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Tax Time
Mar 10, 2010 Amy in the Morning, Blog & Social Media Stuff 1 Comment
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 1 & 7. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and the NYC Moms Blog.
Win an XBox Live living room makeover!
Mar 5, 2010 Product Giveaway 3 Comments
My XBox Life
XBox has been a big part of my life for years. We started out with an original XBox – it was actually our very first DVD player! When the XBox 360 came out, I got my husband one for Christmas, then an XBox Live membership, and as a reward got to sit next to him on the couch as he talked into a little microphone strapped to his head. I amused myself by telling him that yes, I would like fries with that.
Once Jake was old enough to hold a video game controller – a day I think my husband had been waiting for since our firstborn had emerged from my womb, pointy-headed and be-penised – the two of them would sit on the couch together, shooting two-dimensional people and blowing things up and driving fast in cars to get to other places to blow other things up. Sometimes it’s a plane. Sometimes there are soldiers, sometimes girls in bathing suits. I think I might be talking about more than one game here, but they all look basically the same to me. When Jake and Daddy play XBox together, Fiona and I exchange a look that says it all: we don’t get it, and we don’t want to.
But then Rock Band came out, and suddenly I had a use for the XBox. Fiona, who was born singing, grabbed the mic immediately (she had always been a loud child and definitely didn’t need amplification, so we learned quickly how to turn off the mic’s sound and still have it register in the game). We discovered that Jake actually had a talent for drums, complete with rock-star like tantrums when he can’t master a section of a song (seriously, he’s throwing his sticks at a fifth-grade level). The Ass showed his inner Hendrix on guitar. And then there was me, all thumbs, stuck in the back playing bass: our little band’s very own Mike Huckabee, playing the same few notes over and over again, knowing I would never be as cool as the rest of the band.
Well, eventually I got better. Actually at this point I kind-of kick ass at Rock Band, on bass and guitar (but no drums, it’s truly embarrassing how uncoordinated I am). And thanks to the good people at XBox we’ve got more family games to play together, like Sing It and Scene It, and an XBox Elite to play them on. We’ve moved beyond just gaming with our XBoxes, using them to watch Hulu and Netflix and stream music from our computers. Someday I expect them to cook me breakfast.
XBox Live Giveaway – enter by March 8th
XBox Live is running a fantastic giveaway, the XBox Live Just Press Play giveaway, but you have to hurry: entries will be accepted until a minute before midnight on March 8th. And you want to enter, because here’s the prize:
- a $2,500 gift certificate to Crate & Barrel
- an XBox 360 Elite
- a 47 inch LG HDTV
- a Bose speaker system
- an XBox 360 game pack
- a Netflix account
- 4,000 Microsoft points
- some wireless stuff to help you get everything set up and play wirelessly
It’s all worth about $5,000. That’s right, $5,000. You can register here, and good luck!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 1 & 8. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and the NYC Moms Blog.
My interview with Chandra Wilson
Mar 4, 2010 charity 4 Comments
I’m a big fan of Grey’s Anatomy, and an even bigger fan of Chandra Wilson. Her character on Grey’s, Dr. Miranda Bailey, is the most interesting character on the show. If you’re interested, here’s my theory on why: her character has avoided the rampant sleeping around that a good deal of the rest of the cast has been involved in over the years. Her character’s story arc has never been defined by who she happens to be sleeping with, which lets us delve deeper into her, instead of wasting time analyzing relationships that won’t last past sweeps week. As a result I think Dr. Bailey has stayed a lot more interesting as we’ve watched her go through marriage troubles, and lately trying to balance job and single motherhood with dating.
But I digress. (Sorry, I watch way too much TV, and even when I’m not watching it I think about it more than a healthy amount.) Chandra Wilson is facing a lot of the same issues that us non-Hollywood moms are facing, and I got a chance to talk to her about it in a recent phone/video interview. We also talked about a great charity she’s been working with, the Downy Touch of Comfort Program. Please check it out, it’s a really sweet idea. I know that giant charities do a lot of good and are very needed, but I tend to give to programs where I can draw a direct line between what I’m doing and giving, and the person benefiting. You can see Chandra here, visiting a hospital for the program.
My phone rang for the interview about twenty minutes earlier than I was expecting, and as much as I wanted to accommodate Chandra at that moment I was right in the middle of cooking breakfast for the kids, and knew that I couldn’t do both. So I nicely asked if the producer could call back at the scheduled time, so that I could give it my full attention. Chandra’s got kids, I was sure she’d understand.
So thanks so much to Chandra Wilson for the fun conversation, and to Downy for participating in this worthwhile program.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Want to take a look behind the screen?
Mar 4, 2010 Blogging Stuff Leave a comment
I’ve been blogging on one site or another for three-and-a-half years now. Unless of course you want to count my very first blog, which The Ass and I launched in 1999. It was a movie review site from two perspectives, male and female called “He Said – She Said.” It was a great idea, and the fact that we only posted to it two or three times is a travesty. Can you imagine if we had kept it up? A lot of the most popular blogs today didn’t get there by being the best, just by being the first. We were so stupid to let that site fall by the wayside. My God, we didn’t even have kids. What were we doing with our time?
Anyway, I’ve been blogging for a little while now, on other people’s sites and my own. And not a day goes by when I’m not tempted to write about blogging. I do it every once in a while, but honestly I didn’t think it ever fit with the rest of the blog. And tracking my statistics I’ve noticed that I bring in a completely different audience whenever I write about blogging, one that I don’t generally see again until I write something else about blogging.
Last night (or rather, early this morning) I started a kind of sub-blog of Selfish Mom’s, called Behind the Screen, where I’ll be writing about blogging. It has lots in common with Selfish Mom – graphics, disclosure and about pages, advertising (for now, at least) – but has its own separate sign in and RSS feed. I hope to have lots of guest posters, and develop interesting discussions about the ins-and-outs and backstage stuff having to do with blogging. I may occasionally run giveaways there where the prize pertains more to bloggers than the general population.
I won’t be doing too much cross-promotion between the sites. Please check it out, and sign up for the RSS feed if you’re interested. And if you have an issue you’d like me to tackle, or if you’d like to post about it yourself, please send me an email at Amy@selfishmom.com. And now, back to talking about my kids… 
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Is BMI meaningless, especially for kids?
Mar 4, 2010 Kids, Weight Loss 7 Comments
I was quoted this morning in a piece on ABCNews.com about tracking kids’ health through the use of BMI. An adult’s BMI is calculated using height and weight, and that number puts you in the underweight, normal, overweight, or obese category. It doesn’t take into account muscle mass, cholesterol, blood pressure, sugar levels, activity levels, waist size, or any other indicator of health and fitness.
And when you start talking about BMI for kids, it gets more complicated, because a BMI that’s considered OK for a ten-year-old is obese for a seven-year-old. I don’t think using BMI to track kids’ health is a good idea at all. (However, unlike most of the commenters on the ABC piece, I don’t think trying to improve kids’ health is a commie-liberal-big brother idea either – those commenters get paranoid and nutty pretty fast.) [Please note: the comments link has been working on and off all day; the link is correct, it's a problem with ABCNews.com.] Whether a kid is healthy or not is complicated. My son was in the top 5% on the BMI charts for a seven-year-old when he was seven, which is what triggered the note home. The problem is that the kids’ charts compare kids by age. My son was towering over the other kids in his class, so the comparison was completely out of whack. The charts allow for the fact the older kids are supposed to have a higher BMI, but not for kids who are very tall for their age.
It’s just one of those things where a number or a label without information is useless. I knew the assessment was ridiculous, but had to actually look up the info and explain the BMI-by-age concept to The Ass to talk him down after he saw the letter. He’s not a stupid guy. He’s actually quite smart, smarter than me in many ways. But the government told him his son was obese and he took them at their word. That’s a problem on many levels.
What’s the answer? I have no clue. I’m lucky that I have one kid who chooses to eat like a health nut and another who is active enough that he burns off the huge amount of carbs that he consumes. If one of them had a health problem I would expect my doctor to talk to me about it. He’s got all of my kids’ information right there in front of him, and even more important, he’s got my kids right in front of him. Does he need the government’s guidance talking to me about my kids’ weights? I don’t think so, but if they’re going to tell him anything, I’d rather it be something useful, like whether or not my kids can run and play with their classmates and how they do on fitness tests. What their blood tests should look like. And yes, whether their measurements are in a safe range, based on many factors. Using one number to target kids will include kids who don’t need the intervention and exclude kids who actually need the help.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
