Hot Gogs and Mawshmallows

Hello, internet friends! I have not completely forsaken you. I've just been busy. Last week a lot of my time was spent seeing if I could manage to do this job. It sounded easy! And wonderful! I mean, who wouldn't want to do a little round-up blog post every day and make a thousand dollars a month?!

Well, internet, let me tell you--the Club Mom people were very wise. Part of the application process requires that the applicant write three days of sample posts.

And that was all it took to convince me that this is not a job I can do right now.

Basically, in order to do this job, you'd need to spend hours each day reading through tons of mommy blogs until you found noteworthy posts that you wanted to tell others about. Oh, and if you can group the posts up into themes, they'd really like that.

Uh huh.

Well, I used to say things like, "There are so many talented writers in the blogosphere....they deserve to be heard!"

Now that I have spent many hours looking through mom blogs I can tell you instead that, "There are many cruddy writers in the blogosphere. They are best left to themselves."

Truly, it was very hard to find posts that were interesting and well-written enough that they could be recommended to the public at large. I am sorry to say that many "mommy blogs" are indeed very boring and mostly revolve around the mind-numbing minutia of daily life. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's quite hard to get enough recent posts that all work around the same theme.

So, to make a long story short--I decided that I'm not going to apply for that job. There is no way I can devote 5 hours a day to hunching over my keyboard desperately seeking post worthy of a "round-up" blog. Good luck to you if you decide to try to do it.

We got a nice letter from Sallie Mae the other day that said, "Your student loans are all paid off. Congratulations and have a nice life!" How awesome is that?!

I have been remiss in my delay in sharing photos from Squiggy's third birthday which was a week ago. Here you go:

Batman cake!

I love the stage kids go through when they come up with the cheesiest smiles ever....

Yesterday my husband cut some small branches off of some trees, and when our little guys noticed the brush they started dragging it into a pile, deciding that we needed to have a camp fire. Next thing you know, Doodles was in the house asking me if we could make "hot gogs and mawshmallows" for dinner. You betcha, kiddo. Off to the store I went, returning with the gogs and s'mores supplies.

The Firecrapper and our kids--camp fire time!

It's pretty fun to have camp fires with the kids now that all of them are old enough to understand to stay away from the fire and all that good safety stuff. Occasionally we have to remind somebody of some safety rule, such as when Izzy Man had gotten a stick about 10 inches long that he was trying to roast a marshmallow on. Uh, buddy--watch out! That stick is too small!

Next thing you know Sullen stuck a marshmallow on the end of his finger and said, "Hey dad, is this long enough?" What a goofball.

Roasting marshmallows on a fingertip....

What?! My finger's tough enough!

For those of you with pets that live in a glass aquarium, I have a fabulous tip on keeping the thing clean:

We've been having a terrible time with my son's hamster cage stench. It's not surprising, I suppose, that a 13 year old boy does not feel compelled to clean out a pet habitat really, really well. Neither is it surprising that a 13 year old boy doesn't notice that his room smells like pet excrement. However, these facts were unavoidable for the rest of the family. The stink was eeeking out into the rest of the house and we had to come up with a reasonable way to really get that pet habitat clean.

Well, my creative thinking kicked in and I came up with a great idea!

We have another aquarium that is the same size. I had Sullen simply fix up the other place and move his hamster into it. Then we took the stinky one to the sink and really went to work on cleaning it out. Finally we put some bleach water in it and sat it out on the deck. After a while we dumped the water and now the thing will sit in the sun for a few days to air out, and when it comes time for another habitat cleaning, we'll simply move the hamster into the clean home and do it all over again. It's the best way to clean a hamster home that we've found.

That's it for now. You're all newsed-up and got photos AND a tip. What more could you want? Til next time,
Dollymama