As many of you know, one of my many bloggy responsibilities is to host The Sampler, a feature column at 5 Minutes for mom.

As summer draws to a close submissions have pretty much stopped coming in. So I’m sending a shout out to all of you because I know that most of you haven’t submitted anything to me yet.

It truly is a great way to get your blog noticed! It’s also a fun way to share your writing with the rest of the mom blogosphere.

I have a button on my right sidebar that will lead you straight to the posts I’ve featured. It is also very important that all of you read through the guidelines before submitting so that you know the process. You can see those by going to: www.5minutesformom.com/feature-columns/sampler-guidelines.

Thank you and I look forward to reading what you send my way!!

Goodness Gracious!  Where in the world do I begin.  Maybe the best place to start is to simply explain that due to the number of children we have, I don’t really do a lot of running around and a day out of the house with one or all of the children is basically unheard of!  So the fact that I left 5 of my 6 children in the hands of 2 sitters today so that I could spend the day registering CJ (son 1) for Jr. High and running a few errands only to be thrown immediately into sports practices is a big deal! 

I know that sounds like a small hurdle to most people, but it’s huge for me!  So at about 11:30 this morning I left a few last minute instructions with my brother and left him and my mother-in-law (I know, I know kind of an odd combination, but it worked) in charge of the 5 youngest children. 

As far as Jr. High registration is concerned, can I just say oh-holy-cow who knew it was that expensive just to put your child into school!!!  Keep in mind that he’s a public school student and by the time I left the building today I had spent $129 … seriously!  That’s before I pay another $25 next week for him to play 7th grade Football.  Granted, most of the money spent does give him tangible items … eventually.  Here’s the tally $20 for a yearbook, $15 for an ASB card, $14 for the “Life Fitness” (whatever happened to PE by the way???  but we’ll save that for another day) uniform, $20 for a math/science portfolio (this covers much of the school supply list as well), $20 into his lunch account and $40 for a school sweatshirt (ok, this wasn’t mandatory by a long shot, but I figured “oh well”). 

As if it isn’t enough that I had to hand over that much money in just the cafeteria alone, the mayhem fun continued throughout the rest of that floor.  One room housed the area to get the information to access the parent area of the website, another room had everyone’s locker information (oooooh) and yet another room at the other end of the hall was setup to get athletic information from all the kids.  We got the football info and little pep talk there, dropped off his code of conduct and physical information and went on our way.  He starts football practice on Monday - oh boy!

Then of course the locker and combination HAD to be tried!  He has an upper locker, which is actually very nice for his tall self .  All in all an interesting and semi-enlightening day (thankfully I get to wait another 3 years before I have to do it again) … ooooh, but the fun didn’t stop there.

Of course not!  I decided to take CJ out to lunch and grab a few back to school clothes he still needed (yup, you guessed it, even more moula out the door).  By the time we were done with that “short” errand, it was all we could do to get home, grab my brother, Salesman (son2 - football) and Tater (son3 - soccer), make sure that everyone left at home was alright and head out for sports.  Only to arrive at soccer in a downpour and find out that my son and the coach’s family were the only ones that showed up leaving us with an hour and a half ’till football practice … what to do, what to do. 

Obviously the story could just go on and on here, but I’ll cut it short by saying that I finally arrived home at 8:30 pm tonight hugged the kiddos who had been here all day without me and got everyone settled into bed.  The littlest guys had a very hard time going to bed, especially Little Bug, so I spent a while, rubbing his back and singing to him to get him settled in.  Amazingly all is quiet now! 

It will take me a week to recover!!!

OK, I’m not often announcing new advertising, but do you see the fun new ad to the right there?  Yes, the Leap Frog one!  This creative and simple little quiz will evaluate your preschooler’s development and make recommendations based precisely on where they are at … now that’s useful!

You can fill out the first few questions here, then it will take you to their site to complete the quiz.  You can end the questions and get recommendations at any point, or you can continue on getting more and more detailed information for your child.

I just thought it was a very fun thing for parents!

A while back I began a site for moms that offers wordpress blogs. Although the site is totally blogger ready, I haven’t been able to promote it because all the designs for it aren’t ready yet.

All of that to say that one of the fun extras I started was a social networking group for mom bloggers. Since I hadn’t promoted that aspect of the site AT ALL you can imagine my surprise when moms started joining it out of the blue!!

Realizing that it is a fun and exciting prospect for mom bloggers to have one place to come together I decided to go ahead and let all of you know about it.

So without further ado I’d like to invite my readers to be the first to officially know about Mom Blog Central. You can access and join the networking group at momblogcentral.ning.com.

I would love it if you would consider getting the word out about it on your blog too. In fact I plan to offer a fun incentive for group members who actively promote the site.

I also plan to get the main site done in September, but it is ready right now for anyone interested in having a wordpress blog with mom friendly designs and custom options … but I’ll tell you more about that another time.

I recently caught myself starting to say “laugh out loud” during a phone conversation … instead of just going ahead and laughing out loud.  Then I caught myself thinking it throughout several events and conversations only a day or so later.  Having suddenly noticed this unusual behavior I realized that I do it ALL THE TIME. 

I know that it’s a side effect of so much of my life being online.  Between blogging, commenting, emailing and twittering, normal grammar gets a little skewed. 

So, it brought about a question in my mind … am I alone in this?  So, I’m sending it out to all of you my faithful (yes, that includes the lurkers) … have you caught yourself doing something similar?  Maybe not the whole “laugh out loud” or “LOL” thing, but something similar????  Just want to know if I’m the only crazy .

Have I mentioned that I now offer custom (or premade) designs for Typepad too???  Well I do!  I know that I talked a couple days ago about the new site for my premade designs, but I think I should mention this too.

Basically, I can take any of my designs (custom or premade) and customize it to the sizes required at Typepad and coordinate all of your blog’s colors as well.   This is only available for Typepad members that have a Plus or higher membership.  Pro and higher members can even have a background to match!

Custom Typepad Design is offered at www.sweetnsimpledesign.com and premade designs are at www.snsblogdesign.com.  These are created with my usual passion that each mom’s design should be as unique as she is!

Seriously, it seems like it should only be Wednesday.  I have been playing catch up all week and definitely need a couple more days to finish it all! 

Hubby and I had a super afternoon yesterday.  We get far too many opportunities to hang out … just the two of us anyway!  So it was heaven to be able to chat about just about anything under the sun WITHOUT INTERRUPTION!  I know …. amazing!   We had a wonderful lunch together then went to the mall where my hubby (who’s been trying to decide on a cell phone for a while now) discovered the Apple Store.   Can I just say that it’s a dangerous place to set a non-techy loose with his somewhat-techy wife? 

Suffice it to say he found the PERFECT phone for himself.  Sure they were out of stock, who isn’t …. he discovered who wasn’t and many hours later had one for himself (oh, and one for me too LOL).  So there’s our anniversary in a nutshell . 

I think we do our most major purchases on our anniversary.  We don’t spend a lot of money (we don’t have a lot to spend for Heaven’s sake), but three years ago we had just found out we were pregnant for the 5th time (didn’t have the remotest clue it was twins though) and we purchased our Yukon.  

So, here I am on a Friday-that-should-be-a-Wednesday and I desperately need to get going on all my projects.  Should have a fun contest posted for you a little later today here, so be sure to hop back over this afternoon to take a peek.  Have a great Friday and a wonderful Weekend!

My wedding anniversary that is! Yup, we’ve been married for 15 years today!!!!! I realized recently that I don’t post about my Hubby a lot here and that’s actually quite unfortunate. He’s a great guy, truly the best! He’s a wonderful dad, but an even better hubby! He works very hard to support his family!

I could go on and on, but he took the day off today (yay!) and I need to start thinking about getting ready. So, at noon we’ll begin our Anniversary Date … kidless! The weather is turning out to be very different than we had planned, but that’s the good thing about having a “fly by the seat of your pants” spouse …. nothing is ever set in stone .

So you may hear more from me tomorrow … until then, have a great day!

Hi everyone, if you like my designs you’ll want to head over to Froggy Reviews and check out this post: http://froggyreviews.com/2008/07/fbff3-noahs-ark/.  This week I’m offering a cute Noah’s ark design.  Remember these are still one of a kind designs and You don’t need to enter to win! 

FBFF designs are available on a first come first served basis so if you are interested or know someone who might be, simply read through the Free Designs details page.  You’ll even find a form on that page to fill out all of your information to let me know you want it :) 

Oh and there are a couple other great contests going on over there as well, just be sure to click on the contests category to see all of them