Gotcha Baby

As I’ve said before, I love the internet. It has expanded my horizons in so many ways, broadened my knowledge and brought me friends. One of those friends is Judy Miller, author, advocate and adoptive parent. (I’m also fond of alliteration)

Judy has a new project on the horizon, Parenting Your Adopted Child: Tweens, Teens and Beyond with Judy M. Miller and the other day we sat down with some delicious Skinny Cinnamon Dulce Lattes to discuss it.

Judy has developed and will be teaching a class to help parents of adopted tweens and teens, beginning Weds, February 10th. What? You don’t live in the Indy Metro area? Good news–the class format is via email. Judy will send out assignments, you will complete them, and then there will be discussion online.

Judy created this class with hopes of reaching parents as their children enter an age wrought with emotions and new understandings about adoption. As a mom to four children (one biological, two from China, one from Guatemala), she’s living through her own children’s adolescence and observing what sort of questions and difficulty her children are having in regards to their being adopted.

Each week, Judy will email a topic for introspection, and participants will then write on that topic. Judy said each week’s assignment will prompt participants to “go deep”. The messages the parent sends to the child lay the groundwork for that child’s journey to discovering himself. The topics are ones that will most likely come up in conversation in the tween (8-12yrs) and teen years, but Judy encourages parents with children as young as four or five to consider signing up.

You can learn more about and register for Parenting Your Adopted Child by visiting Judy’s website. There is also a spot to sign up for a newsletter that I know will be great. I always LOVE the time I spend with Judy, and I know you will too!

Judy is a fellow contributor to Grown in My Heart, her personal blog is The International Mom’s Blog.

internet finds adoption, internet finds, parenting

One of my good friends from college has just jumped into the Blog World. In college, we geeked out on the newspaper together, took education classes together, and were in theatre together.

She’s now a teacher in the deep, rural south. And she’s blogging about it. I have a funny feeling she’s going to make my job look easy.

Go say hi.

http://teachinwriter.blogspot.com/

internet finds

So it’s not Labor Day yet, but I’m a sucker for alliteration. And really, I just have a few things to share:

The Foodies

I’ve mentioned them before. This month, our little supper club is featured on CookingLight.com. How fun is that?

Grown In My Heart

Have you seen the site’s new look? Do you love? We are hosting the first ever Adoption Awards–nominate your own tongue-in-cheeck (or legit) category between now and September 30th. Looking forward to some good awards being handed out!

Lovelyn’s Shirt

Have you seen this shirt? Read the message? 147 million.

Ok, I think that’s it. One more day and then it’s the first three day weekend of the school year. I wish every weekend was a three day weekend.

internet finds

Yesterday morning I managed to find some clean clothes, make myself presentable and get downtown by 8:30am to attend BlogIndiana. BlogIndiana is a local blogging/social media/tech conference with a very local focus. It’s actually a three day affair, but our vacation overlapped it this year, and it’s sort of pricey to go for all three days. I was able to snag a nicely discounted one-day pass though, and we made it home from our trip east just in time for me to attend Saturday’s Social Media Summit.

The format for the day was panels–a business panel, a foodie panel,  a women’s blogging pane, and a tech panel. There was also an “un-conference” upstairs–people could gather to network, chat or cover topics that hadn’t been addressed yet.

I don’t know what the make up of the crowd was for Thursday and Friday, but Saturday women were definitely in the minority. As the women’s blogging panel started, the room was noticeably empty. Casey, Heather, Briana , Jen and Stephanie (live via Skype,don’t you love technology?) started anyway, and it was a very interesting conversation.

Joanna of Keeping Feet did an excellent job of summarizing what she took away from the afternoon, and I had a very similar experience.

Women use technology and social media to connect. To find that person online who is either at the same point you are, has been there, or is going there. To read stories that, to quote Ray Romano, make you,”laugh because it’s funny, and cry because it’s true.”

When that panel was over, there was a short break. At that time, most of the women left the room, and most of the men came downstairs from the meeting rooms upstairs.

The women found a spot in the lobby, and eight of us continued the conversation from the panel–talking a little bit about blogging platforms, domain names, and a little bit about maintaining privacy, where lines are drawn, and then some. Clearly we were all techy enough to want to come to BlogIndiana, but not interested enough to sit through a formal panel on tech.

I think the men and women (or at least the social/personal bloggers) were at BlogIndiana for different reasons. To put it in Wordpress blogging terms:  Some people (not me) want to create plugins. Other people (me) just want to use them. Which is fine by me, because the world needs both.

(And? I got to see some great bloggers I’ve met before, and meet new ones, which, really, was one of the reasons why I wanted to go in the first place….)

Uncategorized, internet finds, life as I know it

I have succumbed to the Twitter. I admit it. I resisted at first. It took me awhile to get the hang of it, and there are still things I don’t “get”.

But for easy, quick, feed-the-ADD, jump around sort of browsing and quick chats? Twitter’s where it’s at. (shocking! I know….I admit it, I’ve been living under a rock all these months)

Follow me, @gotchababy and/or @growninmyheart and join the fun!

internet finds