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Category Archives: NaBloPoMo

Pride and Precocious

Written on November 13, 2009 by Jennifer in Little Monkeys, NaBloPoMo

I’m not particularly proud of several facets of this story.

On my way home from Bible study, my kids having already eaten in the nursery, I decided to go through the drive-thru at Krystal to get myself some lunch. {groan}

Sitting in line, waiting for my turn to order, Carson started complaining about HOW THIRSTY HE WAS! He was SOOO THIRSTY! He NEEDED chocolate milk! CHOCOLATE MILK!!! OH EM GEE! (Last exclamation added by me for effect, just a little FYI in case you thought Carson typically ran around saying, “Like, yeah, OH EM GEE!” No.)

Of course Ella was suddenly parched herself and nearing a certain death if she didn’t get CHOCOLATE MILK! LIKE NOW! SOOO THIRSTY!

Krystal isn’t exactly known for their health food, they don’t even offer plain milk on their menu. Thinking quick on my butt, I offered to order them lemonade.

All screaming ceased and they waited patiently until we arrived home, where they were able to partake of their thirst quenching beverage. (Not entirely true, but they did stop their “woe is me” moaning.)

Once home, I poured the lemonade into two cups for Carson and Ella. Ella took one drink and said, “This is SO not beer.”

**************

Other Ella-ism’s include, “I am SO done.” “I am SO taking a bath.”

I SO have no idea where she gets it. (And I SO don’t know why she thought her lemonade was supposed to be beer.)

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So far away from me

Written on November 12, 2009 by Jennifer in Extended Fam, NaBloPoMo

I recently had a conversation with a friend who complained about having family so close-by.

“They just show up! Unannounced! They overstep their boundaries and discipline my kids, they never even give me a chance to correct them,” she lamented. Her list of grievances also included being dragged into family drama, feeling obligated to always participate in family functions, and never having weekends to themselves.

I smiled and nodded sympathetically in all the right places as I listened to her story. Probably, if we lived close to family, I might even feel the same way. I’d likely even need an anonymous blog to complain about those kooky people with whom Tate and I share history and DNA. Yet it’s hard to relate to these family “horror” stories since I don’t have family that is closer than an eight hour drive away.

I do not want to play the “who has it worse” game, because that’s unfair. Family that’s too close and family that’s too far away each have their fair share of pitfalls and annoyances. But last Friday night, my dad had a heart attack and I was 650 miles away. My mom waited in the hospital completely alone and I couldn’t be there to hold her hand and tell her that her husband of almost 40 years was going to be fine. I couldn’t just be there.

On Saturday morning, my mom called and told me the news about my dad. She assured me that he was fine, that he’d even driven himself to the emergency room. Early Saturday morning he received a stent in his heart and was recovering in ICU.

“You don’t need to come,” she assured me, “he’s really fine. He’ll be going home within a day or two.”

At 5:00 Sunday morning, Tate, the kids, and I set out for my hometown. Simply hearing, “he’s really fine,” was not enough. It’s not that I didn’t believe my mom, but I needed to see my dad and KNOW that he really was okay. I also knew that I needed to be there for my mom.

Maybe the fact that we live so far from our extended family makes me appreciate the time we do spend together all the more. But I’d give just about anything to be that person who could complain about having family too close. In these times of family crisis, too close would be a blessing.

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At least I don’t let them OD on sugar

Written on November 10, 2009 by Jennifer in Extended Fam, Little Monkeys, Mommydom, NaBloPoMo

My mom and I were discussing what I feed and don’t feed my children.

“Carson and Ella both love Honey Nut Cheerios, but they wish they could eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch everyday. They know I won’t let them, though,” I explained.

Being a doting grandmother she asked, “Why don’t you let those babies have Cinnamon Toast Crunch!?”

Of course I explained that I couldn’t possibly let them start their days with that much sugar and that I really try to make sure that they eat mostly healthy.

“My sanity depends on not having to scrape them off the ceiling, Mom.”

“You let them have a least some of their Halloween candy, I hope!” my mom asserted, apparently having forgotten the calamity of children high on sugar.

“Well, yeah, some of it. I took away all the Snickers, though, and put them in the freezer. Unfortunately Carson discovered them and couldn’t figure out how his Halloween candy ended up there,” I explained.

“So you let them have frozen Snickers?” she asked.

“Oh no, I froze them for me. I told Carson that it was rule that Snickers had to be frozen until they’re ready to eat, but that it would be a few more weeks until they’re ready. When the kids aren’t looking, I eat them.”

Judge away. I lie to my children and steal their candy. What of it?

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Why didn’t you guys remind me to post the recipe for the green beans????

Written on November 9, 2009 by Jennifer in NaBloPoMo, Pictures, Recipe, side dish

MONTHS, people! MONTHS ago I mentioned these Sichuan Green Beans and how they were delicious and what a great side dish they were for Korean Beef Lettuce Wraps and how I was going to post the recipe, but I couldn’t get a good picture and then…I completely forgot.

I still can’t get a great picture, this one is too blue, but frankly I don’t feel like messing with the white balance. I’m tired tonight and I feel like you will be just fine with my too blue picture.

These are so easy! From the September 2008, Cooking Light

1  lb fresh green beans, trimmed and snapped (I have a little secret. I used frozen green beans and they are FINE.)
1  TB canola oil, divided
1/4 cup chopped shallots
1 1/2  TB minced garlic
1  TB minced peeled fresh ginger
1/2  tsp crushed red pepper
1  TB Chinese black vinegar (I can’t find it in my grocery store and I refuse to traipse all over town for 1 measley tablespoon) or balsamic vinegar
1  TB soy sauce
1/2  tsp salt

Here’s what you do…

1. Cook beans in boiling water 2 minutes or until crisp-tender. Or make your life easier like I do and cook the beans according to package directions, minus a few minutes. Drain and rinse under cold running water; drain. Pat beans completely dry with paper towels.

2. Heat a wok over high heat. Add 1 1/2 teaspoons oil to wok, swirling to coat. Add green beans to wok; stir-fry 3 minutes or until browned. Spoon green beans into a bowl.

3. Add remaining 1 1/2 teaspoons oil to wok, swirling to coat. Add shallots, garlic, ginger, and crushed red pepper; stir-fry 15 seconds or just until garlic begins to brown. Return green beans to wok. Add vinegar, soy sauce, and salt to wok; toss to combine.

Is that not the easiest side dish!? Kinda fancy, kinda Asian, totally easy, totally delicious.

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Dates

Written on November 8, 2009 by Jennifer in hole-y matrimony, NaBloPoMo

I completely forgot that October 31 was the ten year anniversary of when Tate and I became engaged. Apparently he forgot, too.

I remembered on November 6, the eleventh anniversary of our first date. (Jesse James’ Hideout in Rolla, MO. Jealous much?) (I also puked the next morning right in front of him.) (Again. Jealous much?)

I can’t believe that neither of us even REMEMBERED that October 31 was the TEN YEAR anniversary of when we became engaged. How could we have both completely forgotten!?! Since I feel like he and I are having some blips on our marital radar, and I tend to overanalyze A LOT, it made me particularly sad and introspective to have forgotten.

I’ve been thinking about all of our special dates. We don’t celebrate any of these days except for our wedding anniversary anymore, but I remember those early days when we at least acknowledged (wink, wink) all those significant days.

December 29, 1998, This one is none of yo business
December 30, 1998, The first time we told each other we loved one another
May 17, 1999, The day we moved in together in Knoxville, the day after I graduated from graduate school.
July 14, 2001, Our wedding day

I miss those days when we celebrated that we’d been together a WHOLE MONTH! or a three months or eight months. When we got married, we decided that it would be too much to try and remember all the milestones. Celebrating our wedding anniversary would be plenty, we’d agreed.

Maybe we should reinstate celebrating those milestones. Maybe we should do what we did before.

Do you still celebrate those little days? Or do you only celebrate your anniversary?

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Blog Tip Sharing Project Redux: StumbleUpon School

Written on November 7, 2009 by Jennifer in blog tip sharing project redux, blogging, NaBloPoMo

StumbleUpon, StumbleUpon, StumbleUpon. I should confess that StumbleUpon (SU) often totally baffles me. Some posts go over well, others die a very quick death and I don’t really know why. I hear from so many of you that you’ve seen no traffic from SU and that you don’t really see the point of using it. I cannot promise that you’ll ever see any traffic from SU. There I said it. But I know that for me, anywhere from 10-75% of my daily traffic is generated because of SU.

With that said, I have learned a few things about using SU that I think will help you. I’ll give these tips in list form! And! I’ll give these tips in three, easy to follow levels! (Please note that SU has recently updated itself and I’m still learning the new format. I’m trying to provide as accurate of information as I possibly can!)

Part 1, StumbleUpon Kindergarten

Let’s start at the beginning. For those of you who are not SU newbies, scroll on down to Part 2 and Part 3 of this post where I’ll give some more intermediate tips.

1. First of all you have to set up an account at http://www.stumbleupon.com. You’ll be asked to choose a name, try to choose one that best fits your brand (links to a blog tip post that’s not yet been updated) . Next, you’ll be directed to “Join and Download Now.” The “download” part means that you’ll be downloading the SU toolbar into your browser, which is vital to getting the most out of SU.

If you use Firefox as your browser, you’ll also need the SU Add-on. I’ve heard that SU and Safari don’t play well together. That’s too bad.

2. You need to set up your preferences once you’ve received your password via email and have logged into your SU account. Along the top right of the page, you’ll see the word “Settings.”

Next you’ll see some more tabs: Account Settings, Customize Profile, Manage Interests, and Profile Picture. Go ahead and complete the information in each of the sections.

In the “Customize Profile” tab, you can write a little blurb about yourself, your blog, share your interests, and customize the look of your SU page. My blurb says, “I’m Jennifer, nice to meet you! Come visit me at my blog http://playgroupsarenoplaceforchildren.com!” You can write whatever you’d like, although I’d recommend putting your blog address, as this is the only place on your profile where you can do that.

Make sure you’ve hit the green “Save Preferences” button at the bottom of the page!!!

3. Start subscribing to other’s StumbleUpon pages. This is entirely different than subscribing to a blog via a feed reader, as you will access their pages from your personal SU homepage. (Though you can subscribe to these pages via feed reader, but you really don’t need to do that.) Subscribing is basically the same as adding friends, a feature that recently was discontinued on SU.

Click the word “Stumblers” at the top of the page. Allow SU to search your email address book for people who are already SU users, click the green “Find Friends” button on the right hand side of the page.

4. Begin to understand the toolbar you’ve downloaded. The following is a step by step guide on how to use it.

* To stumble a post click on the title of the post so that you’re on the direct URL to the post you wish to stumble.

Rather than stumble an entire site, stumble specific posts on a site.

* Hit the “thumbs up/I like it!” button.

* If it hasn’t already been stumbled, then a box will appear where you’ll write a little review (explanation below). You’ll also be asked to put it in a category. Choose your category WISELY. Then add as many tags as you can, the more the better. (Sometimes, SU screws it up, though, and puts it in an incorrect category despite your best efforts.)

* If the post HAS already been stumbled, then when you hit the “thumbs up/I like it!” button, it will change colors. When it does, hit the little “speech bubble” button and write a review and add tags. You certainly don’t have to write a review for EVERY site you stumble, but the more reviews you write, the more weight your stumbles carry…(yes, the explanation is below)

And now you are ready to graduate to 3rd grade! You’re such geniuses that you get to skip 1st and 2nd grades!

Part 2, StumbleUpon Grade 3

So now what, right? Now that you’ve subscribed to some other’s SU pages, also known as their SU blog, AND you know how to use that fancy schmancy toolbar, you are ready to learn more about stumbling.

Let’s start stumbling! Here are my favorite ways:

1. Just read a post or found a website you adore? Stumble it! Hit the “thumbs up/I like it” button on your toolbar and write a review.

2. Go directly to your friends’ SU pages and see what they’ve most recently stumbled upon.

On your SU toolbar, look for the icon of two people together. See it up there? Clicking this allows you to discover the sites stumbled by your SU friends/subscriptions.

3. From your own SU page, look for the “Discover” tab and see what has most recently been stumbled by different friends.

4. You can even simply press the “Stumble” button on your toolbar.

Okay, next, let’s discuss writing a review and what I mean by “writing a review.” It’s very simple, grasshopper.

After you clickity-click that “thumbs up/I like it” button and either the box appears OR you click the “Speech Bubble” button you’ll write a review for the site.

For example:

“Recipe for peanut butter and fudge pasta.”

Or you can copy a key sentence from the post for your review. In Firefox, if you copy a section, it’s magically pasted into your review.

“From the post: ‘Obama and McCain are running for President of the United States and this is who I’m voting for.’”

BEWARE! Stumbling upon sites is addicting and can cause you to realize you’ve been stumbling for the past four hours while your children ate crumbs off the kitchen floor for lunch. Or so I’ve heard.

Okay, smartypants 3rd graders! It’s time to graduate to HIGH SCHOOL!

Part 3, StumbleUpon High School

Now that we can use the toolbar and we know how and what to stumble, let’s talk tips to drive traffic in your direction.

First and foremost, approach SU unselfishly. Look at it as a way to send traffic to your friends and highlight their really great work. Karma will hopefully eventually hunt you down and return the favor.

1. StumbleUpon frowns upon you stumbling your own site.

If you think you have a really fantastic post, ask someone to originally stumble it for you. You can always give it a thumbs up and review after them. The rumor is that you can only stumble one site fifteen times. I think this rumor has something to do with a time frame. You can review the same site MANY times over the course of months/years, but if you review the same site everyday for a month, you’ll get yourself banned from SU.

2. Write reviews when stumbling! They help up your status over simply just giving a site a thumbs up. The more reviews and sites you’ve stumbled upon, the more weight your stumbles carry. It also helps to subscribe to many people on SU and have many people subscribed to you.

For example, if you’ve only written a few reviews and given a handful of thumbs up, when you stumble a post it doesn’t carry as much weight as someone who has stumbled AND REVIEWED 3,286 sites. Getting a thumbs up from someone that has reviewed many sites and has many subscribers, will get your post noticed by more people.

3. Stumble often and stumble a variety of sites. DON’T ONLY STUMBLE YOUR OWN POSTS. BAD!!!

When I originally tried out SU, I only stumbled my own site and saw NO visitors. Once I figured this out and starting stumbling LOTS of sites, whenever I had a new post of mine that had been stumbled (by someone else), I saw more traffic driven to my site.

It’s also nice to just be generous and send traffic to sites you admire. If you’ve just read something that you just KNOW other people should read, too…then STUMBLE IT! It’s always nice to send a little traffic to your friends in the blogging community.

4. SU users love lists, pictures, humor, and well written posts.

According to different things I’ve read, SU users DO NOT LOVE slow loading sites, blah blog designs, long posts, typical “mommyblogger” posts about poop and what your kids didn’t eat for dinner.

5. The more tags you give a site, the more exposure it will get. Choose those tags wisely!

For example, if you choose just “Parenting” as a tag, you’re missing out on LOTS of potential visitors. Also choose “kids,” “family,” “babies,” “for-kids,” “homemaking…” Those are merely examples, but the point is…the more tags the better.

6. Review your friends’ SU blogs.

The term “blog” in this instance does not mean their actual BLOG that they write posts for, but rather the collection of sites they’ve stumbled upon. Your SU blog is your SU homepage (mine is http://playgroupie.stumbleupon.com).

To review your friends’ SU blogs, go to one of your friend’s SU page/blog, and click the “thumbs up/I like it” button on your toolbar. Write your review (“Love his stumbles, such a variety!”), add the tag “stumblers” and you’re done!

The more reviews you write and receive, the more weight your stumbles carry.

7. Take advantage of the StumbleUpon’s Photoblog It! feature. This feature adds the pictures you’ve stumbled upon to your page/blog.

When you stumble upon a photo that you’d like to review, you can right click on the image, scroll down to the bottom where it will say “StumbleUpon Photoblog It!” Click that, write your review, add your tags, and done.

8. DO NOT ONLY REVIEW YOUR OWN SITE. Yes, yes I know that I’ve said this like three times already. But I really need you to HEAR it. I mentioned above to approach SU unselfishly and I cannot stress enough how important it is to stumble and review OTHER’S sites.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with stumbling your own site occasionally. However if you stumbled your site today then before even CONSIDERING stumbling yourself again, you should go out and stumble 10-20 OTHER sites. Seriously, it drives other stumblers insane to see a person’s SU blog and the only things stumbled are things from their own website. Not cool.

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I realize that this all seems like a lot of work. It is, but there are rewards. I think that SU can generate quality traffic, meaning that I’ve noticed after a high traffic day on SU, I’ve seen an increase in subscribers the next day. If you have any additional tips or corrections to what I’ve said, please include those in the comments section.

I’m certain that there will still be questions about StumbleUpon. Feel free to ask away! However, please remember that what I’ve said here today is based on MY experience with SU. So many of you repeatedly tell me that you see no benefits from SU, but the thing is, I can’t make SU work for you, you gotta make it work for you. Okay?

Previously in this series…Writing Tips, Blog Promotion and Social Networking