Friday, November 14th, 2008
It is amazing that we are given this little gift of life without a handbook. We try our best to keep them safe. However, there are some things as parents we should know. I was lucky enough to be invited onto a phone call with the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children and learned a lot of information about keeping my kids safe. My goal is let you know what I have learned, so your children don’t become a statistic.
Did you know that most abduction attempts occur after school? It is usually between the hours of 2 pm – 7 pm. Almost half of nonfamily abduction attempts happen when a child is walking to or from school (or some related school activity).
Did you know that the majority of children affected by abduction attempts are girls between 10 – 14?
Did you know that only 58% of parents have talked to their children about this?
This is scary information. I remember when I was a kid, and I could go play outside myself. Now, I would never let my kids outside by themselves! I am so glad to see that Duracell and The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) have teamed together to give us parents a handbook to start a conversation with our children. Best of all, this is free of charge! The Child Safety Handbook can be downloaded right from the linked site.
Now, we were able to ask questions and mine revolved around what to tell my 4 year old daughter. I don’t want to scare her, but I also don’t want to not have this conversation with her. The advice I was given for her age is that we really need to get away from “stranger danger”. The problem with stranger danger is that it portrays strangers as these scary bad people, and that is not what strangers look like. We need to talk about the situations that have been tried and are effective — like the puppy trick. We need to teach our children that it is okay to say no to stranger and that if an adult needs help, they will ask another adult, not a child. Our response cannot be fear based, and we must also reassure our children.
I highly recommend downloading that handbook. You will find a ton of helpful information no matter how old your child is. The Power of Parents Child Safety Handbook provides safety tips from the experts at NCMEC for four age groups: infant to toddler, ages 4-6, ages 7-11, and ages 12-17. The handbook outlines age-appropriate tips and scenarios that parents need to be aware of, as well as some outside influences that may be impacting their child’s actions. If reading this handbook could potentially save your child, it is well worth taking the time to download and read it.
Tags: abduction, activity, adult, Advice, age, amp, call, cannot, Center, charge, Child, Children, conversation, danger, daughter, Duracell, Exploited, fear, gift, goal, half, handbook, infant, information, life, lot, majority, matter, mine, National, NCMEC, parents, phone, power, problem, puppy, right, safety, school, site, statistic, stranger, taking, toddler, ton, trick, year
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Sunday, October 12th, 2008
I blogged recently on Lisa Reviews about how much I can’t stand the Chicago Tribune. Yes, my favorite paper since I moved down here has made me cancel my subscription. I know, hard to believe. I have been through many, many, many changes to the look of the paper. However, this last one I cannot stand. It drives me nuts to the point that I swear its giving me acne. I can’t find the sections that I like. I swear there is less content. Some of pages look like a blog page which would be fine if I was looking at a blog. However, I read the newspaper for more content not less. My husband has always wanted me to subscribe to the Chicago Sun Times, so I finally did. Today, our first paper came, and I loved it! Their articles had real content and weren’t just all pictures. I could easily find what I was looking for. I only have two complaints. I am not sure how I am going to share the paper with Bill. We tend to read it at the same time. The other problem I see is that I get less coupons. However, the Chicago Sun Times is a third of the cost of the Tribune, so at least I am saving money there. If I remember, I’ll just ask my mom to keep her coupons, and I’ll go through them when we go up to Green Bay.
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Tags: acne, Bill, blog, cannot, Chicago, content, cost, fine, Green Bay, Husband, Lisa Reviews, look, Loving, mom, money, newspaper, page, point, problem, stand, subscription, sun, time, Times, today, Tribune
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Thursday, September 25th, 2008
I’ve been meaning to get this online, but you know how real life gets in the way! LOL I do have to thank Christine for all the great pictures I am going to be using while I blog about this. I got to Orlando and found out that my camera had died. Right now, it is at Sony to get fixed!
Jeremy Schoemaker was our opening keynote speaker. He genuinely looked nervous to be up there. We were able to learn that in 4 short years he went from a nobody to a somebody. He gave us a lot on insight into his life and how he got to be where he was and possibly what we need to do to get where he is.
Susie Gardner was up next. Her presentation was about content. As a person who has blogged for two years, I personally did not care for her presentation. It was geared towards the beginner blogger, and I have moved well beyond that. I felt like half of us in the room could have given that speech. However, I did talk to some beginning bloggers, and they found her presentation helpful and interesting.
We got to go to lunch from there. We ate at The Globe on Wall Street since it was the least busy. The food was excellent. However, the service was slow. Very Slow. Though, I guess all the places were that way since some of the next speakers weren’t back in time for their presentations. However, we didn’t know that and ended up almost running to get back in time! I definitely did not need any weight loss pills for this trip. That walk/run back to the conference burned off my lunch no problem! In the picture (which Drew took!) is Drew, his wife Allison, Heather, me, and Christine (and yes, in that order).
Next up was the big money bloggers panel and Drew got to moderate it. We got to learn the tricks of how they all got where they are. On the panel was John Chow, Neil Patel, Stephanie Agresta, and Jeremy Schoemaker. This was a very interesting panel. One of the questions was what was your biggest mistake or surprise. The answer that surprised me the most was from John Chow — it was the lengths that Google went about scraping his site from their search engines. He’s a nobody compared to Google, and they went after them the way they did!
Next up was the growing traffic panel with Tony Hung, Lea Alcantara, Brian Clark, Alex Schek, Steve Spalding, and Tamar Weinberg. I’m going to tell you a funny story that you cannot repeat. I was listening to these speakers and was seriously confused. Finally, I leaned over to Christine and asked her what this had to do with what advertisers wanted. She informed me that that was the next panel. Whoops! Needless to say, I didn’t get a whole lot out of this. Being that I work freelance as a social media manager, I pretty much already knew what they were talking about. However, what I didn’t like was that they really didn’t talk about all the networks out there. You can get some really good traffic from sites like stumble, reddit, mixx, kirtsy, etc. Its not all digg all the time. I personally don’t get much traffic from there compared to the other sites.
The next panel was the “what advertisers want” panel. It included Jon Buschlen, Katia Adams, Michael Brito, Sean Jackson, Michael Jenkins, and Randall Richards. It was nice to hear what advertisers were looking for. However, anyone who has done any paid blogging already knew what they had to say. These were advertisers that “get it”. Unfortuntely, there is a whole ton of advertisers out there who do not and want 20 links for $5 and can’t figure out why the bloggers won’t do their opps.
After that, we had Ted announcement. This is when we learned about Cloud Shout, and we got our alpha keys for it! It was an awesome presentation. After that, we went to the hotel to get ready to go out!
Tags: Alex Schek, Allison, answer, beginner, beginning, blog, blogger, Brian Clark, camera, cannot, Christine, conference, content, Drew, food, Globe, google, half, Heather, insight, Jeremy Schoemaker, John Chow, Jon Buschlen, keynote, Lea Alcantara, life, lol, loss, lot, lunch, Michael Brito, Michael Jenkins, mistake, money, Neil Patel, nobody, online, Order, Orlando, Panel, person, picture, presentation, problem, Randall Richards, room, run, Sean Jackson, search, service, site, Slow, somebody, sony, speaker, speech, Stephanie Agresta, Steve Spalding, story, surprise, Susie Gardner, talk, Tamar Weinberg, ted, time, Tony Hung, traffic, trip, walk, Wall Street, way, wife
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Saturday, July 26th, 2008
I know that my husband is just dying to put a bar in our newly remodeled basement. That was a plan he always had since we moved here. Premiere Barstools has so many choices for anyone who is looking for counter stools, extra tall stools, or kitchen bar stools. They have an excellent selection for all of those.
Like I said, I personally am looking to surprise my husband with some bar stools for the basement. Now, I cannot decide if something classic like this:
would work best or if something more pretty would be in store. I found an excellent deal on something like this:
I guess it will probably come down to what kind of bar he decides to build. With having little ones, a lot of extra things come into play. As for the first stool, I would be worried about the stool having no back. Whereas, on the second stool, I would be worried that Will (my one year old) would use this chair as a climbing challenge (Yes, for some reason he has started the climbing stage after he learned to walk!). However, the second chair is about $85 which is a great price for barstools. Plus, whenever we get around to remodeling kitchen, these would look nice there. I have a huge kitchen (I think it is 15 x 15), so at some point we are going to remodel it. We may add in an island, and those stools would look awesome there too! Decision, decisions . . .
Do you have barstools in your house? What kinds did you go with? Did where they were going make a difference to which ones you got? Do you use the barstools as extra seating when company is over? I know, lots of questions, but I have never bought these before!
Tags: anyone, bar, Barstools, basement, basements, cannot, chair, challenge, company, counter, deal, difference, house, Husband, island, kind, kitchen, lot, make, plan, play, Plus, point, Premiere, price, reason, remodel, seating, selection, something, stage, stool, store, year
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Thursday, July 24th, 2008
This video angers me. If you know somebody with autism, it will anger you too!
I cannot believe that he equates loudmouth kids to those who have autism. My cousin is a special education teacher too. They don’t give the answers to anybody. Obviously, he has never dealt with children with disabilities before be it a learning disorder or autism. Heaven forbid, they need an extra hand. I guess if you’re not normal according to what the textbooks say, society should just throw you away or you’re destined for only getting an education online so no one has to deal with you.
I understand that the prevalence of these disorders are going up. Could it be that we have better intervention techniques now so that we can catch these kids early and get them the help they need?
Let me know your thoughts on this!
Tags: anger, Anybody, Autism, Autism spectrum, Brats, cannot, cousin, Disability, disorder, Disorders, education, forbid, hand, health, heaven, help, intervention, loudmouth, Mental Health, prevalence, society, somebody, Special education, teacher, video
Posted in General | 8 Comments »
It is amazing that we are given this little gift of life without a handbook. We try our best to keep them safe. However, there are some things as parents we should know. I was lucky enough to be invited onto a phone call with the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children and learned a lot of information about keeping my kids safe. My goal is let you know what I have learned, so your children don’t become a statistic.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a181e78b-f302-4f04-9f8b-9ed9ff8a39d7)
