The blogosphere recently went crazy over PayPerPost, a word of mouth marketing site where bloggers can make money for advertising products and services. A lot of people have been negative about it but I think it’s great, honestly. I only choose to review things that I genuinely agree with or appreciate. I suppose that some people could go ahead and write about things they don’t believe in but I don’t do it that way. As a result, I think it’s possible to write for PayPerPost while still maintaining your integrity as a blogger. Word of mouth marketing is a major marketing strategy nowadays and I think they’re going about it in a great way by offering incentives. I love it because it gives me an opportunity to make a bit of pocket money. How can I complain about that? (ETA: If you sign up, you can say you were referred by me, sherina at andromeda dot qc dot ca and I’ll get a whole five buckeroos.)

I was taking some chocolate cupcakes out of the oven (the occasion? I had gotten some of those silicone muffin pans from the dollar store and really wanted to try them out.) when George called me from down the hall. “Come here,” he was saying.

I quickly threw the cupcakes back in for another couple of minutes and hoped it wasn’t something that would take long enough for them to burn since they were looking mighty tasty. And then I walked down the hall and saw the three of them listening to music, a dad and his two little girls.

“I want you to take a picture of this,” he said. I rushed to grab my camera off my desk and came back and took two pictures. This one was my favorite because in the second one Hayley sat up and looked at me. I like this one because they both look so relaxed and cozy, curled up on his shoulders.

Both of them always slept better on him too. Breanna often falls asleep on him if he picks her up while she’s tired. It’s much more frequent than it is with me. I like to joke that she won’t sleep so easily on me because I’m so much fun. He says she falls asleep on him because he’s so soothing; I counter that it’s just because he’s so boring that she passes out from a lack of interest.

I think the truth, though, is he just has much better and more comfortable shoulders than I do. That, and maybe because Hayley is and Breanna probably will be total Daddy’s girls.

Minature Earth. I’ve always loved this but the flash version makes it especially compelling. (Via Amy)

It’s almost Christmas and so of course everyone in my family wants to know some gift ideas so I’ve been looking around. I’m a big fan of coffee but I generally just have plain old every day coffee in the mornings and I can’t really justify spending five bucks on fancy coffee drinks at a cafe.

I think it would be awesome to get one of these Tassimo Hot Beverage Machine setups. It’s like having your own personal barista without even having to leave home. Continue reading →

It amazes me the way I have two girls – both of whom came from the same two people – and their hair is so different. Hayley with her long curly hair is often on the receiving end of compliments from just about everyone who sees her. It’s blond like mine was as a child but while mine wouldn’t hold a curl if you held a gun to it, hers can barely be straightened; a couple of weeks ago her aunt tried a straightening iron on her for fun and it was still wavy.

Wavy seems to be where Breanna’s headed. When she was born her hair was so dark and so straight that we referred to her as our Inuit baby. Over the past almost-year it has lightened a bit so that it’s a very similar brown to my own hair, and her straight hair has picked up a few stray curls randomly scattered around the ends. I miss the dark brown but this suits her too.

They both feel differently about having their hair handled too. Hayley’s, while gorgeous, is usually left loose because she absolutely hates to have it brushed and she’s not all that fond of pigtails or ponytails anymore. I pull it back if she’s eating something messy or if she’s getting in the bath and I usually braid it at night to help cut down on tangles. Otherwise, she’d just prefer that we leave it alone. On the other hand, god forbid we mention cutting it to minimize the need to fuss with it. I don’t want to cut it short but I’d love to cut a few inches so that it’s just below her shoulders. We’re going to have to bribe her or something before next fall because I really don’t want to be doing battle with her hair every morning before school.

Breanna, on the other hand, loves having her hair handled. Granted, she’s still a baby and may change her mind, and she also has less hair than Hayley did at this age. Also, with her hair being less tangle-prone, it’s certainly easier. Still, at this point Breanna is very much like me. I can wash my hair in the morning, and go get my hair cut six hours later and I’ll still ask for a shampoo just because I want someone to wash it for me. If someone wanted to brush my hair for an hour I would sit in front of them and not say a word. This is Breanna. If I brush or comb her hair, her face goes completely blank, she stares off into the distance, and she quiets right down. I’ve managed to calm her down from crying fits just by pulling the brush out and stroking her hair with it.

In fact, last night she very nearly fell asleep while I combed her damp post-bath hair.

And that was while she was standing up. Let me tell you, she was pissed when I stopped and she snapped awake.

When I first found out I was having a daughter, I pictured myself styling her hair into one cute little ‘do or another. Sadly, Hayley would rather eat broken glass than let that happen. I do hold out hope that when she gets a little older that she’ll enjoy it more and let me play. And if not, I can just hope that Breanna keeps liking it.

Today was yet another crappy and rainy day. We weren’t very hopeful about our plans for the day since everyone was busy with something and it certainly wasn’t looking like going for a walk to the park was going to be an option.

George went to Loblaws to get some groceries for supper and other necessities. While there, he noticed they were selling Ernie dolls and Elmo dolls for only five bucks each. He picked up one of each and brought them home as surprises for the girls. Breanna loved her new, bigger Elmo and walked around chewing on his eyeball for awhile, occasionally shaking him wildly for good measure.

Ernie proved to be quite the hit with Hayley though, and I never would have guessed since she never expressed any particularly huge affection towards him when we watch Sesame Street. We ended up passing a lot of time playing “Journey to Ernie” from the show. One of us would hide the Ernie doll somewhere in the apartment and then we’d give Hayley clues until she found him. It was amazing how many times we were able to keep doing it and she never got tired of it. He only got set aside for two board games (a Hide and Seek Farm game that is pretty cute), and otherwise, everywhere she went, Ernie went too.

He was also useful at bedtime. For all the compliments people dish out about Hayley’s hair, they’d take them back if they ever had to try to brush it. I’m amazed none of our neighbors have ever called CPS, considering how loudly she screams when I do it, with the occasional, “please STOP, Mommy stop!” thrown in for good measure. I’m sure the people downstairs think I’m killing her. However, tonight every time I hit a knot, she just squeezed Ernie as tight as she could and she barely whimpered. I had her hair brushed and braided in record time.

When she went to bed, I heard her talking and I peeked around the corner to find her reading a Caillou book to Ernie. Just now it was all quiet down the hall so I checked and she’s sound asleep, snuggled up to her new Ernie doll.

I’ve always been a big fan of Sesame Street anyway, ever since I was a little girl but if one of the characters can entertain and soothe her this much, I think Ernie can stay.

One of the best videos on YouTube. It made me tear up a bit.

That sweet story from yesterday about Breanna being awake most of the night and how nice it ended up being? Well although my patience remained intact, it was not so cute the second night in a row. Just like Wednesday night, last night she woke up a little before midnight and couldn’t settle back down to sleep. She didn’t stay awake quite as long but it was still an eternity for a tired mother.

This morning she smiled at me and I noticed her gums looked swollen. I pressed gently on the gums on either side of the two bottom teeth, and they were definitely bulging. All of an hour later, I looked again and although they weren’t through, I could see the white line of teeth pushing just below the surface. Aha. Teething. Therein lies the answer to the late night wake-ups and the cranky behavior of the past few days.

So what do you do when you have a baby who is teething and making you an exhausted wreck, a four-year-old who is testing every limit in the book and then some, and two cats who are making you think plants are better than pets?

You quote The Tragically Hip and start singing, “happy hour, happy hour, happy hour is here” as you pour your Labatt Blue (or Bleue if you live here in Quebec), and you toast the end of a long week.

Cheers.

If you note that my domain is titled andromeda.qc.ca you might have caught on to the fact that I’m an astronomy fan. No, my domain has nothing to do with the television show. I’ve been interested in astronomy since I was a young kid. When I was 12 years old I bought myself a telescope with money that was given to me by my grandparents and I spend a lot of time looking at the moon and the stars.

The telescope I bought was not necessarily the highest quality. It has a special filter for the moon and for the sun but it’s not very powerful; you can almost do as well with good binoculars. However, I found a great site that sells some nifty ones.

What I wish I had was one of these great telescopes. They have so many wonderful and high quality telescopes and accessories and I wish I could take them all to a high mountain top away from city lights to just sit quietly and look at the stars.

Something like this would be nice to own:

Or maybe this one:

I need a large amount of money so I can go crazy and indulge my stargazing self. I wish I had studied astronomy formally, what a nice way that would be to make a living.

I have to say one thing right off the bat: You need to know that this is a sponsored post. I’m not writing this because I was surfing around and came across something nifty, which is something I do from time to time. No, in this case, I had an opportunity to write a post about something and get paid for it, so here we go.

A lot of people got up in arms about the infamous PayPerPost. I have no real opinion of PayPerPost. I don’t really mind if someone writes reviews and gets paid for the. However, one thing about ReviewMe, a new pay-for-review system is that one major caveat is that blogger must disclose that they are reviewing a product and being paid for it. I think most people can figure out that if every second post is a review of some product or service, that person is probably raking in some cash to do it, but ReviewMe insists that you be honest from the get-go when you use their service. I like that, at least I know the facts.

I think the best thing about the service though is that unlike PPP, bloggers are not under any obligation to be positive and marketers must pay up even if their product or service gets a negative review. On PPP many marketers mention that they only want positive feedback or “buzz”. Some jilted bloggers have also complained that although the requirements stated that neutral tones were okay, they didn’t get paid in the end because the marketer really wanted positive, not just neutral and certainly not negative.

I don’t know how ReviewMe will do in the end. I don’t know how long marketers will keep paying out for the crapshoot of not knowing the type of feedback they’ll get. I don’t think it’s something that I would use often myself, although I have no problem with discussing a product or service that I really do like. Maybe if I see something that I genuinely have something to say about, I might go ahead and give it a review and if someone wants to throw a few bucks my way to do it, all the better for me; after all, I’ve already reviewed a camera phone in exchange for getting to keep it for free and a couple of books. I accepted all three of those offers because, like ReviewMe, I was under no obligation to put on a fake smile and gush positive feedback, I was allowed to be as honest as I wanted.

Overall, I think ReviewMe sounds interesting as long as it’s not abused and as long as it can honestly keep up with the payouts they promise. I don’t really see it as being much different from running various advertising campaigns, especially since readers know it’s sponsored right up front. I know I’ll be curious to watch its evolution.