In loving memory of a much loved mother and grandmother. May you find peace, comfort and contentment and realize those of us that are still here loved you very much.

Last Friday, February 8 my mother-in-law, Susan, passed away after a multiple year fight against stage 3 and then stage 4 uterine cancer. She was under 60 and got all her routine exams. Three years ago she felt not right for a while and her daughter finally convinced her to see a doctor before they took a trip. Within 24 hours she went from planning a lifetime trip to Hawaii to getting ready for a surgery that was so in depth and complex even five years earlier they would have never tried. Being the fighter she is she pulled through surgery and chemo like a champ and actually went into remission for over a year. Sadly for all of us it did not last. In the last month she went very quickly down hill and died peacefully in her sleep in the hospital.

So why do I share this tale with you? Besides just memory there is a lesson. Susan wasn't just a cancer patient she was an Oncology (cancer) nurse. She passed away in the very same hospital, very same bed where she cared for many cancer patients. Her dream when she was first diagnosed was that she could beat the disease and act as a ray of hope for her patients. I'm positive she will rest a little easier now if her passing can be used to educate, help and maybe save even one other person. The female reproductive cancers are often silent killers. Coming on and spreading with very few signs anything is wrong. Can you please read and take these lessons to heart:

• Get your annual physical. Mark a yearly reminder on your calender if you need to. I was actually a year overdue for mine when all this started to get bad. I don't even remember how I let it slide.
• Feel free to nag any loved ones who are dragging their feet in that department. (My husband had a few strong words for me when I confessed to how overdue I was.)
• Read the risk factors for Uterine and Ovarian cancer. Talk to your doctor if you have any.
• Read the symptoms of uterine and ovarian cancer. Talk to your doctor if you have any. We wouldn't have had the last three years if Susan hadn't gone to the doctor for very vague symptoms. I try not to think about how things might have been if she'd had them check even a month sooner.
• Listen to your gut. You can often know when something is wrong with you without strong symptoms. Don't try and power through and worry your doctor will think you are silly. The worst a doctors appointment can do is tell you that there is nothing to worry about. The best it can do is save your life.
• Tell your loved ones you love them. All the time. Like every day could be your last.

Thank you. If you do these please send a prayer to Susan letting her know that her passing was not in vane and her message will live on in others.

We recently switched to prepaid cell phones. It was an awesome monthly savings but it came with a catch. I was cheap and bought the cheapest phone they had. With in a month I realized I HATED my new phone. However I was too cheap to say so and get a new one. (Thus the original switch in the first place.) This is a quick tutorial for those like me who want a new cell phone but aren't willing to just say so. (Warning... unless medical science has made some breakthroughs I don't know about this will only work for women.)

1. Get pregnant. Yes, I realize this is a bit drastic... You should probably save this process until you want a cell phone and a baby.
2. Send your significant other a link to this news report on our main site that mentions there is scientific evidence pregnancy causes forgetfulness.
3. Go on a car trip long enough you will need to stop for food.
4. Pick a safe spot in the car to store anything important you might need while you are driving. Personally, I recommend the car door handle.
5. Order fast food cheese sticks and ranch dip in a little cup. Put the ranch dip in the safe spot so it doesn't spill.
6. Take one bite of ranch dip and decide immediately that it is vile and eat the cheese sticks without using any more. (Remember you are pregnant. You have the right to declare anything is vile.)
7. Let some time pass.
8. Make a phone call with the hated cell phone. (Or since calling while driving is dangerous pick up phone and then realize you shouldn't take risks. Especially not when pregnant.)
9. Toss phone into safe storage spot you picked earlier.
10. Wait about an hour and then glance down in horror as you realize your phone is imitating a cheese stick and sitting 1/3 submerged in ranch dip.
11. Remove battery and sim card. Attempt to soak ranch dip out of phone in a cup of water.
12. Give up and go buy the phone you were too cheap to buy in the first place. (And some ear plugs so you don't have to listen to the rest of your family laughing hysterically at your expense.)

Well my attempts at professional blogging have definitely taken a hit this week. What's more important then your blog? Life. Sometimes life decides to come crashing down on top of you and you have no choice then to put everything on hold. In my case it was a combination of two events, one happy and one very tragic.

For the happy event, I'm pregnant, about 12 weeks to be exact. It's wonderful. It's exciting. It's doing horrible things for my productivity. I managed to totally forget about little details like morning sickness and pregnancy fatigue. If you've never been pregnant think about the last all nighter you did. Now imagine waking up after having 8 hours of sleep and feeling exactly like you did at the end of the all nighter. For the nausea... well that's self explanatory as long as you replace the word "morning" with "all day." But please don't think any of this is a bad thing. I'm quite excited and all those yucky parts are reminders that "Yes, there is really a baby in there." I just have to remember to turn off the driver A parts of my personality and relax on occasion. Otherwise my body gives me a nice kick of a reminder.

However with that I was still managing to maintain the blogs until the second event. My mother-in-law, Susan, has been struggling with stage 3 and then stage 4 Uterine Cancer for the past 3 years. It is a testament to her strength and will power that she has done as well as she could for so long. However almost two weeks ago she went back into the hospital because she was feeling much worse despite all her test numbers getting better. After that the news just got worse and worse. The end result is the doctors have stopped all treatment except comfort measures and only expect her to be with us a few more weeks. My husband had already flown down so I spent the weekend packing and then two days driving little C and I down to her house to stay for the rest of the time. Needless to say there were very few opportunities for blogging when taking a 2 year old on an 1100 mile drive in winter for an emergency. The silver lining is that the doctors are making sure Susan stays very comfortable and she is surrounded by loved ones. If you can spare her some prayers they would be very much appreciated.

So where does that leave things? I'm back to blogging but probably only on a limited capacity for the next couple of weeks. Tonight or tomorrow I'm going to restart my main Mom's News Blog and start getting the back log of stories up. This is definitely going to force me to concentrate on only the core news theme. (Something I had already been deciding I need to do.) In about two months I hope to write a nice informative post called "How to Revive Your Blog After a Sudden Break". Thank you to all my loyal readers who have stuck around despite this sudden vanishing act.

eMoms at Home just tagged me with a How Weird Are you? I need to list 7 weird things about myself. How can I resist that challenge?

I understand the meaning of poor. The picture on this post is the picture of the shack, um, I mean house my family lived in one summer when I was very little. Yes, that is the back of a stove on the front porch. There wasn't room for a kitchen inside. The raised metal bucket on the right is the source of "running" water. The pile of wood on the right is for the real house my mom and dad built that summer. (Shacks are not a good plan for winter in West Virginia.) The real house was sturdy, but um, lets just say not polished. Anyone want to know what a composting toilet is? But with all that I LOVED my childhood. We were loved and that was all that mattered. I didn't even understand what poor meant until I was much older.

I'm a secret Canadian. I'm a US citizen but was born in Canada. My parents were there for 2 years for work and I decided that would be a good time for them to have kids. :) A few years ago I had to go through 20 billion levels on INS mess to prove I really was a US citizen. All I have to say is anyone who immigrates here really worked for it! I spent 2 days standing in the rain at 6:30 am for hours. The first day I was turned away at the door because "we are not accepting anyone else today" after waiting 4 hours to submit my paper work.

I'm a geek and I'm not talking the light type that uses a computer a bunch. No, I'm a hard core geek. I have a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon. I can hold my own in an argument on whether or not the open source license is really free. I have wire wrapped demo boards. I have programmed in everything from assembly to C to PHP. I can make a Best Buy salesman go "Wow, you know a lot about TV's for a .... (insert awkward silence.)" That is by the way a really good way to get a good deal on a TV. Best Buy will negotiate. Especially after saying something like that!

I have a shoe thing. No this isn't your normal woman 20 billion pairs of shoes thing. Maybe I should say I have an anti shoe thing. I am the despair of my mom and sisters. Two Christmases ago I gave my mom a special present. It was a pair of dirty beat up half fallen apart black flats. She bought them for me in high school. I had been wearing them ever since. (Just for the record that's a long time. I am not in my twenties.) My mom had been begging me to throw them out for years. The present I gave her came with a wrapped box containing the shoes and a book of matches taped to the front. She tossed instead of burning them but only after making me swear I wouldn't dig them out. I'm getting better. I've even spent over $100 on a pair of shoes... but I have a long way to go.

I can tell you every single thing that contains corn in the grocery store. That may seem like a simple task but it's not. For example that apple is covered with corn based wax. Citric acid in the tomato sauce, from corn. How about some salt? Well guess what sticks the iodine to the salt. Milk? Well guess what most cows are force fed and then it bleeds into the milk. Why am I a corn nut? Sadly it's because my 2.5 year old is allergic. Give her a bite of apple with corn wax and she'll be up all night with an upset stomach. It took a long time to work all this out. Only recently has the poor girl routinely slept through the night.

I'm a localvore. That's the new word for people who try and find local sources for their food. I'm not as strict as some who do all their own canning so I guess I'm a spring, summer, fall localvore. Right now I'm binging on bananas, mangoes, kiwis and all the other stuff I don't buy when their are local replacements. Why did I go this route? Three reasons, one, survival for my daughter. I can actually get her safe apples if I buy them from the farmer. It's in general much easier to know what's safe when I can talk directly to the producer. Two, I don't trust super market meat anymore. I like my meat raised by the person who hands it to me. Reporting recalls on my main blog doesn't help with the matter. Three, after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals I feel it's the healthiest and most environmentally friendly way to get my food. (If you haven't please read that book. It is amazing!)

I have a "small" cookbook collection. I think that 100+ cookbooks is just about the bare minimum for a family to have. :) They are my weakness. I love reading and I really love reading cookbooks. If I get a new one I will sit down and read it cover to cover. It can't be just any cookbook though. I am very very picky! My favorites are the ones that give the details behind what you are doing like Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed. If it's about foreign cooking I love when they toss in how the food fits into the culture and give an explanation of how the different flavorings are used. When I'm done reading I want to have enough knowledge to go do my own experiments. (Some of them are good... some.. well please don't ask me about the last batch of sour dough "bread".)

Ok, that was fun! Thank you Wendy for the tag. If you think this sounds like fun consider yourself tagged! If you enjoyed reading this check out my fellow taggie and friend WAH Web Mommy and her wierdness.

Never turn your back on a 2 year old and a stick of butter. Any veteran parents reading this blog have probably already learned that lesson. But just in case you haven't, I repeat.

Never turn your back on a 2 year old and a stick of butter.

Not even for a minute. Not even just to look over at your recipe... (and maybe check your email too). For any 2 year olds reading this blog, A great way to get your moms attention are the words:

"I can even rub it on my ears!"

(However, it's a very poor way if you hate baths and hair washing.)

Liz Strauss asked a question on her blog that really had me thinking.

If you were on Oprah's Show today, what would you plug?

My mind ran through a ton of different possibilities:

• The importance of parents staying up to date on things like recalls, health news. (With the side benefit of promoting my Mom's News Blog)
• How to find safe sources of toys and children's supplies.
• The local food movement and why it is critical to the health of both us and the environment. (Read The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals if you are curious.)
• The impact of federal subsidies of corn and how it benefits big companies at the expense of the farmers and our health. With the personal story of my daughter who's allergic and can no longer even safely eat a grocery store apple. (Waxed apple = wax from corn)
• The lack of biodiversity in our nations food supply and why we should care

At the end of going over my list I realized it had a central theme to it. It's not about the individual issue. They are all important but what is really important is:

Taking personal responsibility to understand the chain of how consumer goods get to us and how we the purchasers are equally responsible for perpetuating the problems.

For example, when there is a big toy recall I hear lots of grumbling that the government and/or the companies needs to do more to protect our children. Yes, I'm sure that is very true but when it comes down to the bottom line, they sell us those toys because we still buy them. Before the recall how many American parents actually questioned where their children's toys came from? Actually looked at the laws in the country that produced them. The environmental and safety conditions in the factories and went "Hmmm... if conditions are like that do they have any incentive to keep my child safe?" I'm guessing very few. I say this because I was equally guilty. I had this naive world view that big companies would never sell anything dangerous. Would never take shortcuts for the sake of profit at the expense of their customer. Who would be crazy enough to do that? Now I realize they do that because those of us giving them $$$ turned a blind eye. We bought cheap cheap toys and didn't ask where they came from. Didn't care if the supply line was so complex we couldn't know beyond a "Made in X" label. If we all stopped buying I guarantee they would clean up their act. In the end those of us looking the other way are just as guilty as them. Purposeful ignorance is no excuse and will only come back to bite us.

So what can we do about it? Especially since I sure don't want to look at my 2.5 year old and go, "Sorry, honey, no toys for you for the next couple of years." It comes down to understanding.

• Looking at what the companies say they are doing to add protection. If they produce oversees do they own the manufacturer? If not what standards do they set? How do they enforce them? If you're happy with those answers buy. If not say no or except the risk is your own making.
• Avoiding companies that mess up too many times. There's one place I used to shop at occasionally that I will never go in again. I'm not going to say since I don't have expensive lawyers but if you skim the where on my recall notices I bet you can guess. It's one of the reasons I think those notices are so important even if they aren't for a product you have. We need to keep an eye on who the guilty parties are.
• Buy from supply chains you can easily follow. Now is an excellent time to check out your farmers market and see if you have small scale toy producers (not to mention food producers!) I'm also completely in love with www.etsy.com . I think I'm going to buy my daughter some felt fake food from there instead of the plastic stuff. I just feel more comfortable when I'm talking directly to the person making the goods. When their business and livelihood are as much on the line as my child's safety.

I could write this same analysis on any of the issues I mentioned above. What it really comes down to is in general we need to be knowledgeable and take responsibility to force change. The $ is a powerful force. If those of us who wield it remember we are the boss those who want it will listen.

I have discovered one of the problems with working from home is that you are always technically at work. There it is just sitting there beckoning for you to do one more thing. Not playing with my daughter? Not doing house work? Well what better use of my time then to work on my site? In case you haven't already learned this lesson that is a great recipe for complete and total burn out. When you find yourself hating what you normally love take a good look and ask yourself, "When have I last had a break? My number one lesson for the past weeks is:

Set scheduled working and relaxing hours and STICK TO THEM!

Just this week I've made the rule no business or house work after 11PM. It was part of my organizing process but it has had a huge reflection on my stress level! I woke up this morning happy and relaxed, not to mention more reseted and ready for the day. Why was that? Because I actually had a few minutes to mellow and enjoy life before bed. I fell asleep earlier. I slept longer and deaper. I woke up more refreshed all because I left a little me time.

So if you are a driver type A who has trouble stepping away, remember my lesson. You will be a happier driver type A if you remember to schedule and keep to some relaxing time. Your spouse and any children will probably be happier too. The hour of us time I've been setting a side for my loving husband each evening has really helped us both feel a lot more connected. Not to mention I've been enjoying watching the new Dr Who with him! Take care of yourself and take care of your loved ones! And good for you if you've read this and go, "Well that's obvious!" I usually have to learn things the hard way. :)

If you liked this post and have kids you should check out our main Mom's News Blog with all the latest in recalls, child related studies, news that affects your life, health news, organizing tips, etc. (Non parents are welcome as well... but it will not be quite as relevant.)

I find myself struggling with finding balance with my blogs and with my life. Not the normal work life balance... even though that is a continuous struggle. A what to do and say sort of balance.

For example what should this business blog be like? Should it be all business? Much more personal? Someone reading this to learn about starting a business probably doesn't care whether or not my two year old took a nap today... however a mom reading this might care about the power struggles we're having. In turn at what point is taking into account the readers going to far and sacrificing what makes the writer unique. Especially when you don't really know what's going on in the readers head. In contemplating all this I've come to one personal conclusion. In an attempt to sound business like I've started sounding too business like. I've let the personal creep out and it's at the least impacted my willingness to write here. So I guess what I'm saying is there's going to be a little bit more raw me and my life. :)

For another balance, what in the world do I work on in my business when there is sooooooo much to work on! On one hand I'm not happy with my news website for mom's blog design. It's professional to pass but has a long way to go. For example it would be nice to have a business logo. On the other hand, the site is bleeding red each month. Only about $30 or so but for something that's supposed to help contribute to the household income it would be nice if it did. Maybe I should work on advertising and the advanced projects that spring off the site. (I don't actually intend to make my fortune selling google ads.) But then what good is a revenue stream possibility without any readers? Should I be marketing? Actually in the end, after playing around a bunch and talking to my husband, the answer is really simple. As he put it, "When I look at a site what it comes down to is content." I need to work on consistent good content for my audience. I need to stop playing with everything else and focus. Get my columns ahead of themselves so all I have to focus on is editing news stories. Once that's rolling I can move on to the next.

Well, now, before I do have to write a paragraph about work/life balance, it's just shy of midnight, I'd better sign off and head to my book (In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan) and bed. My alarm clock fell asleep on the early side and she doesn't have a snooze button.

I realize I've been a business blog slacker. Between maintaining the main blog and working on a side project I started (more about that in a few weeks) I am exhausted. I'm going to commit to at least one - two posts a week from now on. Right now I'm working on a publishing schedule for the main news blog so I can keep up and be more organized with it. Thank you to my loyal readers. :) If you are visiting here from the Shane and Peter Blog and have children (or know anyone who does) please stop by our site's News for Moms to see the latest parenting news or submit your own news link.

So for my good news! A while a go I answered a set of interview questions for entrepreneurs started by the Shane and Peter Blog. It was a lot of fun. A bunch of us answered the questions, and went to each others blog to answer each others questions. However, today, I got a great surprise. My interview was selected as one of the finalist ones. :) I'll have to tell my mom that her lack of fear of things like Maoist rebels has a little tinny tiny upside for her daughter.

Starting a business is a lot like driving to the article circle and back... in one day.... with a two year old. In the beginning you start with a lot of fanfare and excitement! At some point you realize you've read "Elmo Loves You" 100 times in a row back to back, some one is chanting "Read Read Read" and all you can see in front of you is a very very long dirt road.

I'm currently at that point in my business, where there has been a lot of hard work, and very little payoff. The multitudes are not flocking to my door begging for parenting news. This week I've been reassessing my goals and expectations and this is what I've come up with:

• Just like we made it to the Arctic Circle with out going nuts I will eventually meet my business goals. It just requires a lot of hard work and a picture of the end goal.
• Marketing is important. Really important. But no matter how important it is attempting to market anything except express toy shipping between the days of Dec 15 and Jan 1 is impossible. Just don't do it.
• Elmo does not actually love you. Not even a little bit. What he loves is attempting to get parents committed.
• Get user feedback. Yes, you may think your idea is cool but what do your customers think? Find a focus group and ask their opinion. By focus group I mean an random potential customers you can beg to answer a question, not a paid room of people. Also, don't ask your immediate family. It's like asking your husband if your pants make you look fat... he has an incentive to sugar coat things a little.
• Listen to your gut but not your sense of panic. Panic is "It's all wrong! I'm a failure! I quit." Listening to your gut is "Hmm... this might be a bit to boring and dry. What's can make it really interesting?" Rome wasn't built in a day. Most businesses don't succeed overnight.
• Never, never, never buy a board book with Elmo on the cover. Even when it is presented to you by an eager eyed, glowing 2 year old who has just been an angel on a long plane flight. Don't do it! Trust me on this.