I love Macy’s.  They have the BEST baby gifts ever.  If you’re looking for a layette, you can’t beat First Impressions.   Six years ago, I found out I was pregnant with my first son.  Once announced, people kept telling me I had to register for a layette set.  I had absolutely NO IDEA what that meant.  Even though I was married and 27, I was one of the first to get pregnant out of all my friends, so layette’s weren’t exactly something we talked about regularly.

Well then the months passed and I got to do the baby registry thing and I was happily zapping away.  THAT was when I learned what a layette was.

According to First Impressions,  a layette is made up of all the soft pieces your newborn needs for his or her fist days and weeks.  These include: (more…)

The game of football is any of several similar team sports, of similar origins which involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball with the foot in an attempt to score a goal. The most popular of these sports worldwide is association football, more commonly known as just “football” or “soccer”. -Wikipedia

I honestly never put much thought into it.  I’m a mom, henceforth I will be a soccer mom.  I live in South Carolina, just across the NC boarder where the city of Charlotte resides.  Charlotte holds just about every sporting activity event there and being a fan of the NFL, my two young sons (ages five and two) are already talking about growing up to be “football players”. Yes, I know.  That’s good old American Football you’re looking at above.  Those are my two boys.  They ooze cute.  There’s no denying that.  My first son is named Jacob and his name was inspired by a Quarterback for the Carolina Panthers who has recently left the team, and please don’t pick on him, he took us to the Super Bowl and I love that name.  (more…)



Call me old, call me young.  Call me whatever you want- I’ll answer to just about anything (depending who’s reading this and exactly what it is you’re calling me), but I remember 1994 and I remember it well.  I remember my junior prom and how short my dress was, I remember it was the year I met my first husband (we’re still friends) and I remember when the Sony Playstation first came out.

Back then, it was the first console to use CD-ROM instead of a cartridge to store its games.  Around that same time Sony’s competitor came out but the games for the PlayStation outranked it because each disc could hold 10 times the data that the competitions cartridge could hold.

I’ve since remarried and I was talking to my husband about all the different games we used to play and I swear he was going through a dream sequence when he started talking about Final Fantasy VII.  To quote -

“Games like Finalal Fantasy VII were the first to push the new technology.  That game was amazing.  It spanned four discs and consumed so much of my imagination and time that I didn’t let a little thing like my Electro Dynamic Physics college class get in the way.  FFVII had cinematic cut scenes and half the time you felt like you were playing inside a movie.  The game took me something like 60 hours to get through and was worth every minute.  The PSX made this game possible and I’ll always be thankful.  My physics teacher has a different opinion, but he obviously didn’t have a PSX…” (more…)

They did it.  I can’t believe they did it.  Somebody actually made me a convert.  Bravo, I say.  Bravo.

I’m a writer.  Everything in my world is words.  I’d rather be writing than doing just about anything else.  I blog, I text, I’m on every social networking site out there.  I’m constantly communicating.  The only thing I was stubborn about was the method in which I communicate.

When it comes to writing, I have to have a laptop.  I can function on a desktop but to really express myself properly, I like to sit on my comfy couch with my legs crossed happily typing away on my laptop.  When it comes to texting and social networking on the go, I’ve always been old school.  Everyone is walking around with their fancy touch phones and talking about “Apps” and there I was, relentlessly holding fast against this revolutionary change.

My problem was this – I have to have a QWERTY keyboard.  I need to feel like I’m on an actual computer to text someone.  I’ve tried out all my friends different phones and either they had a QWERTY attached and the buttons were too small, or I just couldn’t figure out how to operate it and felt uncomfortable and awkward.

Then I entered the Sony Ericsson/Sony Style X10 Blogger Contest, hoping to get a shot at the Grand Prize trip to Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup Soccer game.  I honestly never thought I had a chance to even come CLOSE to winning but I was wrong!  I’m in the finals!

…let’s all pause while I once again squeal and jump for joy… (more…)

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been infatuated with Africa.  I credit my father with this, because he made it clear that his favorite animal is the lion, henceforth making the lion my favorite animal.  The picture above was made by my brother Mark, a graphic designer, to honor my father.  My maiden name is Beechinor and my daddy has a PhD in psychology, so all our friends call him “Dr. B.”

My cat Apollo is an orange tabby cat.  My very first cat so many years ago, Mr. Poopers (yes, that was really his name and no, I wasn’t five, I was seventeen) was also an orange tabby.  I’ve always been drawn to tabby’s because they remind me of lions.

Every year growing up I got my father something lion related.  He never once told me that I was going overboard with the lion gifts and to this day his office is filled with every single thing I got him ranging from calendars to lion figurines.  I think I even bought him lion apparel which he proudly wore.

When I was in my early twenties, I landed a job as a ticket counter agent for a major airline.  I couldn’t have been happier.  My goal was to work my way around the world.  I started with the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii – YAY!) and then traveled throughout Mexico and all the way to the rainforests in South America.

My thought was I’d head over to Europe and work my way through all the major cities heading south, making my grand finale my coveted Africa.  I felt I had to save it for last because to me, getting to Africa is the equivalent of breaking through the yellow tape, crossing the finish line and making my dream a reality. (more…)