It is time once again for the annual 5 Minutes For Mom’s Ultimate Blog Party (though technically I am a little late to the festivities).  If you aren’t already participating, there’s still time (hey, look at me, lol).  This is truly too awesome to miss for bloggers and non-bloggers alike.

Not only are there TONS of great people to meet - there are Linky lists for blogs, Twitter, and Facebook - but there are OODLES and OODLES of fab-u-lous prizes.  A few of my favorites (mentioning them here gives me a chance at winning my preference - how cool is THAT?):

US39 - Hilton Garden Inn 2 night stay
US40 - Holiday Inn Main Gate East, Kissimmee, FL, 3 day / 2 night stay
USC17 - $200 Apple GC
US19 Hasbro Preschool Package
INTL2 Custom WP Blog Design

And if those have already been picked, any of the following (in order of preference, lol) gift cards, since I will soon have LOTS of baby stuff to get (or maybe something special for me, depending on which GC, heehee):

USC8 - US112 - USC37 - USC35 - US104 - USC35 - USC39 - USC13 - USC15 - USC3 - US73 - US74 - US87 - USC34 - US2 - US32 - US15 - US52 - US61 -  US107 - US88 - US100 - US113 - USC36 -  US31 -  US37 - US55 - USC32 - USC40 - USC44 - USC41

And if all of those are spoken for too, lol, anything for baby, maternity, or preschoolers would work for me. I’m easy. 

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Now, a little about me in case this our first time “meeting”…   I’m Christy, I’m married to a professional firefighter and I am the WAHM of Lil Roo, our three year old (he’s turning four this summer, how fast time goes by), and our new on-the-way bundle of joy.  We also have a very spoiled four-legged daughter, Halie.  She is an American Pit Bull Terrier and if you believe anything the media says about them, you’ve been misled.  She’s awesome, everyone that meets her loves her and most want her for their own.  We also have a cat, sometimes two.  Both of those pet stories are for another day, heehee.

I started blogging in the Spring of 2008 (looks like I’m upon a bloggiversary of sorts) at MultitaskingMama.Wordpress.org, then after a couple months moved over to Shake The Salt.  I recently created Savvy Frugalistas, where I now post deal / freebies oriented stuff. It is sporadic right now (24/7 morning sickness basically has much of my life on hold or going in slo-mo), but in the future I’d like it to be more frugal-community focused - there are so many wonderful frugal bloggers that I’d love to spotlight and give a little special attention to. 

I created Homespun Preschool and Making It A Home, and blogged there a bit with my buddy Kim, but they just aren’t working out for us, so I think we are going to let them go. Instead of helping me organize my blogging, it just provided an extra responsibility that my heart isn’t in right now.  All reviews from Homespun will be moved so they will still be accessable after the site comes down.  It happens, ebb and flow, trial and error, some things work, some don’t.

Projects I am working on, that will be launching this year that I’m pretty excited about, are Florida Fun Reviews and Sweet Posh Baby!  FFR will focus on family activities & travel within Florida (and perhaps an excursion here and there outside of the Sunshine State) and will launch this May/June.  SPB will be a catalog of reviews on products for babies, mamas-to-be, daddies-to-be, new parents, young children, etc and will launch this September. 

You can find me at any of these blogs, plus at Simply Sensational Divas Review, and on Facebook and Twitter.  I am also available by email.  You can keep up with any of the blogs by following on Facebook / NetworkedBlogs or via RSS (email is an option of that works better for you):

Shake The Salt - Facebook/NB - RSS
Savvy Frugalistas - Facebook/NB - RSS
Florida Fun Reviews - Facebook/NB - RSS
Sweet Posh Baby - Facebook/NB - RSS
SSDR - Twitter - Facebook/NB - RSS

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 A quick little plug about my newest “obsession” - and by obsession I mean something I LOVE but don’t have to spend a lot of time at for it to work: SwagBucks. I’ve been messing around with it for a couple months and I am up to $50 in Amazon Gift Cards.  I ONLY do the free stuff, and pretty much just searches (I try at least each day but sometimes not every day) and codes when I come across them.  Join me there and feel free to ask me any questions - I’d love to help. 

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Thanks soooo much for stopping by…. please leave a comment and a link to your blog if you have one.  I’d love to hear a little about you and any comments on my blog (or suggestions on dealing with 24/7 morning sickness, lol).  I love meeting new people.  BTW, are you going to BLOGHER ‘10 in NYC?  I’ll be there!!! Look for me - I’ll be the short, very pregnant one, haha!!!  

Did I mention I fixed my computer? But you can’t tell?  I know, I know… I’ve only posted on a couple of days or so since I repaired the memory issue that shut my computer down.  Not so good for traffic, but we’ve been having lots of fun around here.   

We’ve taken Lil Roo bowling, to the movie theatre for the first time (we saw Ice Age 3) and he did so well & enjoyed it so much that I think we are going to take him to see Up today (he and Daddy were watching the trailer on the computer last night and he seemed pretty excited about it). 

The Fourth of July was also a pretty big day for us.  We visited my sister and nephew and during that visit, my brother, his wife, my niece and my great-niece all came to visit.  My brother (one of four brothers actually) lives locally but I don’t get to see them often and my niece and her daughter live out of state.  Her daughter is about 3 months older than Lil Roo. 

Later that day, Lil Roo had his first boat ride.  He, Daddy, myself, and our pup met up with Lil Roo’s Uncle Paul, two of his older male cousins (and one of their girlfriends) and “Maw”  (hubs’ mom).  He’s been talking about going our in the boat, but had only been in a boat on dry land, so we weren’t exactly sure how it would go.  He loved it.  We watched the fireworks display from the middle of the river.  He fell asleep on Maw’s lap on the way back in.

We planted a few sunflower seeds the other day and they’ve sprouted!  I can’t wait to see his reaction as they keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger!!   

The little bit of computer time I’ve had, I have been busily preparing Shake The Salt’s Back To School ’09 Guide and working on the upcoming Launch Party at Simply Sensational Divas Review.  Both events will be in August and you do not want to miss either of them.  If you are a review and/or giveaway blogger, you’ll want to get listed at SSDR – but you’ll have to wait for the details on that.  

I’m pretty excited at all that is going on – online and off – but my recent blogging has paid the price a little.  I’m working on a few things that I’ll be sharing and I will be updating the Freebies megalist.  If you know of a great freebie, deal, or coupon, pass it along to me and I’ll be sure to give you credit / link love. 

Now I’m off again to start getting ready for our trip to town.  What are your plans for the day… and for the upcoming weekend?

It happens to the best of us…  the memory fails a little bit and it can cause things to not exactly go according to plan.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just hop over to the store, grab some new memory (an upgrade even!), plug it in, and not only be good as new, but better?  OK, so it doesn’t exactly work that way for us, but thankfully, memory was the issue with my computer, and once I put the new memory in, the computer is back to playing nice again.  (Well, at least back to playing, which is a lot better than sitting there doing absolutely nothing.  We’ll have to see about the nice part, LOL!).

As I mentioned previously, my husband’s laptop charger “broke” right after my computer went down, and I am proud to announce that including the purchase of new speakers for my three-year-old’s computer (for his computer games), we are now three for three!  All computers are up and running properly. 

Now the real work begins!  While my computer was down, I was only able to access email sporadically and only able to get up a couple of posts to let ya know what was going on.  I was also very busy planning the birthday party (which was a total success).  Now that the party is done and all systems are a-go, I’ve got lots of catching up to do.  I’m about to become a very busy little beaver, so if you don’t sub to the RSS feed via email, it is a great way to get a daily list of new posts so you don’t miss anything.  I’ve somewhat recently added next & previous links at the bottom of the page, so you can also easily scroll back through the blog pages that way. 

Thanks for hanging in there and bearing with me as I made my way “back”.  Now, let’s get to some fun stuff!! 

Whew!  There’s a lot going on right now.  I’m sure you’ve noticed there hasn’t been a whole lot of blog posting this past week, so I’m gonna owe ya big time on freebies & deals!  I had 4 giveaways lined up for this week, but I’m going to have to push most of them back and just run one. 

Lil Roo’s birthday party is this Sunday, and although I’ve been working on it, there are still tons of little last minute details to be seen to.  I’m preparing a Back To School Guide to run in August here on Shake The Salt, plus Shake The Salt’s sister site, Simply Sensational Divas Review, will be having a launch party August 1-31, with lots of giveaways & a Twitter bash.

I’ll be announcing the winners to the two giveaways that ended last night shortly, and will be posting the Frugal Deals Roundup as well as a pretty sweet Boca Beth giveaway (if you have kids, don’t miss that!).  But otherwise, I’ll continue running low key on the blog for a bit.  The giveaway for the Tiny Prints $50 gift card is still running, so be sure to enter for that. 

Annnd…. I’m still tweaking and such. Please keep sending your thoughts on what you like, don’t and what you would like to see around here. 

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see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I am going to be tweaking Shake The Salt a little here and there over the next month-ish.  Most things you may not even notice, but if something seems completely off out of the blue, just bear with me as I’m working on it.   

If there is something you especially LOVE (or maybe not so much) or if there is something you are not seeing that you’d like to, here at Shake The Salt, please drop me a line and let me know your thoughts and I’ll see what I can do. 

I will be announcing winners soon for the previous giveaways (including the $100 Home Depot gift card – woot!).  There are currently three pretty cool giveaways going on right this very minute right here and I have more scheduled for upcoming weeks (including a Hamilton Beach Thermal Cooler Plus that was suppose to go up this past Monday, but I’ve had to delay it til next week, so look for that).

A few other things I will be working on… Fab Finds (roundup style), 2009 Back To School Guide, the Disney Scoop (all the latest on new Disney music plus more!), as well as continuing to bring you reviews on great products and all sorts of ways to save and make money (look for a special feature on earning extra income coming soon).  Things are going to be heating up and staying busy at Shake The Salt this summer, so be sure you are getting the daily update via email or immediate post updates via a feed reader so you don’t miss any of the good stuff!

I will also be working on the sister sites of Shake The Salt, so keep your eyes peeled for updates!

I want to say THANK YOU very, very much to my faithful readers and a special welcome to my new visitors.  Your continued interest and support mean the world to me and I don’t always take the time to say thank you, so I am doing it now. 

Shake The Salt now has Google Friend Connect so you can now “follow” this blog (though on mine it actually says “join this site” but whatever, LOL!).

The narrowest it would allow the widget to be is 200 px, so it wouldn’t fit in the sidebar.  I placed it in the footer, so take a moment and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and follow (or “join this site”) so it doesn’t look so lonely, LOL!

If anyone knows how to link directly to the follow page, please let me know.  I haven’t explored it and Google Friend Connect is very new to me. 

I am updating my blog roll & would love to exchange links or buttons with you. If you have a frugal blog, I am also interested in adding you to the Frugal Blog Roll that is part of the weekly Frugal Deals Roundup (I’m also looking for weekly frugal Mr Linkies).  Email me.  J

I know, a little belated considering we are almost a week in. Also disparaging? This is my first blog post for March.  I’ve been sick and am now attempting to convince myself that I am not sick anymore. It isn’t quite working, but it is worth an effort. I’m also cranky and my right foot hurts. Don’t know why exactly, but it does and makes walking uncomfortable.

Quick note: if you’ve come looking for rainbows and lollipops, you may have come to the wrong place today. Ha!

My Facebook status, updated a few minutes ago, reads: Naptime in 3… 2… 1…  Not that he is actually going to sleep, even though he is tired, even though Mommy has 100 things she needs to do in a quiet environment, and even though Mommy would actually just like to take a nap herself.  Naptime, in theory, has begun. 

I bought Photoshop and even installed it. I have yet to open it, though I have grand plans to attempt to create graphics for new blogs I’m working on – little extensions of Shake The Salt really.  However, my good friend procrastination comes over and we just hang out.  Oftentimes bring unorganized along too and then the day is shot. 

Plans floating around in my head:

Spring Cleaning & Organization Series (I need to eradicate the winter dust bunnies & the sluggard Unorganized from my home and life – have a product or article to contribute to help with that or would benefit others in getting decluttered, getting things cleaned up, getting organized in any way? Email me. I need you.);

Mother’s Day Gift Guide – I should probably begin preparing for this now, but tomorrow seems like a much better day.

Marketing and blog improvement posts & applying them to my blog(s).  I plan to work through some great resources I’ve have, notes I’ve taken, etc.  I’ll share for your benefit as I work through them for mine. Win-win.

A nap.  The list wouldn’t be complete with out this one. It was a rough night because my body ignored me when I told it I was all better.   So, I may conquer this important task first, and then look into the others. 

How are you feeling today and what good things are you working on?

I am working on a Spring Cleaning And Organizing Series – if you have a product that you think would be a great fit, please contact me.  Likewise, I will be looking for a few guest posts throughout the series, so if you have some expertise in this area, I’d love to talk about the possibility of you doing a guest post on Shake The Salt. 

Amazingly enough, there are still unclaimed prizes from the Holiday Gift Guide Giveaway and from the redraw of unclaimed prizes, so I will be doing a giveaway soon where ONE WINNER TAKES ALL! 

Stay tuned and sign up for the RSS Feed so you don’t miss it when it happens!

During the next couple months or so, I will be telling you about new “branches” of the Shake The Salt family tree.  Here is a little sneak peek of what I am currently working on:

Simply Sensational Divas Review

You may already be familiar with this great new review blog, but if not, you should hop over there and check it out.  We are featuring a new great product review each week, and instead of the typical individual review, you get multiple perspectives, all in one place.  We will be planning a big blog party with some great prizes in the next month or so. Be sure to sign up for the RSS feed so you will be sure to hear about it and join us for the fun and prizes!

Sweet Posh Baby

* Under Construction* 

Although I will still be doing some reviews at Shake The Salt, Sweet Posh Baby will be JUST reviews (and giveaways, of course).  Although it will specialize in bringing you wonderful baby products, there will also be reviews for toddlers / young children, and mommies, too.

Making It A Home

* Under Construction* 

2009 will be a busy year around our house, with lots of redecorating & projects, and I wanted a bloggy home to corral all those goings-on.  I’ll be looking for ideas, and sharing my own. 

Homespun Preschool

* Under Construction* 

I am beginning (slowly!) to do preschool activities with my son (he’s two-and-a-half), and I wanted to create a resource for other parents as well as document our journey.

I am VERY EXCITED about the upcoming BlissDom ’09 Conference, about finally meeting in person so many of the fabulous ladies I have met online (OK, serious nerves episode happening here, too!), and learning from some very brilliant ladies during the panels / classes. I cannot wait! 

I am still interested in securing sponsorships & excited about the opportunity to work with and promote a great company / brand (or companies / brands).  A few fun ideas I have is to Live Tweet during the event; offer sponsored giveaways during the event using Twitter (maybe throw out some fun trivia?); pass out samples; create product / brand buzz on Twitter & Facebook, through my blog, & word-of-mouth; sport sponsor’s product(s) during the event; pass out sponsors biz cards, coordinate with those at the sponsors exhibitor booth (if applicable); among other ideas.  I admit this would be my first conference, and I’m not as familiar with the set-up and progression of conferences, but I am creative and will find ways to promote the sponsor(s) during the conference.  Also, I will provide advertising on my blog for 6 months as well as include sponsors on my Twitter background (which will be designed and put up prior to BlissDom).

If you are not currently sponsoring an attendee at BlissDom ’09 (or are looking to expand your sponsorship), please contact me. Don’t let your brand go un-represented at this year’s BlissDom Conference. (More details may be found here.)

Yesterday, going to Blissdom in February wasn’t even an outside possibility, or so I thought. Heck, a few hours ago, it wasn’t more than a passing, not really possible, thought.  But then, I caught wind of #Blissdom09 buzz on Twitter. 

Oh, it started sounding enticing. And I realized that I truly wanted to go, but had quieted those thoughts since it isn’t something I can swing without a sponsor and, well, it is less than a month away.  So it just didn’t seem… well… doable.

While chatting on Twitter about Blissdom ’09, the idea started forming… What if?  So, I thought I’d toss the idea out there that I would love to attend and needed sponsors.  Within minutes, I had an email with an offer of partial sponsorship. You know who you are and I totally heart you. You added real hope and the realization that This. Could. Happen. 

So, I have some numbers to crunch.

Conference Fees. {Update: Conf Fees = $150 in advance or $200 at the event}

Airfare (which I heard through Twitter buzz there is an awesome roundtrip fare right now). {Update: Just confirmed price I heard: $160 roundtrip.}

Hotel costs (and tonight I made plans to room with another lady, so those costs will be more reasonable as well.  {Update: Hotel rates are $98-103 per night for 2-3 nights, so split it would be $100-$150}.

Misc fees.

Laptop.  Ok, kinda joking about this one, but I’ve only owned desktops and can’t take it along with me to live tweet & live blog the event, so if there was someone who wanted to give me a laptop to enable me to do that… well, I wouldn’t exactly turn it down.  J 

I’m ready to rock your brand at Blissdom ’09 & beyond!  Contact me with your ideas and let’s make it happen! 

2009 is a mere 5 days away, can you believe it?  At this time last year, I honestly did not know what a blog was, much less think I’d actually create one, move/change it, create another (shared) one, and have plans for more.  Ironically, and thankfully (lol) the new blogs have / will have more direction than MM / STS has had.  I love it yet it isn’t quite “there” on what I want it to be.  Of course if I knew exactly what that was, it would be a lot easier to get there.  So, I want to thank you for coming along this journey with me as I continue to figure it out.  J  The new blogs will help me organize content better and will have a specific purpose, which may help STS “become”. 

The response to the Holiday Gift Guide was unbelievably overwhelming and I am so thankful for all participants.  Unfortunately, it was so overwhelming that the time I allotted to have it created and published was not enough time and not everything was featured. For that, I offer my apologies and although the Christmas season has now passed us, I will include all products that didn’t make the Holiday Gift Guide in upcoming articles / lists. 

New winners will be posted shortly as there were numerous winners that did not claim their prizes.  If you have entered any of the Holiday Gift Guide giveaways or any since, keep an eye out for the new list!  A hint – you may want to use an original name / id when entering contests & giveaways (even adding something to end of a common name could help) then occasionally do Google searches to see if that name gets any hits (as in winner announcements!).  I hate that someone misses out on a prize they won, but I am no longer able to personally contact every winner. 

Upcoming Toddler Travel features will be pushed back to January, but keep an eye out for those.  Lots of great products you may be interested in if you will be traveling with a toddler.

Have you heard about the Shi Shu Baby blankets and blankets for the home? They will be included in the Golden Globe swag bags and yours truly has one right here.  Look to Simply Sensational Divas Review the week of January 4^th for several “mom opinions” (mine included) on this fab product.

A pretty big thing I am working on right now, and thankfully am ALMOST finished compiling, is my list of 101 things I want to do in the next 1001 days.  Check out Day Zero for the 411.  It starts for me on January 1, 2009.  If you are looking for some help in getting your list started, check out Jessica Know’s 15 Days Of New Year Resolutions. I plan on making lots of changes this upcoming year and over the course of the 1001 days (2.75 years) and am excited about getting it started. 

A Moment For Me will resume on Monday, January 29, 2008 after a little Holiday siesta.

BTW, my email is still tragically overloaded, but I am working through it.  I am checking for any winners before drawing new ones and then working through other email as I can.  The busyness of holidays, family, house & home have me spending less time at the computer right now, as I am sure most of you can relate. 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! 

There are A LOT of unclaimed prizes! Please check out the list of recent WINNERS, including Holiday Gift Guide prizes, for your name.  I will be redrawing names next week for ALL unclaimed prizes!!  Thxkbai.