2010 July | Table for Five

American Girl Doll Giveaway -Enter By 7/31/10

July 25, 2010 By Elizabeth

This giveaway is closed. Congratulations to the randomly chosen winner: comment #24 from Hannah B.! American Girl is giving you a chance to make a big difference in the lives of children through their Shine On Now program, which I first told you about last week. Their goal is to donate $1 million dollars to four childrens' charities and in order to make that happen, one million virtual stars need to be donated to the program. Here's how it works: Go to the Shine On Now website and look for the Donate Your Star! box. Type in the name of your child and a parent email address and click the arrow. This box will pop up: Click on the star, drag it into the outline, and you've donated one star. For every star, your daughter gets one entry in a drawing to win an American Girl Doll, they are giving away one every day until July 31st. You can donate up to 100 stars a day so that's 100 chances to win! Not only did American Girl donate 1000 stars in my name to the program … [Read more...]

This Is Where I Belong

July 25, 2010 By Elizabeth

Image by Elizabeth/Table4Five via Flickr Before I was a blogger, when I gave my husband, my kids and my home 100% of my attention, I was itching for something else. A creative outlet that would let me make something that was just mine. I dabbled in hobbies - crocheting was a disaster, scrapbooking was laughable, I only made half of the top of a quilt. And then I found blogging. I was made to be a blogger. Raised by teachers, surrounded by books and words, a Bachelor's Degree that basically says yep, you know how to use words to explain your thoughts and ideas. When I found blogging, it was like it had been created for my exact skills. Technorati was tracking 70 million blogs in 2005, the year I started. That might be the case, but the Mommyblog community was certainly much, much smaller than it is now. My original blogroll had about 18 blogs on it, many of which are still around in some form. If I remember correctly, around 700 bloggers attended the BlogHer 2006 … [Read more...]