Categories
Chase

Slavery

Last night as I was putting Chase to bed, he asked me about slaves. He wanted to know what slaves were and how a person became a slave. So I started with Egyptian slaves and recounted any slave examples I could all the way up till slaves of the South. He asked if slaves were bad guys or good guys, the same about the slave’s owners, how much they got to eat and such. After emphasizing all the points I wanted to and trying to teach the ethical values I thought he was thinking about, I inquired why he wanted to know:

Me: “Did you talk about slaves today at school, or see some on a show?”
Chase: “No, it’s just I don’t eat much and I help out a lot”

Categories
Deals

Free $2 worth of MP3s at Amazon

Instructions
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5. After you’ve entered the code, click on the “Give song as a gift” button. On the Thank You page, if you like, you can click the Facebook or Twitter buttons to tell your friends about the MP3 you chose and pass the word along about this offer. See how.

Categories
Ranting

Multi Level Marketing

Thinking about doing a MLM? This article sums up how I felt when researching it.

Wittlich says he worked day and night on his Amway business and never made a profit. “Active” Amway distributors earn an average of just $115 a month, according to Amway’s latest disclosure statement. Just a quarter of 1% (0.26%) make more than $40,000 a year, which Amway attributes to the fact many work part time. Active distributors, which describes about 60% of Amways’s 600,000 North American distributors, get at least one bonus check or make one sale or meeting a year.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone making over $1.50 an hour,” Whitsell says of multilevel marketing. “The primary product is opportunity. The strongest, most powerful motivational force today is false hope.”

Source – USA Today

Categories
Charlotte McVideos

Potty Training

We haven’t tried very hard to get Charlotte potty trained, we usually wait till the kid shows interest. Charlotte has not. HOWEVER, she has started lifting her dress and secluding herself, so I think she will soon be wondering how to keep the poop off her. I find it very entertaining, so here is a video of it.

Categories
Deals

Mobile Phones

We’ve recently, within the last year, switched to both having cell phones. I love our android phones, but I hate cell phone carriers. They are all money loving rip offs. We have 10 months left with our Sprint contract, and while they are the cheapest for what we get, they are also raising prices like everyone else. So I stumbled upon Virgin Mobile who offers two good android phones, and some really great pricing. They run off the Sprint network, b/c Sprint owns them I guess, and I’d like to hear from anyone out there who uses them. Check out their plans…

Categories
McVideos

Pillow Pit of DOOM!!!

Saturdays at our house are awesome. The kids are so excited to hang out with Daddy who doesn’t have to work. Most of the time I handle the extra attention all day long fairly well. I try to throw in a trip to Home Depot as often as I can. Last week Chase had more energy than I could keep up with so we created the PILLOW PIT OF DOOM! We gathered 95% of the pillows in the house and made our own safe jumping area. The kids enjoyed doing a show for Mommy while dad was announcing with his circus voice (I don’t know why I just changed to third person there). They did the show again that night for Casey and Jessica. Enjoy the videos, circus voice not captured in videos, sorry.

Categories
Charlotte

“Poh-tews”

As of about a week ago, Charlotte loves to wear ponytails in her hair! I’m ecstatic, because for a while there, her hair was just looking stringy & unruly all the time. Her “styled” hair is very cute… But we think she looks really old with her hair done! She requests “poh-tews” every day now.

Categories
Family Fun

Some Recent Funnies

A few days ago, I was headed to the bathroom to take a shower, when Chase called after me, “Be sure & wash your feet!”   …haha so random!

I asked Charlotte to show Chase where she’d left the markers. She enthusiastically said, “Come here Chase, I show ya! I show ya!”

Chase drew a colorful picture in his church class. At the top, the teacher had written what he’d told her: “I can show love at home by babysitting my sister while my mom is in the shower.”

Charlotte is obsessed with The Little Mermaid. She constantly sings the song “Kiss the Girl.” But she puts her own little twist on it: “Shalalalalala, kiss the girl, TO-NIGHT.”

Chase was standing near me on one of our barstools, so of course he took the opportunity to show me what people do when they slow dance. He didn’t mess around. He put my hand on his shoulder and we clasped our other hands together. Then he instructed, “Now, we twirl around, and stare at each other the whole time.”

Categories
Tech

Xbox Kinect

WE LOVE OUR KINECT!! If any McBlog readers are looking for a great birthday present or new workout program, we would recommend checking out the kinect. We have been having so much fun playing sports, working out, and getting high scores. After we borrowed Jessica and Casey’s kinect over the Christmas break, we were pretty hooked. I easily justified the cost by saying, I could join a gym for 10 months OR I could buy a xbox and kinect. I get just as much workout, if not more, I can do it in my own home, and it’s a ton of fun. Plus I can play other games. If anyone else out there has one, lets play!

For those who don’t know yet, kinect is a new xbox addon that tracks your entire body and sends data back to the xbox. Currently it can track most basic movements and direction. In the future it will be able to detect individual fingers and facial gestures. Here’s another main reason we love it, watch Chase play video games for a few minutes, he actually gets tired!

UPDATED WITH VIDEO
Here I am playing track and field. Each game captures you while playing (you can turn that off) and makes a fun highlight clip for you at the end.

And my favorite so far, beach volleyball

Categories
Charlotte

VICTORY!

Some may find this amusing, maybe even ridiculous. But I assure you, it’s been a very big deal for us. Right up there with potty-training and transitioning to a big kid bed (we’re not going to attempt to put Charlotte through either of those quite yet).

(drumroll)…

*****CHARLOTTE HAS GIVEN UP HER BINKIES FOREVER!!!*****

Pictures like the one below will be happening no longer, because there are no more pacifiers to be found in the house… they’re tucked away somewhere at Jessica & Casey’s. Shhh!

This all started on Saturday night when I bought an Ariel hairbrush for Charlotte (Ariel is her FAVE), and of course Pace commented, “She doesn’t need that!” Hmmm. Right then & there I decided that we would give her the beautiful brush in exchange for the binkies.

Why???

1. Because it was time, 2. She’s a big 2-year-old now, 3. We’re tired of looking for the binkies for every nap and bed time, 4. She’ll have other traumatizing issues to deal with soon enough (like potty-training), and 5. Her teeth will thank us later.

So the very next day we had Charlotte gather all her pacifiers and put them in a large envelope addressed to the “Binky Fairy” (an idea from Supernanny– love it). She was excited about being a big girl, though she certainly didn’t foresee the drastic results of this little ceremony.

We marched outside to put them in the mailbox for the Binky Fairy.

Charlotte came inside to find her new magical Ariel brush from the “Binky Fairy"! She has been carrying it around the house ever since (along with her Ariel doll, and occasionally her Princess magazine and her Unicorn Pillow Pet). She has to have those things with her to go to bed now, too.

The next time she had to go to sleep after “mailing” the binkies, she frantically searched her crib and asked, “Binkies?!?!??” And for the next few days, complete TORTURE followed for all of us. I knew it would happen, but I didn’t know how challenging it would be. She didn’t nap and would cry for a long time before going to sleep, and also woke up all night. It was one of those things where you just want to give in. But we endured! It was tough love.

Charlotte is now completely binky-free and is doing just fine without those darn things. She goes to bed and states calmly, “Charlotte big girl. No cry.” She is proud to call herself a big girl.

This may sound a little silly, but I feel like we’ve accomplished something great, and I’m relieved that things are back to normal now!

UPDATED WITH VIDEO