For months now he’s said

“Nuh!”
“No No No”
“uh-uh”
“NO!”

with not a ‘yes’ in sight…. but finally we have it…

He now says…

“arse”
(no we have not taught our 20 month to swear! That is ‘yes’ in Muski-speak)

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Arse! is a post from: picklebums.com

You know how on some blogs they list some of the crazy search engine terms that people have used to find their blog? Well I have always wanted to do that (because you all know how bad I want to be part of the cool blogging crowd), but up until now, no one has actually found my blog via a search! Switching to my own domain name and self hosted wordpress has changed that, so here I am, jumping on the band wagon, following the crowd, bleating like a contented sheep and sharing some odd search terms with you all!

“bribery and corruption, photos”
bribery and corruption… ok yeah I can see why someone might google that, but photos of bribery and corruption??

“stole my nanny”
Mum I promise I have never written a post anywhere that talked about stealing you, or any other Nanny for that matter!

“3 aces and 1 king ikea”
What?

“glitter bums.com”
I think this might be the next domain name I register (glitterbum.com is already taken but just add that pesky little s and it is all mine!)

“wee muski”
Well yes he is small… though somehow I don’t think that is what they meant….

The thing is with all of these… how disapointed must the people be when they click on my blog and find a lot of mindless prattle about living with small children in Australia?

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Huh? is a post from: picklebums.com

I got suckered into the social media sites with the rest of the universe. I did hold out for a while but eventually signed up to facebook like the good little sheep that I am. Baa!

Facebook

Initially facebook was just a bit of fun, something new to waste time on. I quite enjoyed playing scrabble with a few friends (even if I did suck!) and some of the other cutesy applications were fun to start with, but it has worn off pretty quickly. I rarely log into my facebook account these days and I delete most of the email notifications it sends me. I must have about 457 million zombie requests waiting for me, not to mention a bazillion growing gifts.

I have recently read a few articles suggesting that facebook is just a giant data mining operation. I am not sure if I subscribe to that theory or not but I have been tempted to delete my account all together but then I have managed to connect with one old highschool friend and a few CISVers which is kind of cool… so I am thinking I might just clean it up, take out all the apps I never play with and leave it as a way to contact me if anyone is looking.

So, it seems, facebook is not for me, but since I am easily sucked in, like to follow the ‘in crowd’ and don’t have a mind of my own, I have been playing with a few other ‘social media’ type sites.

Del.icio.us
I use Del.icio.us as kind of a giant bookmarking service more for myself than to share with anyone else. Since I tend to spend some time at my parents using their fast net connection (ours is dial-up slow out here in the country) I was often frustrated at not being able to find a link I wanted when I was at their place so started using Del.icio.us to save links to so I could access them anywhere. Simple and easy. I am sure it does much more than that but for me, that is all I need.

Stumbleupon.
I’ve also recently signed up for Stumbleupon. I am still not sure of all the ins and outs of stumbleupon but I’ve started to ‘stumble’ a few sites that I like. Mainly blog posts that I read and think someone else might be interested in, or that I want to remember and come back to. I have accumulated a few stumbling friends along the way and the best thing about it all. is that when I am bored or have a few spare seconds to kill I can take a look at one of my friends and see what cool sites they have found. Now for someone who loves blog hopping and reading random stuff on lots of topics this is way fun! An added bonus us that by stumbling someone’s blog you can help them gain some more traffic – which as a blogger is always appreciated.

I could definitely use a few more stumbleupon friends so I have even more options for wasting time looking at nifty web sites. So if you stumble go to my page and add me!

Kaboodle
Kaboodle is big in digi scrapping circles, from what I can tell mostly as an easy way to share a ‘wish list’ of goodies that you’d like to buy. From what I can gather the great thing about Kaboodle if you are a digi scrapper is that you can netowrk with heaps of other scrappers and designers and if you are lucky the designer of one of your wish list items might RAK it to you!

I have a Kaboodle account but I haven’t ever really used it. Though it might be useful as a place to compile a ‘shopping/wish list’ for if/when we renovate – though I sort of use del.icio.us for that already and I can’t imagine the swimming pool manufacturer logging on to kaboodle and gifting me a swimming pool just to be nice can you?

So I am dabbling in social media – enjoying it while it is entertaining and vowing not to get so sucked in that I can’t walk away when it is no longer fun. How about you? Do you do the social media thing?

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Do you do Social Media? is a post from: picklebums.com

Finally I am ready to wrap up my pay if forward project. It was so great to get comments with great ideas on how to just be nicer to everyone in general, and I promise I’ve been doing my best to follow up with your ideas.

To wrap up my PIF project I am taking inspiration from pickledeel’s comment about sending cards;

Random cards to people saying how much you appreciate them is always a good thing.

My three lucky PIF ‘winners’ will receive a card from the picklefarm, just ‘because’, as well as a bit of linky love and review of their blog . I have allocated each commenter a number and used a random number generator to find my winners…
Amanda from Shamelessly Sassy
Kylie from a*muze*ing
and Tiff from Three Ring Circus

Stay tuned for some reviews of the above blogs soon and hopefully some of you will continue with the Pay It Forward game and keep it going!

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Pay it Forward – wrapping up! is a post from: picklebums.com

I have a few bits and pieces to report on today… sundries.

Making My Day!
Firsly the gorgeous Tiff over at My Three Ring Circus gave me this award the other day!
Tiff is a gorgeous mother of two sets of twins and then some.. stop on over and say hi. I can’t pick any one blog or person to pass this on to as all the blogs I read make me smile for different reasons… so if you are reading this and would like an award to share around please feel free!

PIF
I’ve had some great suggestions for my ‘Pay it forward’ project and I have been working on a few of them over the last few days.

I smiled at, and even chatted with, two grandmas at the park yesterday – they both wanted to talk twins and while generally I get tired of the comments really quickly yesterday I made an effort to be nice as I know that was their intent as well. One of them turned out to be the mother of two sets of twins who are now older than I am and we had a really good chat! Funny how making the effort to be nice to someone else often pays you back ten fold!

I’ve also been in de-clutter mode as part of ‘organise ’08′ and while I have long been collecting stuff and making plans for a trash and treasure sell off I have decided that it can all go to charity. I will most likely never get around to trash and treasure and right now the little bit of extra cash we’d get from it doesn’t seem so important, so much better someone who really needs them gets some toys and clothes and blankets.

I will continue to work on a few more things and by the end of the week I will pick three random commenters to receive a special RAK from me. So there is still time to leave a comment here to be in the running. The lovely Guera from Roaming Aussie Mum blogged about me as part of her PIF project so hop on over and say hello.

Zucchinis
We seem to have caught up with the two zucchini plants and for the moment only have one waiting to be eaten. As per requests I will post some of my zucchini recipes in the next few days though so keep an eye out!

That’s all for tonight…

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Sundries… is a post from: picklebums.com

Hello!

Welcome to my new blog, complete with it’s own snazzy new domain name and word press installation. If you are new around here then feel free to have a read back over some old rambley posts (eventually I will put a list of my fav posts in my sidebar to make that a bit easier). If you are joining me from over at blogger… yay you followed me! I promise to make it worth your while to stick around, with more hilarious posts about my family, and the pickle farm, plus I have plans to add in some more posts about fun activities to do with the kids – since that is what people always seemed to google the old blog for and well, I like to bring out and dust off my old preschool teachers brain every now and then!

You’ll notice that there isn’t any digi scrapping related stuff here any more. That is not because I have stopped scrapping or designing, it’s just because I am setting up another little blog for all those things as I’d like to expand and diversify in that area this year. So stay tuned for a link to that soon.

I am still not completly happy with the new blog yet. I have a few things I’d like to tweak or play with and there are still a heap of things I need to add or fix up. The links and the archives pages are still empty and I am still wrestling with a few plugins and widgets and other little bits and pieces I want to change around like – don’t you think it would be better to have the comments link at the bottom of each post? and do I need one of those tag cloud things?

Do excuse the mess while I keep playing, there is bound to be a lot of mistakes  and/or oversights for the next little while so I apologise in advance, but I figured if I didn’t invite you all over here now I may never do it, and you know, I’ll probably never be 100% happy! If anyone has any suggestions or tips for me – this is my first real big play with word press – please do let me know! I am trying to set up a contact form (that plugin just doesn’t like me)  so in the mean time just leave me a comment and I will get back to you.

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So here we are! is a post from: picklebums.com

I touched on this in my post about our trip away, but it has been eating away at me ever since so I need to know…

Why on earth do people have blue toilet water??

Ok I get that it comes from one of those hang on the side of the bowel things which personally, I don’t really go in for. I mean I am sure they make your toilet smell ‘nice’ after every flush or something like that but I am not really into that air freshener smell. Plus, they always seemed like an expensive way of keeping your loo nice when a squirt of vinegar or a bit of bleach will do the same… tho I guess not smell so sweet. And no my toilet is by no means pristine and could probably use a good clean a lot more often than it gets (egads I just admitted my loo was not ‘fresh’ to the general public!!)

But all that aside.. why do they need to make the water blue?

It is a really electric blue too, well it is when it is fresh. Even over the few days we stayed in the flat the toilet water got progressively less and less blue, when we left on the fourth day it was a kind of washed out pale blue ink colour.

At first I thought maybe it had something to do with ‘hiding’ what goes in the loo? Then I noticed that when you pee in it, it goes a weird grass green colour and worse.. number twos go a really revolting khaki green brown shade! This rather impressed the girls, as did the blue toilet water…. it was all that I could do to stop them putting their hands in to play in it!

Can you imagine puking into blue toilet water? Imagine what colour it would go? Ok yeah way too gross for the majority of my readers I guess, but if you had spewed as much as I did while pregnant (yes every day for 29 weeks with the girls and every day for 42 weeks with Muski) then the aesthetics of where you spew becomes rather important.

By no means do I intend to offend anyone who does have blue toilet water… I am sure it is lovely and that there is a perfectly good reason for it… I just need to know what that is!

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Blue Loo? is a post from: picklebums.com

My very special gorgeous friend (even if she did leave me to move to Queensland – why do all my friends do that??) has had her baby girl this morning!!!! I knew the little lady was just waiting for me to get out my credit card on her behalf!

So so so sooooooooo excited and happy for you all! I knew you could do it woman!!!

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She is here! She is here! is a post from: picklebums.com

The newest ‘pickle baby’ arrived this afternoon and I am so excited to hear the news that all is well!

Welcome to the world Holli Annette!

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So excited! is a post from: picklebums.com