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.

She looks so peaceful, doesn’t she? My camera would have taken a different picture last night, though. At 11:45, when I was just filling my water glass to head off to bed, Breanna woke up. This would not be a big deal in and of itself, except that she then inexplicably wouldn’t go back to sleep. I never talk to her when she wakes up, beyond “shhh” and the occasional “it’s okay” but she woke up completely nonetheless.

She then proceeded to keep me up for hours into the middle of the night. I have no idea what it was all about, but it wasn’t all that bad, really. She wasn’t crying and she wasn’t squirming to get out to play. She was quiet and snuggly and she would lie beside me, smiling, then she would sit up and rest her head on my stomach and just look at me. We talked softly to each other, me with words and her with coos. Every so often I would say, “night night Breanna” and she’d lie down and turn her head away, but then she’d start over again.

Eventually at some point I said please a few times and she finally laid down one last time, curled up in the crook of my arm with her back against me, and she drifted off to sleep.

During those hours lying on the bed with her, more awake than I really wanted to be in the wee hours, I realized that as long as a night like that feels, those moments are so fleeting. I don’t know when she’ll stop needing me in the middle of the night but it will be sooner than I think. Some day she won’t want to snuggle with me and she won’t smile up at me with so much happiness just because I’m there. And some day I’ll read this entry again and remember how much love there was in her eyes one November night and I’ll probably cry and be grateful than instead of being frustrated, I just enjoyed the quiet darkness with my baby.

Do you want to know a secret? Every so often I go looking for sites with samples like this free stuff site. You can find freebies for baby products, pet products, coupons, almost anything you can think of. It’s so nice to get something other than bills and junk mail in the mailbox once in awhile. Go check it out and see if anything catches your eye; personally I love getting shampoo samples because I was always a hair product fan, and fancy schmancy lotions because I know I can’t afford to buy them so at least this way I get to try them out.

Some day when I feel insane I might try to make Pablo Cake for Hayley; he’s her favorite Backyardigan.

Neat crafts to make with your kids.

Laughter IS the best medicine. Watch the baby in this video and just TRY not to laugh. (Thanks Karen!)

There are three types of clothing for kids that I always loved best of all. Yes, I love footed pajamas and pretty little dresses and whatnot (and I had one moment of ovary-aching “oh, if only I had a boy too!” when I saw a little itty bitty grey suit in a baby store yesterday), but the three things I love best are jeans, overalls, and jogging suits.

You can take the youngest baby, fat rolls and jiggly cheeks and drooly faces and the second you put a pair of jeans on them they look like miniature teenagers. I don’t know what it is about jeans, but it’s true. With both the girls I remember dressing them in jeans for the first time and then thinking, “no no no, no more jeans, she looks too grown-up!” Of course, I do it again the next day because it’s just too cute not to.

Meanwhile, overalls somehow seem to help keep them looking small. Even when you take a really tall four-year-old, somehow those overalls make her look just a little smaller than she really is, and when you’re blinking in confusion and wondering how time has flown by so quickly, that’s kind of nice once in awhile.

Jogging suits are just hilarious and cute. Jogging suits look normal on Hayley but they make babies look like little puffy creatures. It’s like having a marshmallow with legs walking around. I have four jogging suits that fit Breanna right now and I love putting them on her.

Jeans and overalls and jogging suits are definitely easier to deal with than the clothes your average teenager wants to wear, if the mannequins at the mall are any indication. I wandered around a mall with the girls for a couple of hours yesterday (both were wonderfully well behaved) and any time I passed one of the geared-for-teens boutiques, I couldn’t help but wonder if my mother had ever felt the same horror when she walked past the stuff that was in style in my youth, though admittedly, at least it wasn’t super revealing and it didn’t include stuff like g-strings peeking out of low-rise jeans and t-shirts that say “sexy” or “slut” on them; it was the late 80s and early 90s, our stuff was just ugly.

And then I wondered when I got so old.

Hayley is so good about sharing food that it’s unbelievable. We didn’t really go out of our way to teach her that but she picked it up anyway. She’s far more likely to give you some of her food than share her favorite toys with her sister.

Every morning she shares her breakfast, occasionally asking me if the piece is too big (though she almost always does it right anyway without my input). Here she was sharing some toasted bagel with margarine. Breanna the carb queen was more than happy to help Hayley eat it.

When Hayley was born, I got to spend so much time with her. George would leave for work before 7 am and get home around 5:30 or 6 pm, which left me with full days where I could just watch her and play with her and observe her as she grew.

When Breanna was born, I didn’t have that same luxury. Hayley wasn’t in pre-school or daycare so I didn’t get to have the same constant alone time with Breanna. I still got moments here and there but it wasn’t the same because I had two people who relied on me and I was kept pretty busy – and that hasn’t changed.

On the weekend, George’s sister was out this way and Hayley left here at 12:30 on Saturday afternoon. She was whisked off to the shopping center and then back to his parents’ house for supper. I wasn’t very surprised when I got a call asking is she could sleep over so I packed an overnight bag for her and his sister picked it up. It wasn’t the first time she had spent the night there.

I missed her. I always do. But the one nice thing about it was that I got a lot of time to just hang out with my youngest daughter. She has such a funny sense of humor already and we had fun. I played the new Justin Timberlake CD (it’s really starting to grow on me, it has some pretty good songs) and she danced happily, then she kept on dancing when I switched over to the country video channel. I wish I could have gotten her on video while she was dancing wildly to Jason McCoy’s “Born Again in Dixieland”.

She enjoys playing with anything Little People-related so we played with the school bus, the ark, all the people and animals, and a house and barn set. She played her own little game where I hunch down on the floor in a ball, and she comes over and smacks me on the back. Then she pulls my head up by my ponytail and I bark at her like an angry dog; this causes her to run away laughing. Then we do it all over again and if I don’t get back into a ball fast enough, she’ll impatiently push me down.

In between that she napped quietly and then woke to play some more. Sometimes we just hung out on the floor together and relaxed.

I know it’s sort of obvious that people are different, that siblings are their own people but it’s still so strange sometimes to know that the same two people could produce two different children. They have many things in common but they are definitely each their own person and I love seeing their personalities grow.

I’m glad I got to see Breanna’s personality up close this weekend.