Category: Uncategorized

In September, Jenny and I gave away tickets to Disney on Ice, thanks to Mom Central. My family and I went to see the show, and it was amazing. Now, Mom Central’s at it again – they’re giving away tickets and offering a coupon code for another exciting event – Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey presents Zing Zang Zoom!

Here’s what they have to say about the show:
Through the mystery of magic and the mastery of skill, audiences will be spellbound as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey presents ZING ZANG ZOOM, a thrill-filled, mind-blowing circus spectacular where family fun is no illusion.

Magical Zingmaster Alex and his assistant, the alluring Levitytia, lead audiences through a kaleidoscope of color and imagery revealing extraordinary worlds of fantasy, flight and phenomena that celebrates the uplifting spirit of the circus and wards off a cynical Mr. Gravity and his team of “heavies” who try to bring everyone down.

Fun-filled magic merges with traditional circus arts to create a world of infinite possibilities where apprentice illusionists levitate their parents with a wave of a wand, and audience spirits keep rising as the high flying circus is (literally) turned upside down. BONUS: All Access Pre-Show is free for all ticketholders and begins an hour before showtime.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey presents Zing Zang Zoom will be coming to the Cincinnati and Dayton areas in March and April, and we’re excited to be giving away tickets to both shows! Mom Central has also generously provided tickets for me and my family, and I absolutely cannot wait to take our kids. Watching their faces at Disney on Ice was so special, and I am sure they’ll enjoy the circus just as much.

Today’s giveaway is for a four-pack of tickets to the opening night of Zing Zang Zoom at the US Bank Arena in Cincinnati on March 10. We’ll giveaway tickets to the Dayton show in a few weeks!

To enter:
1) Leave a comment on this post telling us what you think your kids would enjoy most about the show.
2) Tweet about the contest on Twitter and leave a comment here telling us you did so.
3) Post about the contest on Facebook and leave a comment here telling us you did so.
4) Subscribe to our feed and leave a comment here telling us you did so.

The contest will run until 5:00 p.m. on Friday, February 19th, and the winner will be chosen using random.org. Good luck!

But there’s more! Mom Central is offering a great deal on tickets – just use coupon code MOM on Ticketmaster.com and you can get four tickets for $44 for Monday-Friday matinee shows (any additional tickets are still priced at $11), and $4 off Friday night and all weekend shows.

Photo by Kaibara on Flickr

Friday afternoon, my phone rang as Jenny, Cortney and I were lounging in our room at the Opryland. It was Andy.

“Oh no,” I said. “Oh no. Oh no!”

As I hung up, I reported to them, “Kate is throwing up.”

“Oh no!” Cortney and Jenny said in unison.

My poor baby girl had apparently picked up the stomach bug that was, based on the reports of other parents on Facebook, going around her school. Great.

An hour or so later, we were sitting in a session about blogging rock stars, and I was pretty pumped, so I tweeted this:
Getting ready to see my google reader in real life with @velveteenmind @bostonmamas @debontherocks and @mttsm #blissdom

In the middle of the session, Andy called. Of course we were sitting WAY in the front, but I left the room as quietly and quickly as I could.

“Sammy’s puking his brains out,” Andy reported.

And then I tweeted this.
Both my kids are at home throwing up and I suddenly feel very stuck in nashville #blissdom

I immediately started pulling up the schedule for Greyhound and the website for Enterprise Rent-a-Car. I really, really wanted to get home and take care of my babies.

Late in the evening, Andy called to tell me that they had stopped getting sick, and that I should just stay put in Nashville. I was truthfully glad not to board the Greyhound in a strange city in the middle of the night and in the middle of a snow storm, but the news of their sickness took a lot of the excitement out of the weekend for me.

I woke up Saturday morning with a sore throat, and by noon I was feeling pretty lousy. I spent most of the day in our room watching Toddlers and Tiaras (have you seen that? o.m.g.!!!!) I got up (at Jenny’s urging. Or perhaps, insistence) and got dressed for dinner, and while I was sitting in a room with some of my very favorite people in the entire world, I wanted nothing more than to go upstairs and put on my pajamas. And watch more Toddlers and Tiaras. So I did.

I called Andy to check on the kids, and they were tired and worn out, but there was no more puking.

That is, of course, until Andy started puking.

So by the time I got home on Sunday, our house (though remarkably clean despite the weekend they’d had and with all the laundry done) pretty much needed a big black X on the door to ward off potential visitors. Actually we should have done that, because my grandma came to check on the kids and, bazinga, a day later she had the dreaded disease as well.

The kids and Andy, fortunately, were on the mend, but for me, the worst was yet to come. It turns out I had strep throat, which I hadn’t had since I got my tonsils out circa 1989. Apparently it’s one of those diseases that sucks when you’re a kid but very nearly kills you when you’re an adult. Or at least that’s what it feels like. I really can’t remember ever being that sick, it was awful. It felt like I was swallowing shards of glass. During the night on Monday, I told Andy it hurt worse than being in labor with Sam, and that was not an exaggeration. I would have done pretty much anything for an epidural that night!

We all lived to tell about the weekend from hell and things are nearly back to normal, despite the fact that in the midst of all this mess, Sam’s beloved teddy bear went missing. But that’s a story for another day!

Hi, this is Emily, coming to you live from Blissdom at the Opryland Hotel. Jenny, our friends and I are having a great time! It’s so nice to be in the company of other nerds bloggers. Anyway, today’s post was written by my sister, Anna, who is expecting her first baby. She is, of course, looking for advice, so I suggested she do what Jenny and I always do when we have a question, and turn to our brilliant readers. So take a look, and let Anna know what baby items she will just have to have and what will likely end up at the bottom of the closet.

It took my husband and me awhile to decide to start a family. Many of our friends have children and it seems they are much more willing to share battle stories with us than stories about the wonders of being a parent. It wasn’t all that long ago that our friend described her evenings taking care of the children, including things like homework and baths and putting the kids to bed. Notably missing from her description were the things that we typically do in the evenings: veg on the couch and watch TV, eat in the living room, spend a considerable amount of time on Facebook, go somewhere at the spur of the moment and, my favorite, nap. Here was our conversation after we got home:
Hubby: “You know when Mandy was talking about their normal evening ? It sounded horrible.”
Me: “I know. Shudder. Why do people even have kids?”

Fast forward a few months and we decided to that we too wanted a little life-sucker… I mean blessing of our own. In the words of Liz Lemon from 30 Rock “Is it so wrong that I just want to one of these to grow up and resent me?”

It’s been a few months since we found out we were excepting. (I bought the pregnancy test with CVS ECBs, Woot-woot). As we check the weeks off the calendar, our baby becomes more and more real. Our excitement grows along with my belly. And so do the questions. I’ve started to do the very first thing that comes to me when facing uncertainty: research. I’m pretty sure that researching is a genetic trait that runs in our inbred family. Before making a decision, I simply must gather as much information as humanly possible.

Which leads me to my question for you: What is a definite must on our registry and what should we leave off? With so many options and verities of baby stuff, I have no idea what I should get for the baby and what we should do without. Was there anything that you found collecting dust and just taking up space? What were the things that you really needed for your baby, the things that you couldn’t live without?