I can not wait for Spring. I am feeling cabin fever like crazy and it’s MAKING me crazy. Not to mention I am no fun to be around.

Thankfully I have a financial pick me up coming in less than two weeks. The glorious tax refund. I have PLANS for the money.

I think there’s more but I can’t remember off the top of my head right now. I do know I have to pay my vehicle sticker which went up $20 since last year.

Anyway, as you can see I am planning on purchasing two iPhone’s. I would love it if you could suggest your five favorite apps!

Does anyone else have a hard time during the cold months? I know this is due in part to having the baby, I don’t want to drag him out in the super harsh weather. I am just not used to being inside SO much.

See, it’s been just about a YEAR of being “trapped” in the bedroom. Last March is when I started bleeding at 12wks pregnant and was put on bedrest. I then developed SPD, which also kept me in bed, combined with recovering from the emergency repeat c-section this past October… yeah… I am itching to be outside! It doesn’t help that most of my photography is of the nature variety which is not easy to do inside!

We are planning on redecorating the house (FINALLY!), starting with the bathroom as the space is extremely small with a really odd color paint. We are going to paint the walls/ceiling a bright white and have the accent color be in the blue family. I figure I can use some sky prints of mine on the walls to really pull it together, such as the following.

Or perhaps the accent color could be pink (the male folk won’t care)…

Or maybe green!

The hardest part in some ways, is just deciding on the color palette! Do you have any favorite home design blogs/sites?

Well I suppose I am going to sit here in bed, I’m sure the baby is going to wake up soon enough to nurse (yay for co-sleeping and breastfeeding!), and watch some TV quietly.

These are plugins I personally use and feel really enhance my comments page not only for me but for those who comment as well!

CommentLuv
The support is very quick, especially if you contact them via twitter. I love this plugin because it enables the commenter to quickly link to and display their OWN recent blog entry at the bottom of their comment. It brings them more traffic, gives you something new to read (and comment on!)

DoFollow
Basically this allows you to remove that pesky “nofollow” attribute from links. What that does is, again, bring more traffic and page rank to those who comment on your site! You can read more about the “nofollow” at SiteSketch101.

Subscribe to Comments
Just as the title suggests, this lets the commenter “subscribe” to the comments. This is great because I know if I leave a comment on a blog, I like to keep in the loop so to speak, return, etc.

WP Twitip
This easily adds a field for people to input their twitter id. I’ve found that my commenters tend to get new followers this way!

I saw the steaks during our grocery shopping trip and immediately thought of stir fry!

This meal was easy to prepare, quick to cook, and affordable!

Ingredients

• 2 top round steaks, trimmed of fat
• 2 medium red bell pepper, sliced
• half of a large red onion, sliced
• 2 limes, juiced
• 2 TBSP garlic, minced
• 1 pint of grape tomatoes
• 3 TBSP fresh ginger, grated
• 1/2 C soy sauce
• 1 carrot, julienned
• 1/2 C cilantro, chopped
• 1 bunch of scallions, chopped
• 1/2 C bean sprouts
• kosher salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 C water
• 3 C cooked white rice (or you can use brown if you have it!)

Directions
Have your warm cooked rice on standby, we do it in our rice cooker which is a fantastic device!

In a bowl, mix together the garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and lime juice. This is your sauce for the stir fry.

Season BOTH sides of the steak very well with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, turn your pan (I used our non-stick pan sprayed with olive oil) on high heat and get the pan SUPER hot as you need to sear your meat.

Once the pan is very hot, carefully place both steaks in the pan and DO NOT touch the steaks. Cook on the first side for 4 minutes, flip the meat and cook an additional 2 minutes. Take off the heat to your cutting board and let rest while you cook the veggies.

Toss in the still hot pan your onion, bell pepper, and carrot. Season with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Cook for about 2 minutes. Add the water and using a wooden spoon, scrape up the brown bits from the meat (FLAVOR!). Add the tomatoes, bean sprouts, and cilantro. Cook for about 5 minutes until the vegetables are still a bit crisp but no longer raw.

Add your sauce and scallions to the vegetables and cook for an additional 3 minutes. During this time slice your meat against the grain VERY thinly. A serrated edged blade works best for this.

To assemble per serving, put a few scoops (1/2 C or so) of rice into your bowl, top with the vegetable mixture (1/2 C), and 5-7 strips of steak.

To veganize this dish, eliminate the meat and use firm tofu marinated in some extra sauce (garlic, ginger, lime juice, and soy sauce) for about 10 minutes before cooking it.

Since the end of February of 2008, I’ve felt as if my beliefs, my faith in Paganism, has been missing. Perhaps the car accident at that time was a catalyst? I don’t know.

I just feel like something is missing. I don’t feel connected to the Goddess at ALL anymore. I’ve been Pagan for over fourteen years now so this is very odd for me. The first few months I thought maybe it was due to stress, work, being a single parent (at the time). However it’s been just about two years and it hasn’t improved. I have zero interest in Paganism.

I suppose part of me feels abandoned. My faith was shaken. I went through so much in the past two years emotionally and physically and felt no strength, no love, even when I did ritual after ritual, hoping I would feel connected again. I kept thinking if I tried to “talk” to the Goddess more, invest myself even MORE into my beliefs that perhaps my mindset, my heart, would change. That it would be as it used to be.

Yet nothing helped. Nothing changed. My life completely crumbled.

I thought, what if another religion or spiritual belief speaks to me? Yet I have so many preconceived notions that I wouldn’t know where to start.

Part of me as well is tired of being solitary. Yet when I reached out to other local Pagans I just get annoyed. Either they have NO grasp of reality or especially if they are parents, it’s hard to find someone who shares in my attachment parenting ideals.

I want to be a part of a community, have my sons be a part of a community. I want to feel strong in my faith, my spirituality, my religion.

I need help. I need guidance.

I’ve gotten a lot of comments about how I do my comments page and figured I would share how I do it! Granted not all of the styles are in my style sheet, that is due to pure laziness on my part when I was writing it up.

I use the following WordPress plugins specifically for the comments page:

• CommentLuv
• DoFollow
• Subscribe to Comments
• WP Twitip ID
• Yet Another Related Posts

For the rounded edges I use the following CSS3:

border-radius:6px;
-webkit-border-radius:6px;
-moz-border-radius:6px;

This chunk of code enables you to have alternating colors in the comments but also let’s you define in your CSS, a class to specifically customize the author (your) comments.

Place at the very top of the page, this defines the CSS class you will use for the alternating color row in your comments.

$oddcomment = 'alt';

This also starts the comment loop.

<?php if ( have_comments() ) : ?>
<?php $i = 0; ?>
<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
<?php $i  ; ?>
<?php
//Test for author comment
if($comment->user_id == "1") {
$authorcomment ='me';
$commentclass = $oddcomment . ' ' . $authorcomment;
}else{
$authorcomment = '';
$commentclass = $oddcomment;
}//endif
?>
<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
<?php if($comment_type == 'comment') { ?>

I offer my comments page in its entirety. If you have any questions about it or if you want to use any part of it (such as the comment guidelines) just comment!

{Download comments.txt}

A new year of learning, growing, thriving… especially now that I have TWO boys!

What do you want to do differently this year as a parent?
Be more active. Ok, I have to give myself some slack in this area. Last year I had hyperemsis, a subchorionic bleed, and symphysis pubis dysfunction. Was on bedrest the entire pregnancy, then recovery from the emergency repeat c-section (failed VBAC). Still. Our awesome friend Jennifer, gave us a Brookfield Zoo Membership that I can’t WAIT to take full advantage of.

I also want us to focus on more of a schedule. As it stands now we are all naturally nocturnal, which is fine for the Winter, but when the warmer Spring starts to happen I want us to have a semi-set bedtime so we can spend our days outside in the fresh air, exploring.

We also, especially with our oldest son, will give even more support and guidance. He came back from living with his bio-dad and bio-dad’s girlfriend sickly, unhealthy, afraid, and with night terrors. After only 5 months with them. It’s been a long year of slow healing for him emotionally and physically.

We will be working on stronger reading skills (we homeschool/unschool), more math skills, and anything else he wants to learn! Already we’ve noticed a huge leap in his language since being back home, especially in the past few months, and we really want to encourage him to speak properly, eloquently, etc. I always have a tendency to get a bit upset in general with people who “dumb” themselves down.

With the baby, there isn’t too much I need to do differently. Naturally this year is a big one for development so I do want to expose him to different music, photography, and textures early on.

What do you want to be the same?
With my oldest son, the love and desire to be a family. So many children I know can’t stand to be around their parents and my son loves nothing more than “family time”. Just on Monday night, he sat on the floor in our bedroom and sang to all of us (the boyfriend aka “real daddy” as my son calls him, the baby, and myself) about how much he loved us individually. His little brother LOVED it. Huge smiles, laughs, and squeals!

With the baby, just his enthusiasm. He is always so excited to see me when he wakes up (yay for co-sleeping) and overall is super chill.

What went exceptionally well in 2009?
Having Danny move back home into a safe, secure, well-loved environment. Giving birth to Tristan. Seeing the love between brothers who are almost eight years apart.

What could you use a do-over?
Well obviously, not have Dan live with his bio-dad heh. I also would have started homeschooling him right away instead of having more damage done by the local public school.

So to recap:
Create more of a structure for not only myself but for my oldest son. Make an effort this year to create some amazing experiences.

Visit Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!
Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

• The Adventures of Lactating Girl
  To Yell or Not to Yell
• Baby Dust Diaries
  It Is All About Empathy: Nurturing a Toddler’s Compassion Potential
• BluebirdMama
  To my babies: this year
• Breastfeeding Moms Unite!
  Mindfully Loving My Children
• Code Name: Mama
  January Carnival of Natural Parenting: Resolutions
• Craphead (aka Mommy)
  Resolutions
• Consider Eden
  Imperfect Mother
• FC Mom
  FC Mom’s Parenting Resolutions 2010
• Momopoly
  Use Love
• Musings of a Milk Maker
  My parenting resolutions
• Navelgazing
  Talkin’ ’bout My Resolutions

• Happy Mothering
  What’s in a Resolution?
• Hobo Mama
  January Carnival of Natural Parenting: Parenting resolutions
• Little Green Blog
  Natural Parenting Resolutions
• Look Left of the Pleiades
  This year, I will mostly…
• The Mahogany Way
  Parenting Resolutions
• mama2mama tips
  I Resolve to Breastfeed In Public More Often
• Megna the Destroyer
  Moving to Two Kids
• Raising My Boychick
  Invitations, not resolutions
• The Recovering Procrastinator
  No more multitasking during kid time
• Tales of a Kitchen Witch Momma
  I need to slow down, smell those roses AND the poopy diapers
• This Is Worthwhile
  Resolutely Parenting in 2010

I’ve been asked many times what plugins I use so I figure I will give the low down on the plugins I use and WHY I use them!

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
I use this on the comment page of an individual post to show 5 related posts. I do this for a few reasons, namely for old posts to get some life back into them and because their may be some valuable (to someone at least) information in an older post the reader wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Add the Twitter field to your comments
Really as the title suggests, this adds that fancy, sought after, twitter field to your comments so readers can not only do the typical name/email/url, but also add a link to their twitter page!

TweetMeme
Adds a really simple retweet button to your posts. What I like is that it displays how many times the post has been tweeted!

WP-Cufon
I use this plugin to do all my fancy fonts in the header/titles/sidebar.

Search Everything
This plugin is just awesome. It really amps up the built in WP search so it’s more accurate.

Sociable
Almost par for the course, this plugin let’s you add a variety of social networks to every post so readers can add it to stumbleupon for example.

Twitter Counter
Displays the amount of twitter followers in a basic text format so you can incorporate it into your design.

WordPress Mobile Pack
If you want to up your readership, you NEED a mobile version of your site. This optimizes your site so it can be easily viewed/used on blackberry, iphone, etc.

Twitter
Again, really basic, displays my latest tweets.

Defensio
I completely adore this plugin over Akismet. The amount of spam I used to get is cut down around 85%! It also is a lot friendlier to work with.

Do Follow
I won’t go into the million reasons why no-follow isn’t my favorite thing in the world, this nifty plugin removes that bit of code to share in the comment love!

FeedBurner Count
Displays your feedburner count in a basic text format, use it to make your design pretty.

RSS Footer
Let’s you add information to the bottom of your RSS for each post. It can be done poorly so less is more when adding to your feed!

WP-Typography
Ah how I love this plugin! Just for the proper char­ac­ter replace­ment alone!

Well I hope this list helps you out, let me know what some of your favorite plugins are in the comments!