Little TIP here: the contests at the bottom of the list are newer, and have fewer entries. Better chance of winning!

Another little tip: if you mix sweetened shredded coconut with melted chocolate chips, so that the shredded coconut is fully coated (but still fluffable, not adrift in a sea of chocolate), and then you add butterscotch chips and fluff it up a little, and then you put it in the freezer—well, let’s just say you will eat more than you intended to eat.

Also: have you ordered from The Something Store? If so, would you email me (swistle at gmail dot com) and tell me what you got? I’m really trying not to place an order for what would surely be a disappointment (size 4 jeans! a dog toy! a book about physics!).

Good morning! and welcome to the Group Effort Pay it Forward! In case you have been SKIMMING, here is what’s happening:

1) A whole bunch of us are starting fresh new Pay it Forward contests, all together, all at the same time. Anyone may join in. (Email the URL of your contest to swistle at gmail dot com so I can add you to the list.)

2) All the contests will end Friday July 4th. Keep checking this post for more contests: I’ll keep posting them here as more start up.

3) Each winner will get a gift in the mail. Each winner will then continue on the grand tradition, holding his or her own Pay it Forward contest. Typically such a contest starts with a photo of the received loot, so we can all snoop nosily.

I will link below to all the contests, adding more as more start. Please feel free to click right on down the list, entering every single one: that is in fact what we have in mind here. Please feel free to enter even if you are also throwing a contest: this has the potential to create fun little loops.

If you win more than one contest, you can throw a single Pay it Forward contest of your own, choosing one winner for each time you won. OR, you can accept one winning and ask the other bloggers to choose a new winner.

A few people wanted to enter the contest, even though they don’t have blogs. For those, I will draw additional winners from my own Pay it Forward contest. The blogless participants are:

1) Dynamita, who lives in LONDON, and that immediately makes me wonder about COOL LONDON STUFF.

2) My good brick-and-mortar friend Lee.

3) Andrea, who lives in AUSTRALIA, and that immediately makes me wonder about COOL AUSTRALIAN STUFF.

4) Libby, who once thought I was British and therefore was immediately on my good side.

And now here is a list of blogs running Pay it Forward contests (I’ll keep adding to it as people keep emailing me) (hint: the ones toward the bottom of the list have been up for less time, and therefore have fewer entries and a greater chance of winning):

Parking at Home
Mimi All Me
My Little Monkey
and the duck said…
The New Girl
Cookiemonks
All Dressed Up
Pantsfreesia
Twists and Turns
Incubation Nation
Our House
Everyday Life
Andrea Unplugged
Alice’s Wonderland
Messing With Texas
Cerebral Palsy Baby
Sublime Bedlam
Smiling Mama
Splendid Sustenance
The Creamery
Move Along – There’s Nothing to See Here
It’s Not About That Anyway
Just a Bunch of Silliness, Really
3 Giraffes
Life of a Daycare Girl
Eleanor Q.
Midwest Mom
As Many as We’re Given
Keeping Up With the Laughlins…
Emblita’s External Monologue
Honest and Truly!
Everyday Bailey
Totally Serial
It’s My Life
Get Up and Play
Clueless but Hopeful Mama
Sunday School Rebel
Tina Hearts Adam
Emily is Enceinte
Yes, I Would Really Like to be Thin
Amelia Sprout
A Little Left of Lost
Random Rantings
Mommy Daisy
Bethtastic
Under Construction
The True Adventures of Axel and Outlaw
aibiffity
Bethiclaus
Blondie Speaks
Houndrat
This? Is Not the Life I Ordered!
No Whey, Mama
Life in the Fast Lane
stickyfeathers
A is for Beautiful
Learning to Love Life in a Tiny Town…
Bebellyboo
Swistle: Baby Names
The Princess of Quite a Lot
Jennifer’s Mommyblog
Today is a Different Day
My Life
Thank You For Not Being Perky

Enter, enter! And don’t forget to enter mine as well, by leaving a comment on this post. You can say anything: “Me, me!” “I hereby enter,” “ENTERING,” “You are a goddess to me,” whatevs. If you need help coming up with something, you can tell me if you know how to swim. Okay, go!

Now don’t be NERVOUS about the Group Effort Pay it Forward! This will be easy and fun, you will see! And don’t be worried that you will throw a contest and no one will show up: I will be linking to all the contests here, and I suspect that large masses of people will be clicking right down through the list, entering one contest after another; at least, that’s the PLAN.

Here is what you will do if you want to participate and you have a blog:

1) You will begin to write a post. You will write that you are doing a Group Effort Pay it Forward contest. You will say what that is. You can copy and paste my description, or you can write something that’s shorter and makes better sense. Up to you.

2) You will spell out the rules: you will mention that the contest ends on Friday July 4th. You will say that the way to enter is to leave a comment. If you feel like it, you will come up with a thing people can say in their comments (“Do you prefer Coke or Pepsi?” “What do you think is my most charming quality?” “Who’s cuter, Hugh Grant or John Cusack?”).

3) You will post the post, either Monday June 30th or Tuesday July 1st.

4) You will email me at swistle at gmail dot com, and you will send me the URL of your contest post so I can include it in the list.

(If you want to participate but DON’T have a blog: Email me at swistle at gmail dot com and tell me you want me to draw you a random winner from MY Pay it Forward drawing. And I will say yes.)

And then you are done with the first leg! See? That was not so scary! And now you have plenty of time to work on the second leg. The second leg is even less scary, because there are no deadlines. But the second leg has more words, because it has more interesting things to discuss. People with blogs, start with step 1; people without blogs, start with step 3:

1) Sometime after the contest ends (maybe within minutes, maybe not until you return from vacation), you will assess your comment section. Open a random number generator. Tell it to generate 1 random integer, with a value between 1 and the number of comments you have that came in before the deadline, and format it in 1 column. Click “get number.” That’s the number of your winner.

2) Write a new post. Announce the winner. Say that their prize will be going out soon. Make a little joke about how long it will probably end up taking you. If the winner left an email address, email the winner and ask for his/her mailing info. Otherwise, in your post instruct the winner to email you with his or her mailing info. Mention your email address.

3) Decide what to send as the prize. The prize can be anything. Anything! It can be something you made, or something you bought. It can be an assortment of random stuff, or it can be things on a theme. It can be something from your regift shelf. Whatever is most fun to you.

4) Ship it. I’m only familiar with U.S. shipping, but if you’re in the U.S. and you’re mailing something heavy but small, flat rate is a great option. You can also consider ordering something from a site that will ship it for you for free: if you have Amazon Prime, for example. If your winner is from a different country than yours, talk with them ahead of time about what they might have to pay customs on, or what things shouldn’t be shipped.

There! It is a lot of words, but that is only because I am so wordy! The steps themselves are easy: (1) say what you’re doing, (2) pick a winner, and (3) mail them something fun!

Do you notice anything…different about me? Over there, under the ad. There’s an email subscription thingie. I got it because Sundry’s aunt is having some trouble with her email notification service, and I told her in a know-it-all tone of voice that Blogger didn’t even HAVE such things. Then I was like, “Maybe I’d better check my facts? I’m just saying.” So I did, and I found a way it COULD be done, so then I had to eat my words. And also: had to add an email service thing.

Let’s consider it to be in Test Mode for the time being. This is because whenever I publish a post, I then go back and edit a typo, and then I republish. Then I notice an awkward phrase, and I go back and fix it, and then I republish. And then I see another typo, and so I fix it and republish. And if this is going to lead to everyone receiving four, no five, no SIX emails saying I have the SAME new post, then that is not going to work out for any of us.

Plus, it looks like it might send out updates at a specific time each day, rather than right after the post is posted, and what good is THAT? So I don’t know. I may want to take this one down and put up a new one, and then you’d have to resubscribe, and really it might not be worth the hassle. Why not wait and see if it works out first, is what I would do.

I went to Target yesterday with Rob and William and Henry because—get this—Rob and William ASKED TO GO. My genes are presenting! So while my mom had playtime with the twins, I took the other three kids to the store.

We got this little guy. He’s a trash can, and he was 75% off. I love his little front claws, and his satisfied “just ate some yummy trash” expression. I’m thinking he would make a good compost bin. Right now we’re using big yogurt containers, which are ugly.

I bought ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY POUNDS of cat litter. They had 40-pound bins for $10, and normally the 28-pound bins are $10. You cannot believe how heavy the cart was to push around with these things in there.

I let Rob and William each choose a notebook, and together they chose a package of pens. I’m hoping this will reduce the whining they do when I make them write in their journals each day during summer vacation.

This Dial Mandarin Grapefruit handsoap was on sale for $1. I hope I like it as much as the Softsoap Grapefruit handsoap I bought on sale last week, which I LOVE.

I bought a few more reusable Target bags, which I love so much I want to run off to Vegas with them. They fold up into cute little squares that snap closed, but they expand into flat-bottomed, comfy-handled fabric bags with several times the capacity of a usual plastic Target shopping bag. And they have a darling decoration of birdies and trees on them! And they’re only $1.50 each! Love.

I don’t even know what I’m going to do with these fabric-covered bins. I just knew as soon as I saw them that they were going home with me. They were 75% off, so they were $3.24 each (down from $13 each).

Stack of six aqua plastic cups for a grand total of 48 cents. I can’t remember if that was 50% off or 75% off—they weren’t expensive cups to begin with. We only have two big plastic cups, and Paul is always using one when he comes home from work, putting it in the sink, and then using the other one at dinner, which means I either have to wash a cup or use a small cup. NO MORE.

I thought these earrings were pretty. And you know, every time I see purple stuff now I think of Jess Loolu and wonder whether she’d consider it real purple or not. I couldn’t get a good picture of these, but they have eggplant-colored enamel sunk down into the valleys of a gold design. They were 75% off: $1.74 down from $6.99.

Let’s talk more about our Pay It Forward Contest, Group Effort Edition! I wanted to give all of you HUGE KISSES when I saw how many people were joining in! Suddenly it feels like we haven’t had enough FUN for awhile, and now we ARE going to have fun!

Or maybe the feeling is that I haven’t had enough BROWNIES for awhile (
Anyway! Several good issues have been raised!

Issue the First: Zesty Jenny wanted to know if having the contests next week means we need to have a prize ready by then. No indeedy, and in fact although you MAY have a prize ready ahead of time, I prefer to go shopping after I know who won. More fun! Also, if you show the prize at the beginning of the contest, it kills some of the thrill: for me, part of the fun of winning Jess Loolu‘s contest was wondering what surprise might be arriving in the mail.

Issue the Second: The New Girl wanted to know what the protocol is for package contents—price range, theme, etc. I think what’s so fun about this kind of contest is that the prize is totally up to you. Some people enjoy doing a theme. Some people do one single item. Some people do a bunch of random little things. I myself am in the “things I found at Target while thinking of the winner” group. If you’d like to see two sample prizes, you can go over to Melessa, who won my last contest: she posted a picture of the random-stuff prize I sent her, and also a picture of the theme prize she was offering.

As for price range, I think it’s “whatever is still fun.” If you start getting stressed about the cost, that = not fun. I think a prize can be something you go out and buy, or it can be half a batch of cookies, a couple of used paperbacks, and a bottle of moisturizer that wasn’t right for you. (In fact, I think sometime later we should do a “Redistributing Clutter” Pay it Forward, where we all get rid of some of the stuff in our houses that we don’t want but it’s too good/expensive to throw away.)

Issue the Third: Nowheymama reminded me that next week contains the July 4th weekend, and a lot of people might be going out of town before the contest is over. I think that’s still going to be okay: as long as we start the contests early in the week (June 30th or July 1st), and have them all end on the same day (July 4th itself), it’s fine if we’re not there in person for the end of the contest. When we return from vacation we can pick winners and shop for prizes—no hurry.

In a related issue, Janice asked about being out of town during the two START dates. See if your blog platform (“blog platform”? Is that really the term I need here?) lets you submit posts for delayed posting. Mine lets you set the date/time in the future, and then the post won’t post until that date/time. You can get a Pay it Forward Contest Announcement all set to go before you leave and set it to post on Monday.

Issue the Fourth: Misty asked if I’d handle the scheduling, and I was all like, “YES I will boss that train!”—but then I realized we’re probably in different time zones and different countries and so I can’t over-boss here. What I suggest is that all the contests begin on either Monday June 30th or Tuesday July 1st, and end on Friday, July 4th, and I’m talking about U.S. dates. Specific end-TIME is whatever you want. I’m planning to go with noon Pacific Time.

Issue the Fifth: Tina is wondering about a random number generator. I use Random.org. Actually, NOW I use a program my cool computer-geek brother wrote for me, but it is customized for me and so the rest of you sadsacks without cool computer-geek brothers will just have to cope with Random.org. Which is a nice random number generator, too, just not as nice as mine.

Issue the Sixth: In fact, Tina and Barb bring up a good point in general, which is that not everyone is familiar with Pay it Forward contests and maybe there could be a quick overview rather than the assumption that everyone knows what I’m talking about, especially considering that I myself did not know what I was talking about until Jess Loolu’s contest.

So! Pay it Forward contests! They have kind of a dumb name, but it is what they are called and we are too late to vote on it. The way they work is that a blogger says he or she is having a Pay it Forward contest, and a bunch of people enter by commenting on that post (I like to give a lightweight optional question to answer; last time I asked if your skin was dry, oily, or combination). The blogger uses a random number generator (or scraps of paper in a hat) to select a random commenter, and sends that commenter a surprise box (contents completely up to the blogger) in the mail. The recipient of the surprise box must then post a Pay it Forward contest on his or her OWN blog, and choose a random commenter to win it, and send a surprise box to that commenter. Then THAT winner….and so on.

So! Did I cover everything? If you’re in on this, get your post ready for Monday or Tuesday of next week. Next week, when you’ve posted it, email me (swistle at gmail dot com) the URL and I’ll put it in a list of all the Group Effort Pay it Forward contests, which I’ll post on Monday or Tuesday with my own Pay it Forward contest—adding to it as more contests are emailed to me.

If you don’t have a blog but you want to be in on it, email me (swistle at gmail dot com) and I’ll add you to my own contest and choose you a winner from my commenters.

I am looking for summer project. No, no! Don’t give me any! Heavens! No, what I mean is that I’m looking at my existing project list and assigning a few of the projects to this summer: I need things to do when the children are doing THEIR summer projects, to give a feeling of solidarity.

Anyway, my summer projects so far are pretty grim and involve things like “clutter removal” and “labeling photos,” and I need something more fun to do. First MzEll and I were fondly remembering the Pay It Forward contest, and then I read something on the same topic over at Alice’s, and so I thought maybe we could do more of that.

In fact, when I say “we” I mean WE. As in, WE. Wouldn’t it be fun to start a WHOLE BUNCH of Pay It Forward threads all at the same time? Like a Pay It Forward BOMB! It’s hard to get involved in one, normally, because you have to WIN one. But not if you START one.

So anyway! I’m going to do one. And if you want to do one, too, I’ll link to yours over here. We’ll have a whole LIST of Pay It Forward Contests going on at the same time for people to enter! They can just click down the list, entering one after another! And we’ll just go ahead and make it totally allowed for all the contest-givers to blatantly enter each other’s contests, so maybe we’ll get a neat looping effects going! And meanwhile there will be the fun of shopping for the Pay It Forward packages, and the fun of gifts arriving in the mail! I think this could be just the thing!

Summer is not the BEST time to do this, since it rules out mailing melty things like chocolate—but I think this problem is MORE than compensated for by the benefits of presents arriving when it is about as far away from the Winter Gifty Holidays as it is possible to get.

Do you have to have a blog to win, or to throw a contest? No sirree! I have workarounds for both of those issues, so worry not! If you want to throw a contest but don’t have a blog, I can pick an additional random number when I’m doing the drawing for my contest, and that can be your winner. If you win a contest and don’t have a blog, the contest-running person can choose a second number from their contest to be the person you send a gift to, and then that second person would carry it from there. Well, my explanation does not please me with its clarity, but trust me that it would work!

Let me know if you want to participate, and we’ll coordinate contest timetables! I’m thinking…next week? We could post all the contests early in the week to give plenty of time for everyone to find them and enter them, and have all the winners later in the week. You can leave a comment saying you want in on it, or you can email me (swistle at gmail dot com).

Have you watched the show The Wire? One of my brother’s friends says it’s “the greatest work of art ever made”. He adds: “I am not even kidding.” But I’m one episode into it, and mostly it seems to be about swearing. If you’ve watched it, tell me: how long did it take for you to know if you liked it or not?

You see how on the main page of Milk & Cookies each post cuts off partway through, and you have to click to read more? My mom wants that on her Blogger blog but can’t find a way to do it. I poked around, but I don’t even know what to call that “click to see all of it” thing, except in the context of feed readers where it’s called a partial feed, and that’s not what she wants. She wants a full-feed, but her posts are really long so she wants only the first part of each one to show on her main page, rather than having her main page be a million miles long.

When I was little, my parents severely limited our TV/movie watching. This turned us into clueless little weirdos, in my opinion. Social interaction among children is like social interaction among adults: adults talk about TV shows and movies they’ve watched, and so do children. This doesn’t mean I’m going to force-feed the kids every violent/inappropriate show their peers are allowed to watch, but it does mean I want them to have general cultural literacy in the things their peers know about. But! How do I know what their peers know about? I don’t! And so I am asking you: what do boys in the age 7-10 range watch? Last I checked, it was The Smurfs. So I need an update, stat!

We don’t do “friend parties” in our family. We invite my parents over for presents and cake, but that’s it. We tried a friend party when Rob turned 5, and it was so unpleasant I don’t know if we’ll ever do it again. MAYBE when the kids turn 10 or some other special birthday. Maybe.

Occasionally Rob or William will get invited to a classmate’s party. They go. They have a nice time. Everyone knows that “not everyone gets invited to every party,” so I don’t worry that we don’t reciprocate by inviting that child to a birthday party.

But ONE family invites William every single year. The birthday boy is someone William went to preschool and kindergarten with, and we see the family every year at the pool for swimming lessons. This is the situation that’s starting to make me feel uncomfortable. Year after year, William goes to this other child’s party, but we never invite that child to a party of William’s.

We don’t know the parents well enough for them to know we don’t have friend parties, and it’s awkward to drop it into the kind of small-talk conversations we have with them. One thing I’ve considered doing is asking the mom for some advice about friend parties, and then explaining by saying we’ve never done one. That would ease my mind a little: I don’t want her to think we have any reason for not inviting her son.

In the meantime, what we’ve done is send a good present. I spend about half again what I would usually spend.

I’ve wondered, though, if this year we ought to decline the invitation? I don’t know if they might be asking us because they feel obligated (their son always asks William at the pool if he can come to the party), and if they’d be relieved if we declined? Or if declining would be like saying, “Not only don’t we invite your son, we also don’t let our son go to your son’s party.” Plus, the one time we DID throw a friend party, I was wringing my hands over the possibility that people wouldn’t want to come.

The other child’s birthday is coming up, so I’m facing the usual decision.

Here are some of my recent favorite posts:

Bub & Pie writes about how “living life to its fullest” doesn’t have to mean physical risk-taking.

Bossy gave me a little panic attack with these two pictures: first this one and then this one.

Jonniker is talking about this interesting phenomenon: when you like/love someone, and THEY like/love someone YOU CAN’T STAND.

Firegirl is discussing Unusual Crushes.

Kirida has me going around pointing to things and saying “Awesome. Not awesome. Awesome. Awesome. NOT awesome. Try a little harder, maybe someday you’ll be awesome.”

Screamy Thing and her mom “being meerkats” totally made my day.

And if you’re feeling in an advice/input/feedback-giving mood, you can head over to Ms. Sassy Pants and talk to her ex-SIL, who is guest-posting about fertility issues. She’s ASKING for feedback, so you don’t have to worry that you’re giving unwelcome commentary.

We have a spider that lives between the screen and the glass of the window over our kitchen sink, and I tolerate her (even though I am a huge sissy re spiders) because she is a smallish, classic, Charlotte-shaped spider: almost more like a drawing of a spider than an actual, hairy-legged, fast-moving spider. She has graceful little legs, and she just hangs out in the corner there, industriously wrapping up little bugs and putting them in her pantry for later. I watch her as I’m doing the dishes.

The other day there was a fly in the kitchen, and it landed on the screen, so I opened the screen a little and quickly closed the window, so the fly could eventually bumble its way out. It flew near the spider, and that spider moved so fast and so alarmingly, I actually opened the window and saved the fly. I saved the gross, probably diseased fly, who given half a chance would litter the house with maggots. But the way that spider moved was so horrifying, and so evocative of my reptilian-brain feelings about spiders, that I acted fast and without thinking it through. I felt so sorry for that fly, seeing that same-size-as-herself spider coming at her like that. So if you notice a slight increase in the fly population of the planet, I’m afraid I’m to blame.