Alright, alright - you can do it one more time! Just once, though - and I mean it!!!

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Now that was fun, even I have to admit!! Oh my bum, though…ooooohhh!! Heehee!

I swiped this from the blog of a really awesome online marketer, Jim Kukral - check him out! If you are working online - internet marketing, blogging, anything online - you will want to keep reading his blog!
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My children are in another state, several states away - without me. All of them. All three of them.

It feels pretty strange. Shawn got me a little ‘broken in’ to such occurences, by going to Washington D.C. without me. It still feels really strange.

My mother was here all weekend - and we had a fun visit. I suppose it could have been more enjoyable, had my narsty migraine not visited at the same time! Dagnabbit! We did still have a good time, though. And I am glad that she got to finally see my home, my town, and all the cool stuff around here!

And then on Tuesday, she packed up and went home to Texas - with my children! Aggghhh! Stop that woman! She has my children!!

Ok, ok, I’m just kidding - that was actually part of the plan. She takes them back with her, and then Mark and I will join them on Friday.

It was so funny, because Monday night she took them with her to the hotel, right here in town - all of THREE MILES from my house - and that first night was the hardest. Hello? They are three miles away! What? Well, I guess it was because it was the beginning of their journey without me.

Patrick still had some laundry in our dryer, and Mark had planned on taking it to him that night at the hotel, and when he was ready to go - he asked me if I wanted to go with him. I jumped up like my chair was on fire!!! Ripped off my pajama pants, threw on my jeans - and said, “YES!!!”

So the two of us, silly saps that we are, went over to the hotel, and watched a movie with them. It was “When Mars Attacks”. I love that movie. It’s so ‘B-Movie-ish’, but, it is filled with awesome actors and actresses and it is so silly-funny!

Anyway, so my little monsters are away, and I’m feeling kind of like I don’t have my shirt on or something. Not to be grody or anything, just like, that feeling of ‘Wait a minute! This isn’t right - something’s not right!’ You know?

I can tell you that I feel 1,000,000% better than when Shawn went to D.C., because they were with my mother, going to my brother, sister, and father - and going to spend the night with dear friends, whom I know love them very much and take very good care of them. Familiar - and safe - places. That D.C. thing liked to kill me! Whew! I still look at him and go, “Oh! You’re home! My baby, my baby!”

I know - I’m a goofball - you don’t have to tell me.

This is just a very exciting time in the world of blogging, if you ask me! I am actually still just tickled pink that I can make money doing something that I love so much. There are so many new things happening around the blogosphere, though, that it just continues to get more exciting. The newest installment from one of my favorite companies, PayPerPost, is their way of letting advertisers more directly approach specific bloggers for the buzz and/or reviews they are wanting. This new release is called PayPerPost Direct. With this program, bloggers install a button on their blogs to let advertisers know that they can be approached with an offer to blog about their site/business/blog/product or whatever it is that they are trying to stir up some buzz for. You can see my handy dandy button on my right side bar. The advertiser can then click it, and enter negotiations with me about their desired post. Once we come to an agreement, I then make the post and the advertiser reads my post, and can also at that time have discussions with me about it. Maybe I’ve used the wrong link text, or they want one more link, or perhaps, they are extremely pleased with the post. Then they approve the post - and I get paid!

I could enter into all of these negotiations and going back and forth with an advertiser on my own, and I have before, but, I do not have the safety net of another company to make sure that I do, in fact, get paid. And PayPerPost only takes 10% of the total cost of the post! That is an amazingly low percentage for a service such as this in the blogging marketplace today! It is really unheard of, in comparison to other such services. So say you and I negotiate and you decide that you are willing to pay me $20 for a post. Then the total cost to you would only be $22! Do you see how this is an awesome deal for both blogger and advertiser? If you were to go to Sponsored Reviews or ReviewMe for the same service, you would be facing a 50%-100% markup!

When you click on my PayPerPost Direct button on my sidebar, a popup window opens up and you and I can begin to discuss what you deem a fair price for a post here on my blog. That is a great feature to this new service - it is basically you and I here, on my site, working out a price together. So PayPerPost is enabling me to sell real estate here on my blog, while at the same time offering me the security of money in escrow already waiting to be paid to me at the completion of the post.

All in all, I am really excited about this new blog advertising service, and can’t wait to see where it takes all of us! It really is an exciting time to be involved a part of the blogosphere!

She is en route right at this very moment! She is coming to see me here in Alybama! She left her house around 8:30am, so she could get here anywhere from about 8pm-9pm!! I am so excited!

I have wanted her to come out here ever since we moved out here! I want to show her my house, my town, my mother-in-law’s property and her horse. I want to introduce her to Mark’s family.

I want to drive her up to the top of the mountain on the road that runs right by my house. I’d love to take her out to the National Forest and show her this really cool waterfall and old homestead fireplace that are out there.

I want to take her to this really cool old cemetery. And there is also a really neat bridge in the woods near my mother-in-law’s house and the road that it is on is really cool.

Basically - there are a lot of things that I would like to show her. The only problem is that she is getting here tonight - and leaving Monday or Tuesday morning. So we really don’t have too much time to do all that we want to do. I have told the kids that we have to pick the things that we feel are the most important that we want to show her, because we won’t have time for everything. So I’ve got them thinking about that.

Anyway, I haven’t talked to her in several hours, I should probably call her pretty soon and check her progress and make sure she’s not getting sleepy! She works all the time, so I know she is totally worn out!

Oh! And another really super-cool thing - she is bringing Miss Lucy, or as I like to call her, Little Girl, too! Totally awesome!!!

I had a really sad nightmare the other night and it really shook me up. I dreamt that Mark had died. It was truly, truly awful. I was completely devastated. My mother and the kids and I were standing in line waiting to see him, which is totally weird, anyway, right? We were waiting in line - behind other people? To see my own deceased husband? Odd. But, as we were standing there, I was really having trouble holding it together, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and at one point, I just fell to the floor. I don’t recall ever having had a dream that someone so close to me has died. So it really freaked me out and when I woke up, it took me several hours, maybe longer, to shake those icky feelings. And it was weird because, as parents of young children, whenever we talk about it or think about if something were to happen to one of us, the first thought is how to continue on financially, etc - without the other. Taking care of the children - that is the first thing we address whenever it is talked about. And you think that you would kick into high gear - like ‘ok, what do I need to do now? what’s next? how do I take care of the children?’ You know - like a business, business, business attitude. And we do have death insurance on Mark, but, in the dream - there was NONE of that - not a drop of it. I guess when you’re constantly bickering with someone, you don’t think that their death would affect you so deeply. But perhaps - that is why you are still bickering with someone after all these years - because of how profoundly they affect you and also their death would affect you.

That is what I am now, officially - as of today! Oh my freaking gosh!! How in the holy heck did this happen? It was weird, because, as I sat at Shawn’s graduation today, and made myself consciously think that - ‘I now have two high-schoolers’ - it didn’t affect me the way that I thought it would. I think I’m still in shock. And I also think it’s definitely weird on my system that they go straight to high school. I mean, I guess even the school district still considers them middle schoolers, but, let me tell you, in a momma’s eyes - they get dropped of at the high school every morning! They can ‘call’ it middle school in the one hallway, but, as a mother - darnit - I just dropped my seventh grader off at high school! Yikes! So it’s like I’m in this weird stage of mentally knowing my true emotional reaction to having two high schoolers, but, not quite feeling it yet! It is definitely strange. But let me tell you, I am really not much older than 18. Really! I’m not! I feel like 18 was a couple of months ago. Plus a couple ‘o years. (19!) And I am just brand new to this ‘grown up’ world. And I am not even sure if I can really spread my wings and fly without my parents yet. I’m still a baby, dammit!! And it was just a blink ago, that I had a huge, swollen belly (yeah, I’m fat now, but, you should’ve seen me pregnant!) and the doctor was getting out his littman stethoscope and listening for a heartbeat. And then I turned around and got a huge swollen belly the very next year, too. And I had these two sweet, precious baby boys. And it was heaven. Pure bliss. I finally had what I’d waited all my life for. Oh crap - now I think I’m starting to feel some of this - why’d you have to get me started talking about this? Aw, man - but, it was just so sweet! Although those were very hard years, raising babies and toddlers could kill a person - they were also glorious years. And then my little girly was born and for years, it was the four of us - the four of us against the world. We were a little team. And it was so much fun. And now - they’re all spread out - one kid over here, one kid over there - got plenty of other stuff to do - none of which involves, includes, or necessitates - mom. Ugh. Quick - somebody send over a baby, before I have a total meltdown!