
• The Mistress’s Daughter by AM Homes - The latest edition of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade. Adoption, identity and needing (or not needing) answers are discussed
• The Girl with Two Birthdays - More on being adopted, milestones and which ones to celebrate
• Smokin’, Drinkin’, Sniffin’ Glue - A study of the (bad) habits of pregnant women and questions about post-pregnancy cravings
• Appreciating the Present - particularly when the present is hormone- and injection-free, at least for a few days
• The Greening of Me, Parts I and II - Trying to reduce my own impact and carbon footprint before trying to add another one to the world

Did I miss one of your favorites? Let me know.

I can see that other b5′ers are already posting their faves. I’ll add to the list as it grows:

• Angela at the breastfeeding blog Breastfeeding 1-2-3
• Angelique at Breaking the Mirror, a blog about eating disorders 
• Kristen at the women’s health blog Lively Women
• Hope at the weight loss blog Weighting Line

Enjoy!

This month’s selection of the Barren B*tches Book Brigade is AM Home’s memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter. And it is a prime example of how the number of pages or words doesn’t necessarily correlate with the length of time a book can linger in one’s mind. I probably finished The Mistress’ Daughter the day after I borrowed it from the library; I have been thinking about it ever since.

The book focuses on the author’s feelings about being adopted, finding her birth mother, or rather, her birth mother finding her, and trying to find the similarities, if any, between “who I arrived as and who I’ve become.” As I read the first 36 pages, I kept waiting to find a passage that didn’t resonate, that didn’t feel like I could have written it. The story then twists and takes a path that neither Homes nor I had expected and reaffirmed for me that the person asking the questions is never really in control of the answers she might receive.

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