Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
Tags: christmas, fun, garland, Granted, half, hotel, Madness, prelit, side, Sunday, tree, wall
Posted in Parenting/Home, Pictures, Will, madison | 11 Comments »
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
Posted in General | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
I love Lands End. They have some of most stylish clothes at a good price. They even have plus size items that look good, so they score 2 thumbs up in my book. I also love that they have a virtual model on their site. All you have to do is put in your height and weight (there are othere things you can customize too like eye shape and hair color). You then can pick up clothing to put on your model, and know how that looks on you. You can exchange out colors, sizes, and pretty much anything else you want. I could literally spend hours just playing with that.
Now, if you are interested in shopping there for yourself or Christmas, use this coupon code:
Code: OUTERWEAR
Pin: 1013
This code will get you free basic UPS shipping on any order you have from October 13 – October 20. Now, I know that times are tough. Lands End knows this also and wants to give one of my readers either a Women’s Half-Zip Pullover or the Women’s Sherpa Fleece. I will let the winner pick which one she would like to receive! What do you need to do to enter this contest?
Each one of these things will give you one entry:
1. Leave a comment on this post. I want to know which one you want and what color it should be.
2. Twitter about this contest. Please leave me your username so I can verify.
3. Stumble this post. If you don’t know what Stumble Upon is, please read Lori’s post at Blogging Cents. She explains it extremely well.
4. Add this post to other social media sites like Digg, Kirtsy, Blogging Zoom, Reddit, Propeller, Etc.
For 5 additional entries,
1. Blog about this on your blog. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
2. Add this to any forums you belong too. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
3. Subscribe to this blog using either my email or RSS feed
4. Add my badge to your sidebar:
This contest will end October 29th at 8:00 pm CST and is for US residents. Good Luck!
Tags: Anything, blog, blogging, book, christmas, clothing, code, Color, comment, contest, coupon, customize, digg, entry, eye, Fleece, Hair, half, href, Kirtsy, Lands End, Lori, love, mce, model, Order, othere, OUTERWEAR, pick, PIN, post, price, Pullover, shape, Sherpa, shopping, site, size, src, Stumble, ups, URL, Use, weight, winner, Women, Zip, zoom
Posted in General | 363 Comments »
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
Posted in General | No Comments »
This is what our Christmas tree looked like for about two hours on Sunday. Granted, our prelit tree is 8 years old. However, half of the tree was out when we put it up. Of course, Bill didn’t bother to plug it in until we were over half done getting it up and fixing the branches. He’s lucky I didn’t recommend he start researching a hotel las vegas. Instead, I stayed quite calm and just finished the tree. Since only one side of the tree was out, we were able to cheat and just turn that side to the wall. We also broke two ornmanents (thanks kids!) before we even had the garland on the tree. Good times, good times.
Lands End Giveaway!
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008I love Lands End. They have some of most stylish clothes at a good price. They even have plus size items that look good, so they score 2 thumbs up in my book. I also love that they have a virtual model on their site. All you have to do is put in your height and weight (there are othere things you can customize too like eye shape and hair color). You then can pick up clothing to put on your model, and know how that looks on you. You can exchange out colors, sizes, and pretty much anything else you want. I could literally spend hours just playing with that.
Now, if you are interested in shopping there for yourself or Christmas, use this coupon code:
Code: OUTERWEAR
Pin: 1013
This code will get you free basic UPS shipping on any order you have from October 13 – October 20. Now, I know that times are tough. Lands End knows this also and wants to give one of my readers either a Women’s Half-Zip Pullover or the Women’s Sherpa Fleece. I will let the winner pick which one she would like to receive! What do you need to do to enter this contest?
Each one of these things will give you one entry:
1. Leave a comment on this post. I want to know which one you want and what color it should be.
2. Twitter about this contest. Please leave me your username so I can verify.
3. Stumble this post. If you don’t know what Stumble Upon is, please read Lori’s post at Blogging Cents. She explains it extremely well.
4. Add this post to other social media sites like Digg, Kirtsy, Blogging Zoom, Reddit, Propeller, Etc.
For 5 additional entries,
1. Blog about this on your blog. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
2. Add this to any forums you belong too. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
3. Subscribe to this blog using either my email or RSS feed
4. Add my badge to your sidebar:
This contest will end October 29th at 8:00 pm CST and is for US residents. Good Luck!
Tags: Anything, blog, blogging, book, christmas, clothing, code, Color, comment, contest, coupon, customize, digg, entry, eye, Fleece, Hair, half, href, Kirtsy, Lands End, Lori, love, mce, model, Order, othere, OUTERWEAR, pick, PIN, post, price, Pullover, shape, Sherpa, shopping, site, size, src, Stumble, ups, URL, Use, weight, winner, Women, Zip, zoom
Posted in General | 363 Comments »