Remember the bag I posted a picture of last week?



You can win it! I'm also donating a personalized minkee blankie that you can win as well.



But really, that's not even the best part about this giveaway. Let me give you a little back story. My good friend Ellyn has two beautiful baby boys that she is celebrating this month with a rockin' giveaway. Sweet baby Eli was born still and his second birthday is the 28th, so we are celebrating the little man in style.

And Eli's little brother Seth is the other guest of honor. See, Seth had a rough start in life, and he lost his hearing as a result of some strong antibiotics he was on in the NICU. He needs cochlear implants so he can hear some day. Which brings me to the BIG prize in this giveaway: the Profound Pictures Prize Package! By making a donation of just $10, you will be entered to win your choice of a Canon Rebel XS or a Nikon D40! Plus tons of great accessories like a camera strap, camera bag and your own copy of Photoshop Elements. Your donations will go towards two amazing charities: Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep and Rhyan's Hope.

There are lots of other great prizes too, including the items I donated, which you can be entered to win for FREE simply by promoting the contest on your blog. So get over to Profoundly Seth and enter!

Wow! I was blown away by the number of comments I received on my giveaway post! Thank you all for the wonderful compliments. Hubby picked a number for me, and the winner is #213, Megret. Congrats, mama! I'll be emailing you to get your choices for your blankie.

Everyone else, check out the winners list to see if you were lucky!

In my short time in the blog world I've entered many giveaways, and even won one. I'm always so in awe of the great prizes that blogs give away every day and have been thinking about paying it forward for awhile now. Well, the time has come! If you haven't heard of the Bloggy Giveaways, click on over to this post. There are literally hundreds of bloggers giving things away, and you can enter every single one!

I wouldn't feel right entering without giving something away myself, so the prize I'm offering is a custom monogrammed minkee lovey blanket like this one. The winner will get to choose colors and the name to be embroidered. Many of you know that I sell my things but I don't talk a lot about it because that's not what this blog is about (and because I don't have anything instock!). But I've been doing it for close to three years now and I love giving things away every now and then, just because. It makes me feel good knowing that I may have brightened someone's day.

So! What do you have to do to enter? Easy peasy. Leave me a comment on this post. That's it! Any type of comment! It can be long or short, funny or serious. Just say anything you want and you will be entered. The post will be open for comments all week and I will draw a winner November 3rd. I'll then contact the winner to get the details for your prize. Make sure you comment on THIS post though, comments on other posts won't be included!

Please make sure you leave me a way to contact you. If your blog isn't listed in your profile, you need to leave me an email address! There are a couple comments with no blog or email address so unfortunately those will have to be disqualified!

I'm following the lead of VDog and showing you my desktop for the desktop meme. I'm actually quite proud of mine (and yes, slightly incredibly anal retentive about it). When I got my 24" iMac (aka my Baby), I spent quite awhile deciding which programs to use and which to have in my dock, and replacing all the system icons with cuter, more hip icons.

And yes, you too can have a kickin' desktop! These are the two programs I use to change my system icons and organize all the icons I've collected. They're both free for a limited time, although I paid for them because they rock that much. Oh, and you have to have a Mac to use them. Because anything else is just not cool enough. ;)

• CandyBar2 - Trick out your Trashcan. Decorate your Drives. Mix up Mail.
  CandyBar 2 lets you change the Mac OS X icons you usually can't!
• Pixadex - Pixadex is to icons, what Apple's iPhoto is to images. Brought to you by Panic and the Iconfactory, the team who created CandyBar, Pixadex lets you import, organize and search huge numbers of icons quickly and easily. Pixadex lets you store all of your icons in a single place, organized into collections that you create.

And here's a list of places I get wallpapers and icons from. Sharing the love.

• Pixel Girl Presents - snag the slickest Mac OS X, XP and Icontainer iconsets and desktop images as well as offering tutorials, articles and links.
• The Iconfactory - For all your icon urges
• Deviant Art OS Icons
• Deviant Art Wallpapers

My wallpaper actually changes every five minutes because I love my collection and can never decide which to use. So I took two caps, just for fun. These are actually on different days and I have changed the icons since the first one was taken, hence the different docks. My screen resolution is 1920x1200. Fabulous.





And just so I can be a total geek, the apps in my doc are, from left to right: Finder, Email (yes, that's Hedwig the owl!), iTunes, System Preferences, my camera uploader, Adium (instant messenger), Firefox, Photoshop CS3, jUploadr (Flickr upload client), Chicken of the VNC (to connect to my old computer), Safari, Preview. And the green monster on the far right is my trash can. :)

And here is my Dashboard. Flickr upload client, pictures from my stream, Threadless, Gmail widget, Bloglines notifier, Harmonic, and your standard weather and time widgets.

I have to take a minute to send out a quick plug. Last week I participated in the Cyber Baby Shower hosted by 5 Minutes for Mom, and I won a prize! I was lucky enough to snag an adorable tee from Blessed Baby. They offer stylish and sophisticated clothing and accessories that also spread the word of God. I chose the Blessed Baby toddler tee, which features an uplifting scripture on the back.

Here are a couple pictures of Beckett modeling his new duds. Thanks again to Blessed Baby for such a cool prize!

DH took both boys in the car to get dinner, and before that they were at the park. I have had almost two solid hours of wonderful silence and it has been heaven. I used the time to bake up a butternut squash I've had sitting on the counter for awhile now (did you know you can keep those babies around for close to four months and they don't go bad?) and pureed it up for Beckett.

That batter bowl is filled with almost eight cups of squash. It loaded up four ice cube trays of 14 cubes each. The cubes are about an ounce each, so I made approximately 56 ounces. When you figure that jars of Gerber squash are 2.5 ounces and $0.59 each, that's $0.23 per ounce. I bought the squash for two bucks -- about 3.6 cents per ounce. Sa-weeeeet. It smelled a lot better too. Now my whole house smells like Autumn.

It was actually fun for me to do this time, nothing at all like the horrors of peaches. I want to try some pumpkin next. If only he was older, I could add some cinnamon. Yum. Oh, and I guess it would help if he'd actually eat the food. We're working on that again tomorrow.

Sarah tagged me to tell her what I think should be in the running for "Grosser than Gross." You sure you want to know, Sarah? I think I had one of my grossest moments today, actually. Clearing dishes off the counter and into the dishwasher, and I opened a sippy cup to rinse. Oh, look! It has milk in it from four days ago! It had morphed into a solid moldy milk patty, and let me tell you internet, this is not something you want to experience. It was the worst, most overwhelmingly putrid smell ever. I was literally heaving while I rinsed it down the drain. That, my friends, is grosser than gross.

Sawyer also took off his diaper today and peed on the linoleum, which I later slipped and fell in. That was pretty gross, too. But it's got nothing on the sour milk or grape skin and raisin poops I have scraped into the toilet. I always tell DH that I need to call Mike Rowe and have him feature the dirty job of motherhood on his show. Because I think we wade through the poo and puke with the best of 'em. Just saying.

I'm supposed to pick a couple other people to tell their tales of grossness, so I tag MomSmoo, Louann and Jayna. Gross me out, ladies!

Also! Jayna thinks I'm nice. :) She bestowed this little award on me. Thanks Jayna! I'm amazed that I fooled you into thinking that flattered. ;) To pass on the spirit of niceness, I'm giving this award out to Sarah and Louann, who both gave me a very warm welcome into the blog world.

I also got another award a few days ago from Dixiechick. Thanks, girl! I'm really feeling the blogger love lately.

I started this post over an hour ago and the boys have been back (and very loud) for 20 minutes now. So I should get them off to bed and then finish my grocery list so I can replenish the barren shelves of my pantry and we can stop eating the natural disaster rations for dinner.

It's Baby Shower time! The lovely ladies over at 5 Minutes For Mom are at it again with their fun games and awesome prizes. I'm writing my own Party Post to join in the fun and help Susan count down the days until Sophia's arrival. One party guest made her debut early -- Olivia was born September 28th!

For my first trick.. err, I mean, party game ;) -- I'm accepting the challenge to show my most sympathy-inspiring delivery photo. This one is mine, hands down. This photo shows the culmination of 11 hours of natural labor at home and 15 or so incredible minutes of pushing. I get teary every time I look at this photo and remember the raw emotion and power I felt here. I kept saying over and over, "I did it! I did it!" A truly amazing moment.



The next challenge is to show a pregnant belly photo. That one's easy for me. I took pictures of my belly all the time. This particular one is the very last photo I took at 39 and a half weeks. Beckett was a slug and came moseying on out a little under two weeks later, at 41 weeks 1 day. This picture shows the incredible way I carried both of my boys -- straight out front. My belly earned the nickname "Torpedo" from quite a few people.



Next, Susan wants us to tell our birth story. Again, easy for me! I posted it awhile back and you can read it here. Beckett was born at home and his birth was the most profound experience of my life. Pure perfection. I relive that day every time I read the story and it never gets old for me.

I was just checking out some of the prizes being given away, and I want everything! Such a great showing of mom entrepreneurs. Classy Mommy is giving away a GR8X Diaper Bag -- how fun and funky is that?? And this is the first time I've ever seen a Cushie Pushie -- it's a little pillow designed to help support a nursing mom's breast, so she has a free hand while feeding. Very cool! And Ju Ju Beane Boutique has absolutely adorable clothing and is giving away a $20 gift certificate. I'm drooling!

Susan and Janice also asked us to talk about our favorite baby names. I already used mine up on the kids I do have (Sawyer and Beckett), but I will share that if Beckett had been a girl, the two names in the running were Linden Aurora and Ellia Annelise. Maybe I'll still get to use them on a pet some day. ;)

Hmm, lets see. Picture time again. Here is a picture of me as a baby, and the boys as newborns! I see a little of myself in both of them. And seeing them side by side, I really don't think they look much alike at all!



I have to cut my party short now to get some sleepy boys down for naps, but feel free to share your pictures and stories in the comments. Or visit 5 Minutes for Mom and start your own Party Post. Warm congrats to Janice on the birth of her daughter and best wishes to Susan on her impending birth! Thanks for the chance at some great prizes, ladies!