Welcome to the 2011 Surrender, Dorothy Blogger Book Gift Guide! This year, I've linked all the books to their spot on the shelf at the Bookstore That Gives (remember that rockstar high school intern?). A portion of your purchase price can be designated to go to the school of your choice.

Some of these authors have more than one book, so I've put my favorite one in this gift guide. *This list is, of course, not complete ... I limited it this year to people I've met via blogging. If I've left you off, please let me know! I'm getting old.

Sleep Is for the Weak

Edited by ... moi! I know, you're shocked. Get the original mommyblogger anthology with 25 bloggers who have gone on to greatness. Buy here.

Let's Panic About Babies

By Alice Bradley and Eden Marriott Kennedy

Eden and Alice have always been hilarious, but this book takes it to a new level. Buy here.

The Beauty of Different

By Karen Walrond

I bought one for me and one for my daughter. May she always feel beautiful. Buy here.

It Sucked and Then I Cried

by Heather B. Armstrong

How her blog readers saved her from postpartum depression. Buy here.

The Pioneer Woman

By Ree Drummond

I read part of Ree's love story on her blog, and that's what made me fall in love with her as a person. Here's the whole thing in book form. Buy here.

PunditMom's Mothers of Intention

by Joanne Bamberger

Mothers and political activism so totally go together. Buy here.

Professional Blogging for Dummies

By Susan Getgood

Susan's really smart about this stuff. Also, she quoted me in her book. HA! Buy here.

The Secret Society of the Pink Crystal Ball

By Risa Green

I've enjoyed all of Risa's books, but my favorite is this young adult mystery. Buy here.

Falling Apart in One Piece

by Stacy Morrison

A heartbreakingly beautiful memoir about what matters in life. Buy here.

What I Would Tell Her

by Andrea N. Richesin

Nicki is the anthologist to end all anthologists -- my favorite is the one with the stories of dads for their daughters. Kleenex alert. Buy here.

Mommy Doesn't Drink Here Anymore

by Rachael Brownell

An honest, raw and well written story of sobriety. Buy here.

Rockabye

by Rebecca Woolf

A baby and a husband and an armful of tattoos so young -- and so right. Buy here.

Make It Fast, Cook It Slow

by Stephanie O'Dea

I have made a bunch of these crockpot recipes. They are good. Buy here.

The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published

by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry

The best book on the publishing business I've read yet, and I've read a lot of them. Buy here.

Insatiable

by Erica Rivera

Erica's first memoir on her struggles with eating disorders -- I couldn't rip my eyes away from the pages. Buy here.

Hollywood Car Wash

by Lori Culwell

Lori self-published this novel and then sold so many copies it was bought by Simon & Schuster. Buy here.

Kirtsy Takes a Bow

Edited by Laura Mayes

Laura's collection is beautiful and insightful. Full disclosure: I also have a piece in it! Buy here.

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

by Judith Warner

I interviewed Judith about her second book for BlogHer, but I really loved her first one best. Buy here.

The Happiness Project

by Gretchen Rubin

I met Gretchen when I interviewed her about happiness in marriage for a series on BlogHer. Loved her comments, loved her book. Buy here.

Life From Scratch

by Melissa Ford

A novel about a blogger. What's not to love? Buy here.

The Mominatrix's Guide to Sex

by Kristen Chase

After a few years writing a sex column and four kids -- um, I believe her. Buy here.

As the holiday giving season/tax year draws to a close, please keep in mind you can also give a tax-deductible donation DIRECTLY TO YOUR SCHOOL. Just ask at the school office. 

Reading is awesome. Writing is awesome. Schools teach both. Please support your schools, whether or not you have kids.

This post is for Strong Start Day from Kat Stone at Postpartum Progress.

I remember Then. I remember waking up to the screams of my baby girl, another day. Stumbling through what felt like water, brushing the not-quite-sleep from my eyes, wondering how I would get through it.

When my daughter was born through about twenty-four months old, I was in the throes of what I now believe to be undiagnosed PPD.

If only I could've had a crystal ball to the Now, to when I would be doing a job I believed in, that used my skills to their utmost, in a house that would become my Forever Home, with neighbors who invited us to housewarming parties and bought my girl Halloween socks, and not the house that encompassed a leaky, Silence-of-the-Lambs basement and mice and ghetto birds whirling above us at all hours of the night.

I now see the exhaustion in my face.

I wish I could've talked to the me, Then, to tell her all about the me Now.

It's real. PPD is real.

And there is nothing that can comfort you when your brain is telling you it will never be better, that the pain will never go away, that the world as you know it will never return to normal.

It was a slow path away from the job to which I offered nothing and to which nothing was offered me, from the home office with no air condititioning, in which the atmosphere often reached ninety degrees with no solace, no comfort. A slow path from being told I was stupid and inept to a being told I gave writers a path, a gleam of hope. A slow path from three hours a day spent crying and googling sleep solutions to a happy, well adjusted seven-year-old who sits on my lap and rests her nose in my neck and tells me I am the best mommy in all the world.

I'm sure it was confusing and annoying to my love in life, who must've thought the happy, ambitious woman he married had disappered forever, leaving a whining puddle of goo in her wake.

That was the Then.

This is the Now.

I wish I could tell you some amazing story of renewal, a doctor that helped me. I didn't really have that. I had a slow path of waking up each morning and slowly seeing the light. When my daughter finally slept through the night around age four, I started to recover. When I got the therapy that actually made sense to me, my mind stopped waking me in the middle of the night, churning and refusing to go back to sleep. When I finally accepted that I needed some medication to relegate my inadequate brain chemicals, my inordinate influx of stress hormones, and I combined that with visualizations and meditation that enabled me to envision a life walking around walls instead of throwing my body against them, that became the Now.

I am happy.

I didn't think -- in the Then -- that I ever could be.

Again, here, I see emptiness.

It scares me to think how seriously depressed and anxious I was in the Then. I couldn't handle the normal ups and downs of life at all. Every red traffic light and misplaced set of keys became a major crisis, when they needn't have been. We moved here and I lost two cats in a row, one of whom had been my substitute baby for nine years, and that may seem like nothing to most people, but to me, when Sybil died, it was the end of my youth. It was the end of having a wubbie, a talisman. When my first cat died and my daughter was three and we had just moved to this town where I knew no one and couldn't even find the gas station without help, I was hanging on to life as I knew it with my fangs. Life was red in tooth and claw, and I honestly didn't know if I would enjoy it again.

My daughter was three.

It should've been over by then, right?

The brain is a strange organ. It regulates or lacks regulation of happiness. It tells you things will be all right or everything is going to hell in a handbasket, and regardless of you intellectual ability to realize it's all a crock of shit, you believe it. As my former psychologist used to remind me: The intellectual frontal lobe and the reptilian feeling brain are not actually connected all that well. You can understand intellectually that nothing is wrong and if your reptilian brain disagrees, then my friend: You.Are.Fucked.

There was a time, in the Then, that I thought I was. The writing didn't matter. The job didn't matter. Motherhood didn't matter. Nothing mattered but the hurt, and the dark, and the hours without sleep.

As I sat down to think about this post for my friend Kat Stone, whose daughter could be my daughter's twin sister, I realized how happy I really am in the Now. I love my husband, my daughter, my job, my writing, my family, my friends, my life. And with the exception of the job -- nothing has changed but my perception of it.

The mind is a powerful organ.

And sometimes, it is wrong.

If you cry when you read this, if you or a friend or sister is stuck in the Then, please encourage her to get help. Life is short. I wish I could've spent fewer years in the Then. I wish I could've spared my husband and child and family and friends the Me that was in the Then. I wish I could've spared myself the Then.

It was unnecessary.

I didn't learn anything other than it doesn't have to be that way.

Kat has dedicated her online life to supporting those who suffer from PPD. I sincerely wish I had known Kat in the Then. The entire time we've been friends I've been in the Now. But when she asked me to share my experience to raise awareness, I could only say yes.

Because you or someone you know might still be living in the Then.

I welcome all to the Now.

Kat's trying to raise $30k on Postpartum Progress to:

• Develop a compelling national awareness campaign for postpartum depression
• Create & distribute new and improved patient education materials for distribution by hospitals
• Translate our "plain mama English" information and support into Spanish and other languages

If only I'd had that instead of a free blanket in the hospital and a host of instructions for how I could scar my baby for life by doing things wrong. Kat says  only 15% of all women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders ever receive professional treatment.

I certainly didn't, in the Then. How much more I understand about my brain and how it works and how it impacts not only me but all the people in my sphere. My little girl is a happier girl because I got help. She doesn't have to deal with a mommy who screams and cries every day like she did when she was 0-3.

I'm going to go donate. If you have had PPD or know anyone who has or even who can relate to what I've said here, please help out Kat, who's dedicated her life to helping women overcome what affected both her and me and countless other members of this community of women.

Let's live in the Now.

Late last week, I wrote a post for BlogHer about the Piedmont Hills cheer squad. Their school district banned their cheerleading uniforms from class because they violated the dress code. I thought about it for a while and came up with this thesis:

I think it's fair to enforce a dress code policy unilaterally.

I think it's fair to make all athletes buy their uniforms or not buy their uniforms unilaterally.

I think it's fair to make all athletes wear their uniforms or not wear their uniforms on game day unilaterally.

The post was picked up by FOX NEWS on Monday. And it started attracting comments like these:

What I'm amazed about is the ignorance of many of the fairer sex about how the male brain works. Guys are visually oriented. Almost revealing will often cause more elongated sizing up by a male than totally revealing.

I was on a trip when a 28 year old lady in the group was wondering why the guys were stopping and staring at her. Well, duh! Se was wearing a pleated mini skirt walking down the street. Her excuse was that a part of the skirt was a pair of attached shorts. She said if the guys have an issue, it's their problem. I suppose she also thinks that if she were sitting on a guy's lap and rubbing his leg, it would be his problem if he became aroused.

Oh, then there was this:

What's up with that hate? The foot ball players DO wear their unpadded jeresys to school. Why you act like somehow there is this high school conspiriacy against WOMEN, and its all BOYS fault? Because you didn't mention anything about the gymnastics girls, or the dancing girls, you said nothing about the flag girls, all you said was "Cheerleaders" and then singled out the boys as being favored. Your blog sounds exactly like a high schooler. Then end it that you are all for equality. How perverse.

And this:

Because you were a cheerleader. Its not like cheerleaders are known for paying attention to what others are wearing. And who oppressed you to be a cheerleader anyway? Its not like you didn't have a choice to be something else if you hated it so much.

The conversation is veering around a lot, but the comments are really interesting, aside from the above, which, just, whatever. And it's totally solidified my belief that we need to get uniforms out of school, period. There are some uniforms that really shouldn't be worn to class (wrestling singlets, swimwear, gymnastics leotards, track shorts, cheerleading skirts), and if you can't have everyone wear their uniform, then no one should.

Would love your thoughts but closing comments because I'd like to keep them on BlogHer so everyone can see everything together. It gets confusing when they are in two places.

---

In completely other news, I finally reviewed Good Enough Is the New Perfect by Becky Beaupre Gillespie and Holly Schwartz Temple over on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

You all might think I'm crazy. Yesterday in a fit of passion I wrote about the Piedmont Hills cheerleaders on BlogHer:

Please. Not all cheerleaders are queen bees and queen bees will be queen bees regardless of what they are wearing. No saggy butt ever stopped a queen bee. Plus, Piedmont Hills Pep could just wear running tights under their uniforms if they wanted to be more covered and less saggy-butted. That is not the issue here! The issue is why have cheerleaders wear uniforms to school in the first place? Feeding into the cheerleader stereotype completely begs the question of why they are the one brand of athlete that wears a uniform to school.

Read the rest over there -- would love to hear from you. Back to normal I hope on Monday! Have a great weekend.

This week has really just drained me. I've had three family health scares, an extremely time-consuming and stressful parental extracurricular activity and a few unexpected curveballs in other arenas. I've sat here staring at this screen for a few minutes now, and I don't want to write about anything that has happened this week. I feel like there are a few brewing good posts about current events, but honestly with getting so behind with aforementioned dramas, I don't have time to write anything good.

Yet, I feel compelled to record something this week, and perhaps that something is this: I'm tired.

Yet another thing: I'm in love with my whole family. Having people's health threatened made my already-squishy heart explode with love, and I felt it gushing out with such volume it threatened to drown me. All this week I've looked at my daughter and thanked God the challenges the world threw at us this week were manageable, everyone turned out to be okay after various doctor visits, scares were mitigated, and life is very close to returning to normal, except the new normal for me, is even more grateful than I was before.

I am preparing for a last-minute business trip (read: what, my toenails look like I live in a cave and I'm not sure what I have clean to wear), but today when I picked up the little angel from summer camp, she said:

"Mommy, I have a green band! I can swim in the big kid's pool!"

And we did a little happy dance around the parking lot.

And I told her over and over again how proud I am of her.

Then we went to swim lessons and made a bunch of extra sandwiches for lunches and picnic dinners at swim lessons while I am gone, and she helped me pack, and the Celebriducks had a show in the bathtub in which the Celebriduck Dorothy may or may not have sung an extremely off-key version of Over the Rainbow.

That's the best way I know to celebrate. Hope you're having a good week. Posting this week will most likely be bizarre as I attempt to navigate the NYC subway system on less sleep than I would prefer. This month is totally bizarre for me.

Also -- I saw all your comments about ladybugs. I went to Ace Hardware after swim lessons, but alas, no ladybugs. WE WILL PREVAIL. The search continues.

We've been going through the annual hatred of summer camp at the Arens house. She hates bowling. Rather, she hates the fact that her team never gets any strikes. She's sick of swimming with the babies and hasn't passed the swimming test yet. She doesn't want to get up in the morning.

And she blames me.

"I promise I won't bother you," she says, noticing for the 800th time that my office is in our house.

Beloved reinforced it had nothing to do with that. "You know why you have to go to summer camp."

She splashed water up the sides of the bathtub. "Because Mommy thinks I'll bother her here," she said, making the mad eyes at me. "But I'll be really quiet. I just want to be home like a normal kid."

"What are you talking about?" I said. "Almost everyone you know goes to summer camp. All your friends from your old school, all your friends from this camp, nearly all of your cousins. You are not the only child in the world who has two parents with jobs. You are completely normal."

She started crying. "I just want to stay home with you."

I didn't react well. For a variety of reasons, yesterday was a shit day, and that sort of knocked me over the edge. I picked myself up, put myself in time out in my bedroom and sobbed into the pillows.

She knocked on the door after a little while. "I'm sorry I made you cry," she said.

I tried to tell her it wasn't her, but I could see she didn't believe me.

In the wee hours of the morning, she woke up with the pirate nightmare and I woke up with puffy eyes and a crying hangover.

I don't know what normal kids do. I just know what we do, how we adjust and react.

I'm pretty sure it's normal to want whatever it is you don't have.

This morning, a friend alerted me to an article on NPR's Shots blog. The headline: To Curb Childhood Obesity, Experts Say Keep Fat Babies in Check.

It immediately pissed me off, of course. This formerly disordered eater worried incessantly about my fat baby girl. The girl people stopped me on the street to comment about. I've been watching with interest the comments on a post on BlogHer about fat talk around children. Some people are adamently opposed (as am I) and some people think it's our job as parents to limit kids' eating and make sure they don't gain too much weight.

My daughter has been "normal" weight since she was about two, and she's always been able to stop eating when she's full -- even if she's halfway through a chocolate shake. I've always praised her for stopping when she's full, but I've never stopped her from eating dessert. I don't want her to have a weird relationship with food. I just want her to eat when she's hungry, stop when she's full, and mix in some vegetables.

However, the NPR article was talking about babies and toddlers, and here are some of the tips they gave:

Cut down the time children spend watching TV or using the computer or cell phone.

We are talking about babies and toddlers. My baby was off the charts for her first full year, and I swear to you that she only used the computer or her cell phone for an hour a day.

Make sure kids are getting the right food portions for their age.

I monitored my daughter's milk intake like a hawk for that first six months. I don't care how hungry she was! I pulled that bottle or boob out of her mouth the second she hit her age-appropriate limit.

So parents and child care providers can do small kids a favor by not letting them get too big, even if that means turning off Nickelodeon.

I'm working on a post for BlogHer (I'll share a link here when it goes up) regarding an interview I recently did with a PPD/ED specialist at UNC. We got to talking about body types and how they impact eating disorder recovery. She told me some of her patients have had to eat thousands of calories a day to recover from anorexia. I gained weight very quickly just by returning to 1200 calories a day -- what would be considered dieting for most women. "I'm a very efficient food storer," I told her. "I would do well in a survival situation. I'm just not often in them."

We talked about how every body is different; every body processes food differently. And I am really sick of the media admonishing new mothers and bequeathing upon them personal responsibility for every aspect of their children's health. The degree of personal responsibility is getting ridiculous.

Yes, duh, parents shouldn't give their toddlers a straight Diet Coke, tequila and Spam diet. Yes, of course we should encourage our kids to get outside and play. But hello, world -- some kids are genetically hardwired to be a little bigger. Sometimes they slim down naturally with age, sometimes they don't. It may have everything to do with what they eat and! It may have nothing to do with what they eat. Weighing them and admonishing them and making a big deal about their weight when they are eating the same or less as the stick-skinny kid sitting next to them in the cafeteria is not helpful. In fact, it can be extremely harmful.

And. Telling a nervous new mother that she holds the keys to every aspect of her child's health -- that it is all her fault if the baby is fat -- is a great way to program a weight-watching, harping mother who will ultimately give her child a complex about food.

I really wish the media would take more responsibility for objective reporting when it comes to health news. In politics, we generally get two sides of the story. These health studies are so one-sided, so judgy. Yes, there is a childhood obesity problem in the U.S. -- I acknowledge that wholly. But I look around my racially diverse but economically homogenous neighborhood, and I don't see one obese child. Not one. I go to Midtown Kansas City, where it's racially diverse and economically diverse, and I see tons. In addition to genetics and diet, childhood obesity has a lot to do with economics -- whether kids have access to sports and camps that allow them to run and play, whether they have access to yards and bikes and streets safe to ride bikes on. Whether they have access to fruits and vegetables that don't come out of a very salty can. Whether they have something to do besides watch TV while mom and dad work.

Childhood obesity isn't necessarily something we can blame on personal responsibility of the parents. We, as a nation, owe kids safe streets and bikes and subsidized, exercise-and-fresh-air-oriented childcare and camps. We as a nation put everything on working parents -- we don't help out with childcare, we don't help out with healthy food, we don't help out with transportation to camps and sports for kids whose parents don't have cars or can't get off work to take them.

There are two sides to every story. One side of this story is personal responsibility of the parents to not let their toddlers exist on a steady diet of Ho-Hos. The other side of the story is access. We like to ignore that side, because it's a much harder thing to face. The media needs to start covering that side of the story, because until we acknowledge it, we won't do anything about it.

Last night, she swam the length of the pool, pausing only once to flip over and rest on her back.

Tonight, I took her back and braved cold water and only 80-degree air to practice again. More making it, more tired and heaving breaths from the little redheaded duck, who this week seems to be exerting herself physically more than ever before.

I am too tired to finish this post.

But there will be swimming.