Another Way to Doodle Around on the Internet

Today, I discovered Crushpath, which has successfully kept me distracted from the home feature I should be writing. I created my free, one-page profile:



And it will allow me to create more pitch sites for other services I offer. This is so easy to use! Go try it.

Hey Moms! New Mag for Tween Girls

BYOU Magazine: Be Your Own You is a new mag for tween girls roughing it through the late elementary through middle school years. As you can see from the picture below, my 12 year-old daughter got her fingerprints and her eyes all over my review copy. I'm hoping she absorbed the age-appropriate advice about dealing with mean girls, following her dreams, being a better student and taking care of her personal appearance and health.

The mail-bag page reveals what other girls are thinking and saying about what they read in BYOU.

Fun, quick quizzes help girls sort out who they are, what they like and how they can do better at what they're already doing well.

And what girls' magazine would be complete without beauty tips?

In addition to reading the articles and features, girls can get advice from someone their own age!

Plenty of role models, from girls just like BYOU's readers to successful women, are presented, with stories about what they do and how they do it. Crafts, short fiction, puzzles and humor keep the pages interesting from cover to cover. And as a mother of a tween girl, I like that the articles in my review copy didn't push the envelope. There was nothing edgy or morally questionable. In fact, everything I read supported values that the vast majority of families share.

Living the Dream

Since my teenage years, I've wanted to be a morning person. Two reasons: 1) I have a romanticized image of morning people drinking steaming coffee while watching the sunrise and composing great literature and 2) The white-hot disapproval morning people exhibit toward the sleeping habits of night owls makes me squirm.

Morning people, because they know I couldn't possibly know any better, let me go on believing in the morning person dream of relaxation and productivity before the world awakes. And though they claim to not pass judgement on the hours I keep, I can tell they believe only a sloth would lie in bed until 9 a.m.

For decades I have believed that I am a morning person stuck in a night owl's body. I have struggled against my nature, periodically setting my alarm to ring me out of bed at ungodly a.m. hours with the unhappy result of slapping the snooze button until 10 or getting up and crawling through my day like a zombie. These experiments end with me patting my self on the back for giving it a good try and returning to my slovenly ways of waking whenever I please.

But then I remind my self that it took me 40 years to develop the habit of making up my bed every day, a task most people master by the time they are 10. At 10, I had the good sense to know that making up my bed was a huge waste of time since I would be messing it up again that night. At 40, I wanted to quit being sensible.

At age 44, still holding on to the hope that I can successfully transform into the person that I know I am inside, I've had an epiphany. In order to be a morning person, I must give up being a night owl. Staying up until midnight and rising at the cock-a-doodle rooster crow will never produce the results I seek. That's a place of limbo and bleak identity confusion.

Since coming to this realization and changing my ways, I've had another epiphany. The early bird misses the sunrise because she's doing the laundry and making the coffee.