It's Sunday night and the Blissdom '10 conference has officially been over for 24 hours. Yet, somehow I am still in Nashville, Tennessee, in my hotel room, at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. There's a contingent of about 8 of us that are stuck here, unable to fly home because of DC Snowpocalypse 2010. Normally, I would jump at the chance to sleep in a hotel bed, alone and without interruption, watch grownup programming on TV and eat out without having to worry if the restaurant serves apple juice, but not this time. I've been away since Thursday night and I miss my family!
I'm imagining them doing all sorts of warm and cozy family things like playing board games, drinking hot
[...]
Tomorrow night I'll be leaving for Nashville, TN for Blissdom 2010. It's my first time going and so I'm quite excited. I'm looking forward to seeing some friendly faces of bloggers that I only get to see IRL every once in awhile and to finally meet others that I've only tweeted with! Barbara and Alli have really pulled out all the stops and organized a weekend full of great information and fun events. As a matter of fact, Harry Connick Jr. will be there performing on Friday night. How cool is that? I took another look at the conference agenda last night and it's going to be tough to decide which sessions to attend since they all look interesting. Blogalicious is sponsoring an event hosted
[...]
During the holidays I won a $5 Starbucks gift card from Tippy Toes and Tantrums as part of the Yahoo! Kindness Project, or Yahoo! For Good. (Check out all the awesome things she did here.) Anyway, I received the card and tucked it away in my wallet for safekeeping. My original plan was to leave it in the mailbox for our mailman since we'd been experiencing some pretty crappy weather and I thought the prospect of a warm latte might brighten his spirits. Of course, given The Mommy Brain, I completely forgot about it and ended up buying him a Target gift card to go along with our baked goods for his holiday gift.
Then, when I went to New York to see MARTHA, I intended to leave it behind in my
[...]
Full disclosure: I totally stole these questions from NerdGirl.]Q: Web tool. It came into your work flow this year and now you couldn't live without it. It has simplified or improved your online experience.Oh, I've tried a lot of different web tools this year: Plinky, Whrrl, iGoogle, DropSend, Evernote, Springpad, TwitterTim.es, Posterous, HootSuite (which I
hate), Cozi, Slide, BigTent and a host of others. But I'd have to say my favorite is
TweetDeck, with
Cozi Family running a close second.
Q: Project. What did you start this year that you're proud of?Blogalicious!I'm so proud of us, ladies!!
Q: New person. She came into your life and turned it upside down. He went out of his way to
[...]
I just finished (literally just finished) reading
The Help by Kathryn Stockett, and I just had to post. You
must read it. It's one of those books where you'll let the laundry pile up, the kids stay up until 10pm, and throw a frozen pizza on the table for dinner, just so you can keep reading. The gist of the story is that of a twenty-something white woman in 1960's Mississippi who grows frustrated of her empty life as a "society" woman; living only for bridge club dates and Junior League meetings. She has a deep-down desire to be a writer and decides to write a book on the most controversial topic there could have been at the time: race relations in the South. Her angle on the issue is
[...]
It's Saturday night, Hubby's out watching The Fight, and I'm home watching the Sex In the City Movie. It's at the part where Carrie jumps out of bed to trek all the way to Miranda's place just before midnight in the snow on New Year's Eve.
It literally makes me tear up each time I watch it.
I know that, well it's just a movie, and that Carrie and her crew are in a completely different situation seeing as how they don't have any kids, but a part of me thinks it would be so amazing to have my close girlfriends all in one city. Yes, I have phone and email and the occasional trip, but it's not the same...I miss my friends. How nice would it be to be able to grab a coffee or go shopping or to a
[...]
Lately I have been driving Hubby crazy with that line. I don't know what it is, but since turning 32 (and actually even a little before then), I have taken the attitude that there are just some things that I should have or do simply because I am a grown up now for Pete's sake.
Take for example, my watch situation. Up until my birthday a couple of weeks ago, I was rocking the same cheap, bland watch every.day. I do have 2 "nice" watches sitting in my jewelry box on my dresser, but the battery is dead in one and the strap is broken on the other, so I have been relegated to my Avon specials out of sheer necessity. So when it came time for me to tell Hubby what I wanted for my birthday (no, he
[...]
[Cue to
24 theme music and cut to a shot of a disheveled-looking
Jack Bauer]
Only, the person who was really disheveled was me (and hubby). This is because at 4am this morning Giggles scurried into our room complaining that her "foot hurths" and offering a 5-minute explanation as to why it hurt and why she couldn't sleep and why she wanted us to wake up. After several minutes of whispered negotiations, Hubby convinced her to go back to bed, only to have her scurry
back in about 8 minutes later saying that her bed was "scary." Hubby made her a makeshift bed on the floor next to our bed and she laid there for, oh, 3 seconds before jumping up to use the bathroom, flushing repeatedly, and then
[...]
Oh my. I've just spent the last 30 minutes reading posts from all over the web about Everything I Need to Know About Going to BlogHer But Didn't Know I Needed to Ask. All of the advice, tips and observations I've read lead me to ask this one question: Is it really that serious?
In my 30+ years on the planet, I've been to my share of conferences. However, never before have I seen the frenzy that BlogHer creates. There are multiple posts
detailing what to wear and even more explaining
what to pack, who to meet and
how to begin a conversation. Are we going on a safari here ladies, or to a conference in Chicago?
Don't get me wrong - I am super excited to attend my very first BlogHer and
[...]
One of the many random things in my overloaded mommy brain is the precise location - at all times - of Giggles' Item of the Week. Does your kid have one (or more) of those? It's like each week she latches on to a new (or old) toy, accessory, bizarre trinket and must have it in her sight no matter where she is. Sometimes it's a plastic Hello Kitty watch from a McDonald's Happy Meal of times gone by. Or it could be a particular princess wand. Her purse is a recurring Item of the Week. It's a Dora the Explorer pink vinyl thing filled to the brim with assorted junk, ahem, personal items. Let's take an inventory, shall we?
- Her "cell phone" (note the QWERTY keypad for easy text messaging)
- Her
[...]
It's about that time. The weather finally seems to be warming up and spring finally seems to have arrived in our area. We've fired up the grill and had our first BBQ of the year, hubby has done his spring yard cleanup and we're starting to actually OPEN the windows and enjoy the fresh air. Hurrah! It also means that it's time for some spring cleaning...inside the house.
Where to begin? It seems like we've been hibernating for the past 7 months or so and that stuff has accumulated just about everywhere. We've already designated a weekend to tackle the project and I've started making a list of particularly disastrous areas that need serious attention:
[...]
So remember how Giggles has been going through a rough patch? For the past month or so, there has been a definite change in her behavior. She stopped wanting to go to ballet class, so we didn't make her go anymore. Then she started having potty accidents, which she never did before. She potty-trained super early (i.e. 27 months) and never looked back. Until now. And then last month, she decided that she didn't want to go to school anymore. We let her stay home a day here and a day there, and once she was at school she was totally fine and had fun. But she increasingly became more and more adamant about wanting to stay home. So we let her.
I figure she's still so young (she just turned 3) and
[...]
So this is what it feels like to have only me to worry about!
I arrived in Seattle last night for a work event and am still getting used to flying "solo". The plane ride was so uneventful - no diaper bags to lug; no preschoolers to entertain on the plane; only one bathroom run for ME...I felt like I was on vacation. And I guess I sort of am! I slept the entire night (which I haven't done since June 22, 2008) and then woke up and went to the fitness center. I didn't have to warm anyone's milk; change the tv channel from the Today Show to Handy Manny, or get.anybody.dressed. How indulgent!
And now I'm sitting here, gazing out of my 27th floor hotel room window with a panoramic view of the city,
[...]
Today Giggles turned 3! She has been so excited about it for the past few weeks and was looking forward to her big day. This afternoon, hubby and I went to her school to have a birthday party for her with her classmates. These school birthday parties are a big deal to the kids and they all rave about whose birthday party it was at school and what kind of cake they had, etc. So we were all expecting a fun time - we had the Minnie Mouse party stuff, the Dora and Boots cupcakes, the party hats, the goody bags - but we didn't expect Giggles to burst into heaving sobs when everyone started singing "Happy Birthday." The poor child was so upset and we have no idea why! Maybe it was because they
[...]
Uh oh. We've learned a new word in school. "Popular." Such a loaded word when it comes to being a girl in school, isn't it? I've been so busy dealing with the rudimentary needs of babies and toddlers (feeding; changing; dressing; bathing), that I never saw the complex social issues associated with school-age kids coming.
Chatterbox came home today saying how "so and so" was popular. And truth be told, "so and so" is popular since both my girls talk about her at length on a daily basis and scream her name like she's a rock star when they see her. But still, I wasn't ready to hear all that in the middle of making spaghetti. I asked her what that meant and who taught her the word and it seems
[...]
blog village 
