If I wake up with a needle in my eyeball, I’m gonna be pissed.
—Logan, as I dropped my needlepoint in bed

• See! Bat rays leaping out of the water!
• See! Newlywed men doing “sexy dances” for their ladies on a pitching boat!
• See! Each of us after a huge breakfast and tour before amazing spa treatments!
• See! Me powered by tequila and rapping to Moulin Rouge’s “Voulez Vous Coucher Avec Moi” with Heather of (and fellow Momversation.com panelist)!

No, really. And let us all thank them for having the voice-over blot out the singing.

What’s impressive about how they handled our visit was that they showed us the place and let us run with it, with lots of free time. Then they interviewed us and we said whatever came to mind. NO SCRIPTING. We were in heaven.

Heather (and Colleen of The Travel Mama) already wrote in detail about the trip. I will too, soon as the kids are at Dad’s and the construction outside my window dies down. Riiiiight.

For now, check out the video over there in the sidebar.———>

Pics and pics and more pics posted to my Flickr photostream!

Isn’t the strangest thing, standing in a full yet completely silent house, so tired you can’t remember what it was you wanted to do when everyone was finally in bed?

Never mind, I’ll remember in the middle of the night. It’s probably my phone needing charging, and it will wake me with its plaintive little beeps.

*Yawn* Who’s going to tuck me in?

See, I’m used to the kind of family phone everyone had to fight over so your parents set elaborate rules about how many calls you can make and how long each can last. Eventually you learn to sneak calls by making it look like you’re not actually ON the centrally-located kitchen phone because you’ve stretched that 25-foot cord out the kitchen door, around the corner of the dining room, and then around the corner of your bedroom where you’ve found a gap in the door that lets you close it without pinching the phone cord too much. And then your sibling finds out when he trip-wires the cord on his way to get a bowl of cereal and takes revenge by disconnecting the cord from the phone base, letting the yellow, stretched-out, curly cord spring back and whip around the corners until it WHAPS against your closed bedroom door where you’re having a whispered conversation because you think you’ve pulled off the bluff of the century.

And then you’ve got like twenty twists to reverse in the cord because it’s all out of shape and there’s always that one that won’t untwist unless you run it all the way to the ends of the cord and when you wake up the next day it’s BACK, with three or four cousins. And believe it or not, your parents never replace that cord. It will persevere throughout your childhood, going from springy and not quite reaching your knees, to a long, worn-out looping thing that has to be tossed over the top of the phone to keep it from dragging on the floor where you will trip on it eleventeen times a day.

So. Cell phones.

My kids use them. And I want to know HOW they are using them because they are portable little buggers and you never know where they are until you call them and your shoe starts ringing. Well. Here’s a story that ought to get your attention, and get you thinking about how to keep your family safe while using a cell.

Forbes Personal Tech: Keeping Kids Safe on Cell Phones
By Claire Courtney

SAN FRANCISCO—Colorado mother Sharon Hamilton thought she had a close eye on her son’s technology use. The 15-year-old turned in his cellphone every night at 10 p.m. One evening, Hamilton became suspicious when he frantically deleted text messages before giving over his phone. Her worst fears were soon confirmed.

When she turned on his phone, a text message from an unrecognizable, out-of-state number appeared. “Good night Babe,” it read.

REET! REET! REET!

“I am a watchful Mom,” she said, ” and this bypassed my watch.”

Her son told her that the text came from a 30-year-old female friend he met while playing “World of Warcraft,” a popular online multiplayer videogame. Hamilton, unconvinced of the innocence of this friendship, investigated the woman further. She ended up paying a company to discover that her son had spent three months communicating with an adult male. Read more…

Don’t EVEN get me started on texting.

Mom Speak: Answers Moms Need to Know
By Kerry A. Dolan

I dipped my toe into the mom blogosphere and nearly drowned.

I’m one of those busy moms with a full-time job and not much time to read mommy blogs. So when I took a peek at the latest collection of parenting blogs, I was blown away by the variety of information they contain. Turns out that even friends who aren’t parents are sneaking a look at some of these blogs. Collectively they’re growing real muscle: Family and parenting Web sites got close to 62 million unique visitors in March this year, according to comScore Media Metrix. Read more…

We love where we are living, but are paying a fortune to store our furniture while living in a furnished house with perpetual construction. Guy and I would like to consolidate households for all sorts of reasons but we live in different counties and between us have six children attending schools thirty miles apart. No matter what we did everyone would have to make major sacrifices. So that’s on the back burner.

Soon, I promise, something will break and I will be able to write more freely. Until then, well. I got all kids of trite and frivolous in reserve.

Mom, your thigh is bigger than my head.
—Name Withheld

Her winning tip?

I made a school memories binder for each of my kids using an Avery 1 1/2” EZ turn ring binder and Avery Premium Heavyweight Sheet Protectors. Each grade is divided with Avery Tab dividers. Every year I have them fill out a template “questionaire” of all there favorites. I slip it in the beginning of the year along with anything else throughout the year I want to save. Art projects (if they are too big i take a picture and put the picture in), report cards, holiday cards from school, certificates, etc….

I have also laminated some of the special ones for extra protection.

The next phase is getting Avery baseball card sheet protectors and putting a wallet sized picture of the kids in each year!

Denise’s Three Avery School Memory Books

You can slip more than one project / card in the sheet protectors.

Even oversized or odd shaped projects will work in the sheet protectors.

Tell us if you feel more like a short-order cook than a willing parent when it comes to your own version of kitchen wars. Do you take multiple food requests at each meal? Do you agree with some of our featured mom bloggers that taking a hard line with your children about what you serve may actually be creating a fussier eater? Our feisty guest mom blogger Jennifer Brandt, asks other real moms to take a hard look at what goes on in the kitchen every day. (In fact, Jen says she offered her son no less than nine breakfast options today!) Our own lovely Jen is also the Managing Editor of our own parenting expert video site, Parents Ask, and she’d love to hear from you!