In So Many Words

I was so touched to be named as an inspiring blogger by Mia of General Hysteria, especially after being so hit and miss this summer. I am so hoping to get into a better routine now that school has started, although the first week was very up and down for us!

For those of you who don’t know how these shameless bits of linky love work, here are the rules:
• You must thank the person who has given you the award.
• Copy the logo and place it on your blog.
• Link to the person who has nominated you for the award.
• Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting.
• Nominate 7 other Kreativ Bloggers.
• Post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.
• Leave a comment on which of the blogs to let them know they have been nominated.

So, now onto my lists:

7 Things About Me You Might Find Interesting

1. My maternal grandmother was born in Scotland, although her family moved to the U.S. when she was around three or four.
2. My paternal grandparents used to take each of us three kids camping once a week each summer. They were in a camping club, and it was a highlight of our summer (well, mine anyway, I don’t know about the boys).
3. From the house I lived in (in Rock Island, Illinois), you could reach the Mississippi River by going either one mile west or one mile north.
4. Our high school mascot was a rock. (The Rock Island Rocks, get it?)
5. There really is a giant rock out front of the boys’ gym at the school, and the rival team in the next town over would occasionally spray paint stuff on it that had to be sandblasted off, thus making the rock ever so slightly smaller each time.
6. We just put over 2300 miles on our car to drive out to Illinois and visit my family and show our son where I grew up. Ergo, the litany of hometown related facts.
7. I am also slightly punchy after composing a very long email to the special education supervisor over our school describing an unfortunate incident that occurred on Thursday wherein the school secretary picked up my seven year old son and carried him into a room that he did not want to enter and, in fact, had told his classroom teacher he would rather die than go back into.

7 Kreativ Bloggers You Will Definitely Find Interesting

Storm at All Things Cherished – I always look forward to her Thought of the Day for encouragement or just something to make me think.
Lisa at Crazy Adventures in Parenting – She is so much more than just the person who holds me accountable for my to do list, although that’s how I found her.
Territory Mom at Delayed But Not Denied – Another encouraging mom walking the special needs path; I love her First Diagnosis & S-List.
K at Floortime Lite Mama – A sweet and genuine mom who shares from her heart about her journey with a child on the spectrum.
Anissa at #FreeAnissa – The beloved and funny mom from Hope for Peyton is striking out in a new direction and is definitely keeping it real.
2Shaye at Miller Memories – An all-around great lady whose blog I found not all that long ago but highly recommend.
Stimey at Stimeyland – An always entertaining look at life, autism, and gerbils.

I have been meeting a bunch of new bloggers lately, and one of them is a fun lady named Super Mommy. In addition to posting reviews and freebies, she has also started sharing about her two kids, one of whom has autism.

For the blog hop, she is asking us to tell what our blogs are about, how we got started, and how long we have been blogging. So here goes…

I published my first blog post on January 26, 2008, so as of right now, I have been blogging for a little over 16 months, and it has been an exciting adventure. I started out just wanting a place to express my thoughts and “find myself”, and then I discovered this amazing community of mommy bloggers and parents of special needs children who want to connect with and support each other.

Tomorrow I will have been married to my husband Bob for 17 years, and we have one son, Michael, who is 7 years old and getting ready to start first grade in a regular classroom with behavioral support. We live in South Central Pennsylvania and attend a wonderful non-denominational charismatic church where I am involved in the special needs ministry.

I work part-time in the promotional products industry (anybody need any mugs or pens with their logo printed on them??) and spend the rest of my time juggling housework, errands, and sleep with being Michael’s case manager and advocate.

A rare picture of the three of us together

Our Two Kitties

Feel free to look around a bit and let me know what you think. I am always thankful for feedback on how the site looks and works for you. Here are some of the highlights (in my opinion, anyway):

• A couple of my favorite posts are Where to start? and LIFE is the Puzzle.
• I am also very proud of the resource posts I have written (something good has to come out of all the hours I spend reading!)
• You can learn more about me on my (appropriately named) About page or in my 38 Things list.
• You can also check out who I like to read on my Blogroll

Thanks so much for stopping by! I’d love to know you were here, and you can subscribe to my feed or follow me on Twitter if you’d like.

Check out Super Mommy’s Blog Hop post to meet her and join in, and her Melamine Snack Set review to enter a giveaway.

Someone asked me the other day how to “follow” my blog, and I quickly realized they were referring to the Google Friend Connect widgets that are ubiquitous on Blogger blogs. My first instinct was to let them know this was a WordPress blog and suggest that they subscribe to my feed, but then I decided to do a quick search and see if it was possible to get in on the following fun.

And guess what, it is! You can add Google Friend Connect to a WordPress blog (at least a self-hosted one, which is what I have – I have no idea about a WordPress.com blog).

It was really easy too, which is always a good thing in my book; the whole process took about ten minutes.

Here’s what I had to do (disclaimer – this may be slightly different for you, but I’m just sharing how it worked for me):

1. Signed in with my Google ID (my Gmail username and password).
2. Under “Set up a new site,” selected the option for a standard website (as opposed to a Blogger blog).
3. Filled in the information about my site.
4. Downloaded the two files they provided, and then uploaded them to my site (I wasn’t sure what folder to put them in so I just put them in the main file area and it worked okay).
5. Configured the members widget and then pasted the code they gave me into a widget on my sidebar.

You can see what it looks like in my sidebar. It seems that if I put it in my post, the sidebar widget won’t show up, which I’m guessing has something to do with trying to run the same script in two places on the same page. Hey, I never said I actually knew anything about computers!

Of course, I had to test it out, so I joined myself and, sure enough, it shows up on my Blogger profile and on my Blogger Dashboard as a blog I am following. Pretty cool, huh?

Quite a post title, huh? So I get ready to come back and post again after a month off and find that the subscriber count on both of the blogs has gone up by about 100! I mean, I’ve seen Feedburner fluctuate before, but it usually goes down and makes you wonder what you may have done to offend 50 people all at once.

I did a little digging, and the best I can figure out is that Feedburner is now counting all the lovely people who subscribe to my FriendFeed. For a minute I thought I was more interesting when I wasn’t posting anything.

Well, June has been quite the month. Thanks to everyone who commented while I was away (I was online here and there but not as much as usual by any means). Here’s the shortened version of what I’ve been up to the last few weeks:

• Started working mornings instead of afternoons. Although I’m not a big fan of getting up early, it is really nice to be done with work at 1:00 and move on to the rest of my day. (Especially since I’ll have two hours before my son gets home from camp for the next three weeks!)
• Found a new therapist and talked to my doctor about the medication I have been taking for depression. I am going to be trying out a new combination of meds in an effort to find the balance between complete lethargy and a total state of panic.
• Started major house decluttering, involving much moving around of furniture and getting rid of things. I have discovered Freecycle, and it is awesome! If you ever want to feel really popular, post something great on Freecycle and watch the emails pour in. I am also going to try Craigslist for a few items that may actually be worth something and see how that goes.
• Took my son to a new DAN! doctor. I really liked him and we are doing some testing to see where we are at with everything. I’m waiting for them to resubmit the insurance paperwork with the correct (non-mental health) codes to make sure we will be able to afford to go back, but am hopeful that we can at least get a good picture of his nutritional/gut status and see what supplements and/or treatments he is in need of at this point.
• Switched to paper for my calendar/to do list organizing. Although I liked the electronic/online things I was using, it wasn’t very convenient for sharing with my husband where we were at and what needed to be done. So I got a little weekly planner and a couple of mechanical pencils and am back to writing out a new to do list whenever the old one gets too messy.
• Spent a day with my husband’s family when my nephew had a soccer tournament in the area. His team won, despite playing much of the time in pouring rain!

Here’s Michael with all his cousins at Red Robin:

And with the “young cousins” and Uncle Andrew on our cuddle chair (reclining chair and a half):

Not very exciting stuff, I know! Anyway, I’d love to hear from all of you how you are doing this summer. I got a little carried away cleaning out my Google Reader and may have deleted too many feeds, so please leave me a comment so I can make sure I am still subscribed to you.

Even with the stressful IEP meetings over and the stress of our kindergarten-year schedule coming to a close, I am still finding it hard to put together a coherent sentence. Which in turn makes it hard to turn any of the ideas swirling around in my head into something worth posting here.

So I have decided to cut myself some slack (for once!) and take a break from posting here for the next few weeks. I may still pop on to Twitter or find myself rambling and venting nonsense over at Autism Interrupted, but then again I may just take Michael to Hersheypark every day in June and never even turn on the computer!

Here’s the proof that I am in need of some serious R&R:

Your Mind is 83% Cluttered

Your mind is incredibly cluttered. You have so much going on in there, it’s hard to think straight. Consider talking to a therapist. It’s a good idea to sort through your thoughts, if only to see which ones are worth hanging on to.

How Cluttered is Your Mind?

If you are reading this in a feed and don’t see a black box with the word “decide” on it, click here to visit the post.

Go ahead, click on it! Enjoy your Saturday!!

I mentioned last time I posted that I was trying out a new, cleaner layout for my blog. One of the things that I had in my sidebar for a long time is a widget for my Google Reader shared items.

These are things that I thought were worth sharing when I read them in my feeds, but I don’t really think the widget got clicked on very much. The links do show up on FriendFeed and Facebook, so at least that’s something, but I thought it might be a better idea to just share my favorite posts here once in a while.

So, besides the posts shown in the list above, here are some things that I have enjoyed lately:

• Asperger Land from Moms of Special Needs Children – a game for moms of kids with Asperger’s; you can’t help but love the “Ka-Ka Hitting the Fan Cards”!
• beyond the window of opportunity from Floortime Lite Mama – some reflections on the sense of urgency often instilled in moms of young children on the spectrum
• On Motherhood from Whiskey In My Sippy Cup – a profoundly moving essay about why we moms all do what we do
• How to Create a Minimalist Computer Experience from Zen Habits – some great ideas on how to clean up your computer desktop and interact more efficiently with your computer. I followed his suggestions about removing everything from my desktop except for a beautiful picture for the wallpaper and am now using Launchy to open any programs or documents I need. I love it!

What’s the best post you’ve read lately? Please share it in the comments on this post!

I have been trying to simplify things in my life lately, including changing the look and feel of this blog. I am now using the Thesis theme and have gone back to my original puzzle piece header image.

The new layout is set up with just one sidebar and a lot less clutter on the page, although I can easily change it later if I wish, since it is more of a framework than a theme, without worrying about messing up the formatting like downloading a new theme might do.

I also condensed my categories from 23 to 13 and removed a lot of the extra buttons and icons from the page. I do plan to add pages for my blogroll and social networking stuff, and I am still working on adding a three-column footer so I can tuck some general information down there. (Hey, simplifying is a process. )

It’s taken me a long time to even start trying to figure out PHP and get into my WordPress theme editor, but now I am learning about hooks and how to use them (made easier by the OpenHook plugin). One great thing about Thesis is the awesome support forums; I had a question the other day and posted it in the forum and got an answer within a couple of hours. Pretty cool!

Let me know what you think about it so far and what you think are the most important pages or other features I should add. Thanks!!

As a board member of ASD HOPE, a small non-profit organization helping parents get started once they receive an autism diagnosis or move to this area of the country, I am always looking for ways to raise money to fund our efforts at providing HOPE (Help, Options and Parent Empowerment).

In addition to covering the printing and mailing costs for our Parent Information Booklet, ASD HOPE holds Parent Chats for “new” parents and EmPOWERment Workshops on a variety of topics. We also have a GFCF Support Group for families wanting to implement the diet.

GoodSearch is an easy way to support your favorite charity or non-profit organization, and we would be honored if you chose to support ASD HOPE in this way.

There are several options for how to use it:

• You can add GoodSearch to the search box on your browser.
• You can download the toolbar with Yahoo! powered search (Internet Explorer only).
• You can simply go to the Good Search home page when you need to search for something online, or the GoodShop page when you need to purchase something.

Many of you know that I am a big fan of the parenting site Root & Sprout, and the related social network Grow Together. Over the last few months, Root & Sprout has experienced much growth and many changes, including hiring a core team of writers while still providing opportunities for both paid articles and voluntary submissions to the ezine.

Starting this month, articles will be published one or two per day instead of all on the first of the month. They will continue to range in category, covering ages from pregnancy to the teenage years and including other topics relevant to parenting. There will be giveaways each week, too, so subscribe to the feed today to stay informed!

Now that the site is using a blog platform (where you can also comment on the articles – hint, hint!), each post has its own permalink, which is great for referencing previous articles and sharing them with others. My newest article has just published today, and I have written two previous articles:

• Potty Training Your Special Needs Child – May 2009
• Using Play Dough as a Therapy Tool – February 2009
• How Did You Know? Early Signs of Autism – August 2008

I am hopeful that sharing our potty training experience will give some hope to other moms who aren’t sure it will ever happen, whether your child has special needs or is just not responding the way you think they should be. I’d love to hear what you think!