WTF?

Totally MIA, I know.   And totally wiped out about 96% of past posts.   Maybe I’ll put em back, maybe I won’t. But I promise to eventually come back to the blogging world…. eventually.

What’s For Dinner? Menu Planning Tips for Busy Moms

Dinner is the last meal of the day and a time when families can get together and discuss their day. It is also a hectic meal for busy moms who are just getting off of work or who have been busy with other activities all day. If you’re a busy mom, here are some menu planning tips to help make dinner meals easy and even fun!

1.    Schedule your meals a week in advance. This is one of the most important planning tips for meals. Knowing what you are going to eat throughout the week means less chance that you will stop off at the closest fast food joint for a convenient, but unhealthy meal. Decide on the last day of the previous week (let’s say Sunday for the sake of argument) what the menu will be for the following week. Create your shopping list from the list of ingredients to avoid buying what you don’t need at the grocery store.

2.    Look for bargains. Clip coupons, read advertising circulars and the like to decide where the best grocery to shop is for your menu items. If one ingredient is a common denominator in many meals, consider buying in bulk to save money. Common staples like milk, eggs, bread and sugar can be bought in bulk as well. Some stores will have double or triple coupon days when you can save even more.

3.    Search online. After a while your family will get tired of chicken and rice every Thursday. You can get into a menu rut sometimes. Use the Internet to search for new and exciting recipes. Learn to put a twist on old recipes for a new taste.

4.    Have a leftover night. After preparing meals for five or six days, there is bound to be some food left over. Designate one night to be leftover night and let everyone mix and match for dinner. It saves mom from having to throw away any food.

5.    Cook your meals in advance. After deciding on a menu plan for the week, go ahead and fix as many meals as you can. Choose a day when the entire family can help like Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. Each person can take one meal and fix it for the following week. Once everything has cooled, store it in sealed containers or casserole dishes to be frozen until the night it is needed.

6.    Do prep work in advance. All of the meals can’t be cooked at once. Some foods just taste better freshly prepared. For them, so as much prep work in advance as you can. Enlist your kids to help chop (give them the kitchen shears instead) vegetables, dice cooked meat and mix together dry ingredients. The night of the meal, all that is needed is to add the wet ingredients and bake.

Google Search Phrases

Okay, so every once in awhile, I’ll check all of my website statistics in order to study various traffic information, like average visits per day, files viewed, error logs … that sort of lame stuff. Why? It’s just something that we nerdy webmasters do, mmkay?

Anyway, back to my story.

There’s also the opportunity to see keyphrases that were used to find your site.  You know… you go to Google, type in a search term, and out pops out a dozen pages of results, you click a link? Well the actual search term that you use, it gets recorded into a site’s log. (Scary, huh?)

Booooooring, I hear ya.  Normally, it is.  But I always manage to come across a few keyphrases that make me giggle slightly, albeit while scratching my head in an “eh?” sort of fashion.

So here’s some of the obvious search terms that lead Googlers here: (with my comments enclosed in parenthesis, much like now)

adsense income suddenly drops
how to keep kids occupied while making dinner
moms creating baby food
nut-free brownie recipe
ways to keep babies occupied? (let them gnaw on a boob… always did the job for me)
ramblings (ha, guilty as charged)
my 9 month old suddenly wont go to sleep and stay asleep (welcome to the club, sistah)
mom works and rocks (awww, that’s nice)
work at home mom blog design (so there’s a need for it)
being a mom rocks (it sure does, for the most part)

Now here are some web searches that kind of made me go “uh, okay?”:

creative ways to fold a rag  (um, I don’t know how to do that, but okay)
creative ways to hang utensils (I didn’t realize there was one)
things to keep you occupied when you’re bored at school (apparently the internet?)
mom rocks wallpaper (I looked around, and don’t see any around here)
mom rocks necklace  (again, nope)
mom with flashlight behind kids  (should I be in front of them? hells no!)
mom what is that under the blanket (it’s me, leave me alone!)

And these, my baker’s dozen o’ readers, are the searches that I am filing in my mental “WTF?” file:
moms are rocks (say again?)
i haven’t cleaned my house  (okay, so this one is semi-believable)
bath tub worm farm (see above search for the possibility on why I could very well have one of my very own)
legal crack (I admit that I once posted about this… dunno if it’s in the archives or not, but it’s not what you think)
legal crack diet (sounds like a great upcoming book title… Random House, I’ll kick your nuts if you steal this from me)
percocet craigslist (oh sure, like I’d part with a percocet!)
mom live showing ass (I swear it’s not MY ass, don’t you worry)
my mom sniffer
sniffer mom (I don’t even want to know, okay?)

Oh well, they gave me a chuckle anyway.  I’ll post more next month if I find any goodies.

I ROCK At Procrastination

For as long as I can remember, I have been a procrastinator. And for just about as long, I’ve been fully aware of it, and also aware that procrastinating has never benefitted me in any way.

As a kid, I hated cleaning my room. Hated It. I would put it off till I couldn’t find a damn thing around me and had no clean clothes. Result? My mess made me totally late for everything.

In school, I vividly recall scribbling half-assed answers to my homework right outside the classroom. Result? Bad homework grades. Oh, and anxiety-filled thoughts about the bad report cards. That must have been a bonus.

Now in my grown-up life, I realize I haven’t gotten very much better.

I am alright about doing the necessities, like feeding the kids, paying the bills, cleaning the catbox. But I find myself putting off pretty much anything that isn’t in dire need of doing. Read: dishes, laundry, email replies.  This is sucky because when these things that aren’t in dire need of doing actually become dire, I’m overwhelmed.

I have a fortune cookie note taped to my computer monitor. It says “Procrastination is the fear of success”. It took me a month just to get around to putting it up! I thought by posting it there, it would give me the motivation to just get going with things.

I’d like to believe the fortune cookie. I enjoy the thought that the little Chinese man who makes my Shrimp Fried Rice somehow knew I needed to read that, so he put that one in the bag deliberately.

Anyway, I’m hoping to change this horrible habit.  Not for a New Year’s Resolution or anything (and even if it were, I do realize that it would’ve taken me THREE MONTHS to decide on it), but just to get some normalcy happening around here.

I’ve reluctantly removed my favorite  “Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid all together” magnet from my fridge and am ready to get motivated.

Um, maybe.  In just a few minutes.

Consistency Is Not One Of My Strong Suits.

My apologies for the lack of updates to MomRocks lately. I’m in the process of getting the new design finished up and trying to preserve a few of the blog’s better posts.  You may find some dead links for the moment, and you’ll also notice that most older posts might disappear. But I promise that it’s for the best.

Great Traveling Activity Ideas

Happy 4th Of July! Here are some fun ideas that you can use while you are traveling this summer with your kids.

20 Questions:

Everyone writes down a secret word which must be a noun (the name of an object). The others try to guess your word by asking questions about it.

Take turns until everyone has tried their word. You could have playoffs between the ones that stumped the lot, until only one was left.

Word Play:

This one is really good for older kids who are learning to read, write and spell.
Take it in turns to say a word. Any old word will do, the next person then has to take the last letter of the first word and think up another word and so on.

So say person one said “engine” person 2 would need to find a word beginning with the letter “e”, let’s say “elephant” next person in line would then have to find a word beginning with the letter “t”, such as “toys”.  The winner is the last person to be able to think up a word.

I Went To Market:

This is another memory game which is really popular with my kids. Everybody takes it in turn to say “I went to market and I bought….” and add what they bought. Next person has to say “I went to market and I bought…. And…”

This carries on until nobody can remember the list of things that got bought at market. Again, the last person to remember the whole list is the winner.

Find the Place:

Make a map of where you are going, but make it simple for the kids to understand. Write down names of cities, towns and villages that you will pass through on the way to your destination. Give the kids a pen/marker so that they can check off each place as you reach it. It’ll make the journey seem a lot shorter for them.

Car Colors:

Give each child a pen and piece of paper and tell them to choose a colour. From then on they have to mark down every time they see a car of the colour they have chosen.  The first person to spot say 15, or 30 cars of their chosen colour is the winner.

Alphabet Soup:

This is a game where everybody takes it in turns to come up with words beginning with the various letters of the alphabet. First person comes up with something for the letter “A” (apples), next person finds something with the letter “B” (boat) and so on.

X, U and Z are the most difficult, so it might be an idea to drop those letters. You can make the game harder by choosing categories such as famous people, or places or even animals and fruit.

Personal Bags

Let each child pack a small bag of their favourite toys and games to take with them. Make a rule that they are only allowed to take out one thing at a time, and they can only play with it for a certain amount of time, depending on the length of your journey.

Also encourage the kids to swap their toys/games if the journey is a long one so that they get a bit of variation in what they’re doing.

Travel Diary:

This one is extremely good for longer journeys, especially when you stop off at various places on the way. Each child will need a notepad and pen. The older ones can have disposable cameras and the younger ones can have art books and crayons.

Let them document the trip by taking pictures (or drawing) and writing notes about where they are, what they’ve seen and what they have done on the journey.

Not only will this keep them occupied, but it will also give YOU something to read on reflect on in time for the next journey.

Creative Ways To Keep Bored Kids Occupied In The Summer (Part Two): Outdoor Activity Ideas

Creative Ways To Keep Bored Kids Occupied In The Summer (Part Two): Outdoor Activity Ideas

Great Ideas for Outdoor Activities

Don’t forget to read part one of this series: 13 cool indoor activity ideas for kids

14: Ribbon Sticks:

For this you need some strips of wide ribbon and some bamboo sticks. A few 4 foot sticks will do. Snap them in half and tie a length of ribbon to one end. Make the ribbon length no longer than what the kids can handle.

Let the kids loose with the sticks and tell them to try to make shapes, circles, and snakes etc. just like the gymnasts do on T.V.

15. Garden Fun:

Buy a cheap plastic double sided sandbox for the garden. Fill one half with sand and the other half with water. Add a whole lot of kitchen utensils and containers, and the kids will occupy themselves forever.

(Make sure you always cover the sandbox when the kids are done, or you might find yourself an incredibly large litter box one day.)

16. Picking Berries:

Find a place with lots of berries, be it blackberries, strawberries, raspberries or whatever and go berry picking for the day.  Sometimes you may have to pay for the berries, but there are a lot of places where berries grow in the wild and are free to pick and use.

Kids LOVE picking berries, so take this chance to make it into an educational thing by bringing along a book about berries. This way you can teach them which berries are safe to pick and which ones they need to stay away from. Use the berries you pick to make desserts, jams and cakes. Delicious fun!

17. Organize a Treasure Hunt:

This can be done in the house, garden, park or even on a short walk. Hide some small items, toys or even little candies in various places. Draw up maps with “X Marks the Spot” and easy to follow directions.

Let the hunt begin!

18. Vegetable Patch:

If you have a garden, or access to one, see if you can get the kids involved in making a vegetable patch of their own. Seeds are pretty cheap and a lot of vegetables are very simple to grow and cultivate.

Try with carrots, lettuce leeks, spring onions and pumpkins for starters. Herbs are also really easy. Some extra simple ones are watercress, parsley, chives and basil.

19. Nature Walks:

Nature walks are one of the most inexpensive boredom busters ever created. All you need is energy and wide-open eyes. Of course, you can make the whole walk a lot more interesting by having something specific to look for.

Luckily for city people, nature isn’t just about being out in the country. Wherever there are trees, there’s going to be birds. Where there’s grass growing, flowers and weeds grow etc.

Borrow a book about wild flowers, birds or animals from your local library and refer to it every time the kids see something of interest. Take along a notepad and pencil for each of the kids to write down what they saw on the walk.

20. Borrow A Pet:

A great way to beat boredom in the school holidays is to get the kids involved with animals. If you don’t own a pet of your own, you could offer to look after the schools gerbils and rabbits, or for that little bit “extra”, why not offer to take your neighbor’s dog along with you on your nature walks?

21. Camping Out:

One thing kids never tire of is camping out somewhere. The easiest and cheapest place for that is in your own back yard or back garden. You can buy tents pretty cheap these days, and you don’t need something huge. If you don’t want to go to the expense of buying a tent, you can always make your own “temporary tent” by using a few sticks, sheets and tarpaulin.

Give the kids lots of snacks, a few flashlights and some sleeping bags. Warn the neighbors that there could be some noise. (If MY kids are anything to go by, there WILL be noise). Please make sure that don’t lock ALL of your doors when you go to bed, as even though the kids may seem ready to “camp out” they might possibly get a bit wary late at night when the rest of the gang is asleep or it might even get a bit chilly and then it’s good for the kids to be able to snuggle up in real beds.

22. Toy Sail Boats:

This one is a really old pastime, but tons of fun. Get a plastic bottle and cut it in half lengthways. Make the sail from a wooden Kebab stick and some paper.
There are tons of other household items that can be used, so look around and use your imagination.

Make sure you hang some weight to the bottom of the boat to make sure it doesn’t keel over. A lollipop stick with some oil based play dough will work for a short while. (Practice in the kitchen sink to see what works best for you.)

Once the boats are ready, walk to your nearest pond or stream, or even fill up the bathtub and go sailing. Hours of fun for free!

23. Neighborhood Walk:

Believe it or not, most kids like to actually learn about the area where they live. Take them out for a walk in your neighborhood and let them explore the houses, parks and shops in the area. Talk about the older buildings and imagine what life might have been like in the “olden days”

A trip to the local library can be good fun and useful for researching “the way it was” in your area, and it can use up a lot of otherwise useless hours of kids having nothing to do.

24. Ring Toss:

You need a few plastic bottles filled with water, sand or small stones (2 liter bottles are best) and some paper plates. Buy a packet of at least 20 cheap paper plates. Glue 2 paper plates together and cut out the middles to make a ring. When you glue 2 together it will add weight to the rings.

Paint the newly created rings in bright colors and hand them out to the kids. Make a line with chalk or rope for them to stand behind and place the bottles at various intervals and distances away from the children.

Anybody who manages to get a ring over a bottle takes one step back and tries again. See how far away they can get and still manage to ring the bottles.

Creative Ways To Keep Bored Kids Occupied In The Summer: 13 Cool Indoor Activity Ideas

Creative Ways To Keep Bored Kids Occupied In The Summer: 13 Cool Indoor Activity Ideas

1. Story time:

Read and discuss a book or a chapter of a book, make up your own endings. You can even make up your own stories by sitting the kids in a ring and letting them “add a sentence”. We’ve made up lots of really funny stories this way.

2. Giant Easel:

Go to a charity shop or wallpaper shop and buy leftover rolls of wallpaper. Cover a wall with the paper, back to front, stick it up with blu-tac or drawing pins.

Give the kids paints, crayons, chalks, pens, etc. and let them create their own artwork. The little ones reach the bottom, whilst the big ones can reach up to the top.

3. Wax Creations:

Give the kids their old, wax crayon stubs and let them make shavings from them with a butter knife onto a piece of wax paper. When they’re done, carefully take their creations to the ironing board, lay another piece of wax paper on top, and briefly press with a warm iron.

Let the kids watch as the colors melt together. Put them on the table to cool down and harden.

4. Old Clothes:

Sort through all of your old clothes. There’s bound to be something that doesn’t fit, or isn’t in fashion and that you’re too embarrassed to take to a charity shop. If you haven’t got anything at all, ask your friends and family.

Get 2 cardboard boxes, one for “dress up” clothes, and one for rags. Fill the “dress up” box with the most outrageous clothes, and cut up the other clothes for the “rags” box. Let the kids play “dress up”, or let them create things with the rags.

Hours and hours of fun!

5. Puppet Show:

Let the kids make finger puppets from paper. Help them create a “show” with a script and characters. Build up a few boxes stuck together with packing tape, make the top one have an opening at the front and hang up a curtain (you can use rags from the rag-box for this).

Let the kids practice until they feel really confident then invite a few friends or family members over to watch the “show”. Don’t forget to video tape it!

6. Kitchen Fun:

Find some cookbooks, let the kids choose a simple recipe and work together on making dinner, desserts, snacks or cakes. The older ones can do the main cooking, and the younger ones can do the measuring or decorating.

7. Mini Worm Farm:

Get a large clear plastic container, some soil, leaves, a little sand, and some bits of vegetables to create the farm. Dig up some earthworms. Fill the container with loose layers of soil and sand, beginning with soil and alternating the layers. Make the soil layers about 4x the size of the sand layers. Also make sure the top layer is soil. 4 or 5 layers should be enough. Drop some small bits of vegetables and leaves on top, and then put the worms in.

Add a lid of some sort, making sure it has air holes. Put the newly created worm farm in a cool dark place for a few days. The worms will tunnel down through the layers, and the kids can see just how good they are at churning up the soil. Please remember to let the worms go when the kids have finished with them.

8. Jewelry:

Collect beads, buttons and string in a shoebox. When the kids are bored, bring out the shoebox and let them make necklaces and bracelets. There’s bound to be tons of beads and buttons you can salvage from the rag-box.

9. Create A Picture:

Collect a whole bunch of colorful magazines and some small sheets of cardboard (A4 size is good). Give the kids a sheet of cardboard each, some school glue and some magazines.

Let them rip up and tear the magazines to their hearts content and create mosaic pictures or collages.

10. Board Games:

Board games are always a huge hit, so make sure you have plenty of them handy, everything from the simplest to the most advanced.

Come up with new ways of playing the games; under a blanket with a flashlight, under the table, out in the shed, or even with new “home-made” rules etc. It will add that little bit of excitement to games the kids may be tired of.

11. Ghost Stories:

If you’re ready for a sleepless night, try an evening of ghost stories.
First, find a couple of flashlights, then cover a table with a heavy blanket. The goal here is for the kids (and you) to make up ghost stories as ghoulish as they dare.

Everybody crouches under the table, with just the lights from the torches and takes turn telling stories. Depending on the age of the kids participating, be prepared to be freaked out!

12. Growing A Seed:

Kids of all ages love this one, because it’s not just sticking a seed into soil and hoping it will grow. This way you can tell when it starts rooting.

Get a paper towel, fold it into a medium sized rectangle then dampen it. Put the seed between the 1st layer and the rest of the damp paper towel, and place the whole lot into a small plastic bag. A Ziploc sandwich bag works great for this.

Use a strip of masking tape on the bags with each child’s name on it so they can check on their seeds progress. Close the bag and put it kind of dark but in a place where kids can walk up to check on their seeds and see the wonders of nature in action.

13. Indoor Crazy Golf:

Get the kids to sit down together and design a crazy golf course to run throughout the house (or just one room if you might have problems getting them to clean up afterwards). Use toys, bathroom stuff, kitchen utensils or anything else at hand to create the “holes” and routes.

Small plastic golf sets are easy to come by in most toy shops, and they’re usually extremely cheap. Have treats ready for whenever a child reaches the end of the golf course.

Mysterious Adsense Drop

Last month I started seeing a small dip in my daily Adsense earnings. No biggie, I thought. I assumed it was just a fluke that would even out at the end of the month. But holy crap… the end of April showed a pretty serious earnings drop for me.

It didn’t occur to me to actually dig around and find out WHY my earnings were declining during April. (Exerting effort is not my strong suit.) I spent some time the other day investigating and realized that the Adsense ads on my main income producing site were totally unrelated to the site’s topic! I mean, they had absolutely nothing to do with anything. No wonder no one clicked on the ads!

Don’t ask me what happened, or why, or what the heck I did to cause the problem. (I swear I did nothing. This particular site is a blog that I rarely update yet continues to make a pretty decent daily profit.)

So now that I’ve identified the issue, I’m freaking out, trying to get it corrected. So far, nothing is working. I’ll spend a little more time on it and report back if something resolves.

So here’s my tip for the day: If you are using Google’s Adsense ads as a profit stream (and you should be doing this already, as it really is a nice effortless income), be sure to monitor your earnings/sites at least every few days in case you run into this weird occurrence.

Semi-Update: Although I still haven’t seen an improvement on the ads showing on my blog, I have devoured a bunch of information. I still can’t figure out WHY these totally irreverent ads decided to suddenly show up (and can’t find any good answer), but I have read that if you use the following invisible tags in between a paragraph or a set of keywords that are applicable to your site’s topic, it may correct things within a day or two (after Google re-spiders your site/blog):

Here’s where your content or keywords should go, telling Google what your site/blog topic is about, so the ads are more targeted. Don’t forget to end the paragraph with the END tag, coming up.

Hopefully that might help. I put the tags on my blog and will report back how it goes. If you’re experiencing the same issue, give it a try.

Another Semi-Update:  Whoa! After putting in the code I mentioned above, I figured I’d sorta update a few of the pages at the site.  I was poking around some of the pages with Wordpress’ Theme Editor and - holy hell! I’ve been hacked! My (file name removed for security purposes) file contained a HUGE, HUGE amount of invisible text and links not entered there by myself.

I’m guessing it was someone trying to attain a better Google search engine ranking for their keyword terms (in this case, it was Debt and Credit Card, which were the exact unrelated ads that were relentlessly appearing on the site).  I have no idea how they got into my site but I know I’ll be checking these files frequently to be sure it doesn’t happen again.

Hospital Hiccup

Today I’ll be taking the day off (far) away from the computer after I return from my liver biopsy. There’s just way too much information available by searching Dr. Google. The Internet is a bittersweet thing. Information at your fingertips, but sometimes… way too much information.

Update: I lied. Here I am. Don’t believe what you read about liver biopsies. They are horrid. My advice is to stay far away from children who are inclined to kick you in the abdominal area while nursing. And try your hardest not to succumb to your desire to check your email “just once”. I obviously succumbed.

Hi, My Name Is Chris And I Am An Internet Addict.