BIG Mess

This morning I woke up to a BIG mess. About 500 perler beads all over the den floor with my two children sitting in the middle of them. Aaron was trying to vacuum them up with the Dustbuster. It wasn't a good sight. (If you don't know what perler beads are, click the link just so that you can see how tiny they really are).

I wish I would have taken a picture but I was so in shock that I left them home with my husband and went out to get Starbucks.

Do It Whose-self?

Did you ever wish that you could do some of those around-the-house projects that you put on your spouse's "Honey-Do List"? Sign up for a newsletter from Home Depot's Do It Herself Club and you could definitely pick up some great tips.

An upcoming Do It Herself Workshop will take place on April 15 from 7 to 830pm and will focus on Interior Painting featuring Martha Stewart Living. In this workshop, you will

• Learn how to choose paint and paint colors using the Martha Stewart Living color center
• See the tools and materials you will need for a professional finish
• Prepare and mask walls and trim for paint
• Watch and learn the best methods for painting ceilings, wall, and trim

Click here to sign up for this workshop at a Home Depot location near you now.

*This post was cross-posted at Read Our Lips: the official blog of LIParentSource.com

No BIG Plans

Sometimes I wonder why I love Friday. When I used to work at a traditional office job, Friday signaled the end of the long workweek, a day where I left the office at 5pm or before, two full days home with my family, potentially a night out with friends and two days that neither my husband not I needed to go to or think about work.

None of those things hold true anymore. Since I work for myself, my weekends are never truly 100% work-free. There's always the potential for the need to have a phone call, answer an e-mail, write a blog post or something equally as interesting, or attend an event which means that my Saturday and Sunday aren't all that different from my Monday through Friday. The main difference is that there's no school and no work, so kids and husband are all home.

On the weekends, we try to catch up on laundry, run errands and go food shopping. Last weekend we planted around the house and tried to make our sorry excuse for landscaping look like less of a sorry excuse for landscaping. As the weather gets nicer, our weekends are starting to include the park, playground, riding bikes and bar-b-ques for dinner. I try not to make too many plans because I like our weekends to be our weekends. I don't want to be responsible for holding ourselves to being at specific places at specific times or make enough plans to account for every waking moment of our two days of freedom. In the interest of saving money, we're not really going out on Saturday nights but doing more family things - making dinner together, watching movies, having ice cream.

So, what does this weekend hold? No BIG plans. Saturday, we'll go to Aaron's basketball game, run some errands and go to a late afternoon birthday party. Sunday, I'll spend the morning talking to 15 pregnant moms about where they can find information that they need and then Aaron has another birthday party at Adventureland (local amusement park, so he is totally psyched) and that's it.

No BIG plans.

And that's how I like it.

BIG Headache

I've had a major headache for three days. THREE DAYS. It hasn't even begun to go away.

In the spirit of NaBlogPoMo, this is my post.

I wish to the headache G-ds that they will take my headache and send it somewhere, never to be heard from again.

Thanks.

BIG Sadness

Yesterday was the last day of vacation and Camryn had a playdate with her friend. It was a beautiful day and so we took our playdate outside to the park. When we got there, the other mom said, "Did you hear that Coach Al died?"

What??

Coach Al is the baseball coach at Camryn's school and last year, Aaron took lessons with him. A big man and avid baseball fan, he would always tell Aaron about Hank Aaron, if only for the reason that they shared a name. He'd walk around the school in his baseball cap, talking to all the kids and just being a super friendly man.

Dropping off Camryn at school today and seeing the sad faces of the other baseball coaches and everyone that worked in the school was heartbreaking.

Apparently over the break, he sat down to take a nap, had a massive heart attack in his sleep and passed away, leaving three children, many grandchildren and two more on the way. He was 62 years old.

Even though I really barely knew him, I do know that he'll be missed. RIP, Coach Al.

BIG Problem

At 730am, I woke up to screaming. Not your average kids-yelling-at-each-other screaming, but real, honest shrieking. Thinking that either one of the kids had lodged themselves into someplace that they shouldn't or someone's arm was falling off, I raced downstairs only to find that the television wouldn't turn on. Yup, no television in this house brings on mass hysteria. For a 7 year old and a 4 year old, this is a sign of a potential disaster and the world coming to an end.

A bunch of years ago, my dad had his eye on this new high tech (at the time) Sony television and after watching the price for months more than a year or two , he finally bit the bullet and made the purchase. Not only did he buy it, but he completely remodeled the room that would house the treasure set, complete with a closet that built the television into the wall. Upon entering the house the first time, the delivery guys promptly dropped the television on the ceramic tile floor, resulting in a giant crack down the side of the casing. Needless to say, the store shortly sent a non-cracked replacement.

After a few years and the emergence of flat screen televisions into our world, my dad bought another set and gave us the older Sony. It was perfect and it fit wonderfully into a corner of our den. At 40 inches, it was a huge improvement over the 27 inch non-HD set that we previously had. The only stipulation was that we needed to hire four BIG guys to relocate the television from my parents' house to ours. Reason being that this television weighs over 300 pounds. This is no exaggeration, it really weighs that much.

With all of the hysteria this morning over the television that wouldn't turn on, my first thought was not of the money we were going to need to spend to replace it, but more like "how in the world we were going to get this 300 pound television our of our house?"! From my asking friends to my updated Facebook status (Stupid TV broke. Anyone know a repair person/company that will come to my house and not charge me more than it would cost to buy a new TV?) to my calls to the repair shop that quoted me a minimum repair fee of $500, I have heard that if we buy a new television that is delivered, the delivery guys will cart away the old set.

Fingers are totally crossed on this one, because this could really be a BIG problem.

BIG Win (and why Twitter, Hampton Inns & my friend Claudine totally rock)

I feel the need preface this post with one statement: I never win anything. Really. Never, ever, ever anything. One of my favorite websites has recently done a number of $300 Apple store gift card giveaways and I have entered every time. Nothing. Twitter parties where pretty much everyone wins something? Nada. Raffles? Nope. Radio contests? Zilch. It's just a fact, I really never win anything.

Today, I was working catching up on Twitter and saw this post from a real life friend of mine expressing her displeasure about her recent stay at a Hampton Inn during a family trip.

Hey @HamptonFYI On road to NC we stayed @ Hampton Inn. 2 Dbl beds & no rollaway allowed in room #fail! Courtyard Marriott for return. #WIN

Being the busybody that I am, I started to follow @HamptonFYI, mostly because I wanted to see if they responded to her online complaint. Note: lately I am really in awe of the fact that so many large corporations monitor social media applications like Twitter and Facebook for complaints and truly do their best to rectify the issues and appease their complainers.

About an hour later, I received the following private message from @HamptonFYI:

Hi there! Can you DM us your contact info? You're our 2,000th follower!

Because of the high rate of identity theft and other frauds that run rampant through the internet (I'm sure you've received the e-mails from a prince in Nigeria who wants to give you $25 million dollars for doing pretty much nothing), I was pretty skeptical of this, so I replied with only my e-mail address.

Pretty soon after that, I received this e-mail from Christy from Cohn & Wolfe Digital, the PR firm for Hampton Inn.

Congratulations! To thank you for following Hampton, we’d like to offer you a free night’s stay at a Hampton property of your choosing. All we’ll need is your mailing address to send you the certificate! If we have your permission, we’d like to include your Twitter handle in a tweet announcing you as our 2,000th follower and a recipient of a free night. Thanks again for following Hampton – We love having you here!

Hilarious!! I totally won something! And it was something really great and fun! BIG win for me!

And a BIG win for my friend Claudine. Hampton Inn replied to her tweet and let her know that they have a 100% satisfaction guarantee, meaning that if you don't enjoy your stay, you don't pay. She called and they refunded her money for the lousy night that she had when she stayed there.

So really, who rocks now? Me, Claudine and most definitely Hampton Inn and their PR rep, Christy!