Monday, August 13, 2012

AF & Unbaby Me Update

My monthly bi-monthly randomly-timed visitor arrived this weekend! I should not be too surprised because I am actually on a super low dose of Hormone Replacement Therapy (1 mg of estrogen every day and 10 mgs of Progesterone for the first 12 days of every "even" month). I know to expect my period at some point during that even month, but day one hasn't exactly been consistent.

I used to be kind of bummed about getting my period, because it meant that the cycle was a bust. Now I've come to really appreciate it, especially these periods induced by the progesterone every other month (i.e. just about every period I have). Out of the three times I'm confident I ovulated this past year, two out of three followed a "fake" period that was induced by progesterone. It definitely doesn't happen every time, but ovulation seems to be more likely in these cycles. So I am crossing my fingers that this one will count. I even started charting again, which I haven't done since it was clear ovulation wasn't going to happen in June.

I also wanted to give ya'll an unbaby me update! I'd say it works about a quarter of the time. My wall is still pretty full of babies. I guess the extension looks at picture captions to identify baby pics, so if a picture doesn't have a caption, you'll still see the baby. Also, it's easy to tell if a picture is "unbabied" because it says so pretty clearly right there on the page:


How cute is that picture?!?

You still see babies that are profile pictures (like the one above), so there's no escaping that. So basically, if you use Unbaby Me, you are definitely not shielding yourself entirely from all pictures of babies. But it might spare you a few pictures here and there. And I selected the "cats" feed but the options are basically limitless. You can choose puppies, food, actors, artwork - anything that can have a feed on instagram.

In all: I like it. I don't feel like I'm missing anything pressing because I'm still seeing SOME pictures from every person's baby... but as we know some people can go a little overboard with the pics. I'm still getting friends' updates, but with slightly fewer baby pics. I'll take it. Especially when it means I get to see more pics like this:
Has anyone else tried it? Is anyone fundamentally against it? There was a good discussion over on Stirrup Queen's last week about the merits of hiding peoples' babies vs. just unsubscribing from their feeds or unfriending them.

My take is that yes, there are some people I can unfriend / unsubscribe (and I have), but others that I should (for work) stay pretty current on and others that I want to stay current on for other reasons (travel pictures, running updates, etc). And if I can do that while saving myself a few familiar pangs of longing, I'm game to do that. Trust me, I am not forgetting that these friends have babies. When I feel like seeing all those baby pics, I can always uninstall the extension (which is super easy in Chrome) or just use firefox or explorer. The extension is not for everyone, but I like it.

Now we just need an extension to remove obnoxious / uninformed politically charged posts and every-single-meal food pictures. Maybe that's just me?

10 comments:

  1. "Now we just need an extension to remove obnoxious / uninformed politically charged posts and every-single-meal food pictures."

    YES PLEASE! :)

    And I would much rather look at cats any day then be subjected to yet another baby photo. Those cuddling kittens sure are cutie!

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  2. Awww what cute kitties. I love this idea and would definitely use it if I could ever get up the nerve to go back to FB. I have stayed away from there because it was just too hard to see all of the announcements and see all of the pictures constantly. I think it is a better idea than unfriending or unsubscribing if you still want to use FB regularly and hear about other stuff.

    On a different note, the partial comment directly under your cute cat picture about the Red Sox made me totally crack up. I am from the Cleveland area and I hate the Red Sox!! Haha!

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  3. I haven't tried this yet because I don't use Chrome. I keep telling myself I'll switch, but I'm just so stuck in my ways...*sigh*

    I'd also like an extension that eliminates drama queen/attention whore posts. You know the ones where the person posts something vague and self-pitying in order to generate a lot of questions from concerned friends? Those are the WORST.

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  4. I have not tried Unbaby Me yet but I'm definitely tempted! Those pics of kitties are just too darn cute. : )

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  5. I love reading your posts! The one time, that I know of since I started recording these things, I ovulated on my own was after coming off HRT, as well. Best of luck to you.

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  6. Omg! I have an uncle, on fb, who posts a picture of every single thing he ever ate! I can not stand it!

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  7. I hate people who constantly repost "inspirational" quotes, like 75-80 % of their posts. It's like that stuff you used to get in email.

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  8. I think we IFers should abandon FB altogether and move over to Google+ and make it a No Fertiles Allowed zone ;)

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    1. Aaahahaha! I love this idea!!!

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  9. Awesome! Thanks for sharing. I've moved from "intrigued" to "motivated" lol!

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