Raising Awareness of PPHN

When my son was born, he suffered from a rare but life-threatening disease called Persistent Pulmonary Hypertension of the Newborn (PPHN). He was three days old before it looked like he was going to pull through, and he was in the hospital for almost two and half weeks before I was able to bring him home.

During his time in hospital, it was very frustrating for me to try and explain what was wrong with him to other people, because I didn't understand it very well myself, and there was so little in the way of useful information available on the Internet, which really surprised me. No one had heard of PPHN and they didn't really understand how sick my son really was.

I finally decided that I needed to put some resources together to help other parents coping with the same illness, so I wrote an article and recently put together a Squidoo lens where others can also add resources that they know of. Hopefully, these sources will make it that tiny bit easier for parents with newborns suffering from PPHN to understand what is happening to their babies.

Fighting the February Blahs...

Ugh... it's February, pretty much my least favourite month. You'd think that, it being the shortest and all, it wouldn't be so bad, but even though it's short it just seems so long. Maybe it's because I live in a part of the world where winter tends to be long, cold and snowy -- by the time February rolls around, I've been blanketed in snow and sub-zero weather for over three months, and I know there's still another month to go before the thaw in March! :-(

And to top it all off, it is cold and flu season and the whole family is currently ill. Makes it hard to concentrate on getting any real work done when all your energy is focused on getting everyone better and trying to get some rest yourself.

So, that's my excuse for why there haven't been any new things added to the stores recently, aside from some new chipmunk and squirrel keychains that I added to the Zazzle store a couple of weeks ago. Oh, and I did publish a few more items on AC -- two poems (Behind This Mask and Words) and an article on How to Make Your Own Baby Food.

Hopefully everyone will be healthy again soon and I can start working on some new design ideas for the CP store!

Published at last!

Woo-hoo! Associated Content finally published my articles! It took a week, but they're up! I'm all excited to have discovered this online writing outlet, and hope to be a regular contributor to their site. Check out the new articles:

Confessions of a Wanna-Be Stay-At-Home-Mother
How to Apply for Canadian Federal Government Jobs

If you get a chance, leave me some feedback at the bottom of the articles and let me know what you think!

New products in Zazzle store

Well, finally got around to adding some shoe designs to the Zazzle store. I'm quite happy with the way they turned out... they're really kind of cool. Will definitely be adding some more in the near future. Also in the works are some new keychains and stickers for the Zazzle store, and a new section for the CP store. Plus, I've noticed a few broken images in the CP site, so have to fix those up, too. Hopefully all of that will get done this week.

Also hoping that my AC articles will get published in the next day or two. On this week's to do list is another article to write for AC, and some new items for the Etsy store, as well. It's going to be a busy week!

On a side note, I think I may be getting addicted to Facebook. I may have to institute some sort of system whereby I have to work for an hour, or get a particular thing done, and then I can spend 10 minutes playing on facebook, otherwise I'm just going to waste way too much time!

So apparently I'm a Twitter twit...

Well, I signed up with Twitter last night. I've seen it mentioned a lot lately, so I thought I'd go check it out and see what all the fuss what about. I have now decided that I can't figure out what all the fuss was about at all...it all seems so very confusing to me. I guess I'm just a completely twit when it comes to Twitter! Does anyone else use this site? How the heck do you find anything over there? In order to get to the general search, I have to go to the help files, 'cause there's no link in the main part. Plus, I can't upload a picture at all for some reason... keeps telling me the image is too big, but it's only 4K and you get up to 700K!

Oh well...maybe it will get easier if I keep at it. (shrug)

Mommy needs a nap!

So, I've been trying to find the time to put some new stuff up on my Zazzle site. I really want to put up some shoe designs -- they've got different styles of Keds that I can use, but I just can't seem to get around to doing it. I'm motoring through my January To Do List (a good thing, seeing as January is almost over!), but there's still a couple of things on there that I haven't got done. The shoes for one, and cleaning up and organizing the home office. That last one always seems to generate the least amount of motivation, no matter how much the clutter is driving me nuts.

And so I procrastinate by updating the blog, and lurking around assorted online forums. ;-)

I did, however get a new design up in the Cafepress store. This one is inspired by my husband and son... when the baby won't nap, I tend to get cranky and my husband will look at the baby and say "Uh-oh...Mommy needs a nap!" I figured it would make a good t-shirt.

So they said I needed a blog...

Well, I guess it's timed I joined the Information Age in earnest and started up a blog.

So now what??? LOL!

Well, this is a blog for my online business, so I guess that's where to start. I have a couple of online stores where I sell all sorts of gift items. You can access all my storefronts through my recently redesigned main web site. I've just added tons of new designs to my Cafepress shop, where I'm currently featuring squirrel stuff (yest, your heard me -- SQUIRRELS!!!). My CP shop has stuff like t-shirts, mugs, calendars, stickers, pins, magnets and children's clothing. Over on my Etsy shop you'll find all my handmade stuff -- mostly jewelry (I use a lot of Swarovski crystal in my pieces, mostly because I just love sparkly stuff), but also some fabric stuff and papercrafting. I've also recently added a brand-new store on Zazzle (but don't get too excited about that one yet -- I haven't had enough time to add much to it, but it's on my "to do" list).

Anyhow, the plan is to try really hard to keep this blog updated, in between creating new designs for the shops and looking after my baby. So how's that for a New Year's resolution?