I know it’s been a while, but I haven’t forgotten about our path to fulfillment!

One of the things that helps me to just relax and enjoy motherhood is doing just that. When I get down on the floor and let myself play with them—not worrying about how much I’d rather be writing or whether a new story or comment or email has come along—is not only (at least mildly) entertaining, it makes me feel like a good mother. Woot for a sense of accomplishment.

Now, this is hard for me, because I don’t really find my kids’ games all that stimulating. (They’re under the age of four; I’m not. It’s okay.) But placing that priority on my children and their play helps me to get my priorities in order.

On the other hand, I’ve found activities we enjoy togethr—reading, for example. And even when the play isn’t something I would have chosen (I grew up with three sisters! I don’t know how to play cars!), I find that the best part is often watching my kids play, imagine and interact.

I can’t do it all the time, and I know that we have to always strive to take time for ourselves, but when I do make the effort to throw myself into my work as a mother, I actually enjoy it more and worry less.

What do you think? Have you found benefits from playing with your kids? What do you like to play?

Table of contents for Blogging Add-ons

• Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers
• Five Ways to Win Links—and Technorati’s Heart
• 5 Steps to Getting Started with FeedBurner
• Seven Ways to Master FeedBurner
• Blog Carnivals, Start to Finish
• Get even more out of FeedBurner

Guess who’s featured in today’s edition of MommyBrainOnline’s The Boost newsletter? It’s me! Welcome to new visitors! Please subscribe to MamaBlogga to get more posts on finding fulfillment and blogging tips!

It’s been a while since we went through the five easy steps to getting started and seven ways to get more from FeedBurner, the RSS service. Well, FeedBurner recently added a feature to help you get even more out of the service!

FeedBurner has offered email subscriptions for a while, for your blog readers who want to get updates in their inbox instead of in a reader. But while you could customize lots of options for your email newsletters, the subject line was always the same. For years, the only way you could make your email subject line change to match your content was to login every day and do it manually.

But that’s changed! Now you can add a custom feature to your subject line to make it match your post titles. Under Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email Branding, here’s the new “hot tip”:

Just add ${latestItemTitle} to your subject line, and the title of your latest post will appear in your subject line.

If you have more than one post per day, you can customize your subject line even more if you check the checkbox. A popup menu appears giving you even more options:

Why is this helpful? It will help your email subscribers see what’s coming in your email. It should also increase the number of email subscribers who actually open your email, since it won’t get lost in a sea of same-subject emails (like Darren Rowse of ProBlogger points out).

Here’s the official Google announcement of the FeedBurner change.

More Works-for-me Wednesday

So get out there and make your email newsletters even better!

Mona Kashani Heern was born in Iran. After the 1979 revolution, she and her sister were expelled from school because of their Bahá’í beliefs. Their father was later jailed for the same reason. After months of waiting in the snow for hours to spend ten minutes with him once a month, they found out he’d been executed. Eventually, her mother smuggled their family into Pakistan, where they lived in jail until they gained refugee status. They later emigrated to Germany, where Mona and her sister had to learn German, English and French in order to graduate high school. Finally, they moved to the US.

Despite the persecution and hardship she’d endured, a prevailing theme in Mrs. Heern’s acceptance speech was the love and kindness that she’d experienced even in the worst, most oppressive circumstances. As a junior high English teacher, she has a passion for sharing her story with her students so that we Americans understand the privileges of freedom that we enjoy (and take for granted).

Sgt. Merlin German, another recipient, served our country in Iraq, participating in over 150 successful missions. When an IED exploded and knocked him from his Humvee turret, he was burned over 97% of his body and given no chance of survival. He defied doctors and not only survived, but relearned to breathe on his own, talk and even walk.

Concerned about burn victims who couldn’t afford the costly treatments, Sgt. German started Merlin’s Miracles. The foundation has helped thousands of burn victims pay for surgeries, compression garments and hospital stays. During a routine surgery last spring, Sgt. German passed away. His legacy lives on through the hundreds of doctors and patients he personally touched and his charitable foundation.

President Boyd K. Packer was the final honoree. He longed to become a pilot like his older brother. He promised God that he would devote his life to His service if he could live that dream. President Packer spent forty months in the Air Force during World War II.

Less than two decades after the end of the war, the Lord called President Packer’s promise due. Packer was called to be an assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, then to a member of the Quorum. Since then, he has devoted nearly forty years of his life in the full-time employment as an Apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His ministry has included service all over the world. He is now the President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the second most senior apostle.

The first award recipient, Neil Holbrook, was one of the original eight Navy “Frogmen,” the predecessor of the SEALs. In his acceptance speech, he told of a friend who was standing next to him on deck when his friend was shot. They both fell to the deck and his friend struggled to say something, but died before he could speak. Holbrook has spent six decades wondering what his friend would have said.

I’m passing the torch to the future generations. Please take care of that Constitution that I can’t enjoy. … I don’t have the liberty to go home.

When we thanked him for his service afterward, Mr. Holbrook said he would do it again tomorrow for people like us.

To honor the sacrifice of so many people this independence day, we have to remember what they were fighting for. We have to remember that the freedoms we enjoy in this country are privileges that not everyone has. We cannot forget those founding freedoms, and sometimes we have to fight with words or with weapons to keep them, at home and abroad.

Please remember this today as you celebrate Independence Day—and tomorrow, and afterward.

Newspaper coverage of the award ceremony with brief bios

Photo by Benjamin Earwicker

He was way ahead of his time, you know. I mean, the man died seventy years ago, and he had the foresight to write this post for me. Okay, okay, so really this is just a long quotation. Emphasis, images and paragraphs breaks added.

Woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist.

Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world.

But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it.

How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the Universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.

G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, p 118-119

Thanks, G.K.! (Note that this is taken slightly out of context, but seriously, it’s a lot better this way. Don’t bother reading the stuff that comes before or after it; it’s not quite so “enlightened.”)

In other news, I’d like to note that I was one of five winners of literary agent Nathan Bransford’s guest blogging contest, and my guest post will go live on his blog next week .

Photo credits: question mark—Svilen Mushkatov; globe—Sanja Gjenero

Sarah, the protagonist, becomes a mother fairly early on in the book. Although this isn’t a major theme in the book, she struggles with motherhood at first, starting with a very difficult labor, and continuing with a hard adjustment to motherhood, for her and for her marriage. In her journal, Sarah writes:

I wonder if every new mother feels as if there is nothing left of herself. Every minute of my day and every last thing I do is tied to this little someone else.

—Nancy E. Turner, These is my Words, p 120

That was very much how I felt when I first became a mother. It was supposed to be all joy and roses, but it seemed to be all baby, all work, all the time.

Now, though, I’m beginning to get a little distance from that work. Hayden is pretty independent—he can open the fridge by himself now. He seems to be turning more and more into a small person (instead of a baby or a toddler) every time I look at him.

Rebecca is eleven months old now, and, as I’ve said a number of times in the last couple days, her cuteness quotient has leapt to near-lethal levels. I’m able to have time to myself, play with the kids, and (due very largely to the support and efforts of my husband), the house hasn’t fallen down around my ears.

Every minute of my day and every last thing I do isn’t tied to them (though still many if not most of my minutes and most of the things I do, especially during their waking hours). I’ve gotten to the point where I can get some, if not all, of “my” own, personal stuff done—and I think it’s done wonders for my sense of fulfillment and accomplishment overall.

What do you think? Is being able to do something by yourself, for yourself vital to fulfillment?

(By the way, has anyone read the sequels to These is my Words? Are they as good as the first (or at least worth reading )?)

Five years ago, when she still had children at home, Business Week interviewed her. Toward the end of their article, they highlighted her commitment to family:

Bartz showed up for a board meeting one night with a hugely swollen leg. Turns out, she had rushed from work to her daughter’s soccer game and slipped, twisting her ankle. She hobbled to the game, then limped to the board meeting. Because the . . . freezer had no ice, she ended up sitting with a bag of frozen peas on her foot. But she carried on as usual, Nierenberg says. . . .

Bartz encourages her employees to have a life outside of work as well. Autodesk’s staffers can receive several hours off a month to help out at their children’s schools. A few weeks ago, Bartz taught 60 or so of her employees’ kids, who showed up for the company’s bring-your-kids-to-work day, how to execute a real business handshake (hand should not be limp, look the person in the eye).

How does Carol Bartz juggle all these roles? The interview hinted at that as well—but I think the two biggest keys are perspective and priorities.

First, she placed her family as her highest priority:

Ever since her daughter, who’s now 15, was in elementary school, Bartz would sit down with her at the beginning of each school year and promise to come to certain school events — say, a Christmas concert or the Halloween party. “I don’t care if the Pope comes to Autodesk, I’m still going to spend that time with her,” she says. Recently, she canceled a business dinner to attend her daughter’s first prom.

Second, Carol recognized that she wasn’t going to be perfect:

I have a belief that life isn’t about balance, because balance is perfection. Rather, it’s about catching the ball before it hits the floor.

I may not be a CEO, or even employed outside the home, but I take encouragement from that counsel. And you know what? Sometimes even the best jugglers drop the balls. What do they do? They pick them up and keep practicing.

How have you caught the ball before it hit the floor? How have you continued after dropping the ball?

Photo credit: juggle balls—Dani Simmonds

What’s this monumental change? Well, the Federal Trade Commission is taking a closer look at online reviews. Yeah, it’s still going to be okay to review products online—but if you were paid to write the review, got the product for free, or use an affiliate link in your post, you’ll need to tell your readers.

The FTC hasn’t published specific guidelines yet (I’ll let you know when they do), but they’ve addressed the subject in new policies over the last few months.

What does this mean for you? I take it to mean that now is a good time to get a disclosure policy. Here is my disclosure policy. In the absence of specifics from the FTC, I believe a site-wide policy, when linked prominently and worded appropriately, is sufficient notice for affiliate links. Specific product reviews or paid posts, however, would probably not be covered by blanket statements like this (unless all of your product reviews use the exact same terms).

“But—but—but—” you say? Brian Clark at Copyblogger has a great post today pointing out that disclosure can actually be a selling point. In his examples, he discloses affiliate links at the link level.

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim also has some suggestions to avoid the wrath of the Feds, especially if you don’t feel a site-wide disclosure is enough:

So, how can you make sure you don’t ever hear from the FTC?

If in doubt, spell it out! Cheesy, I know, but it will help you. If you ever stop to ask yourself, "should I disclose this?" then the answer is probably "yes." The chances are that whatever is causing the guilt-trip isn’t worthy of the FTC’s attention, but you’ll feel better for disclosing it AND you’ll earn the trust of your readers!

Other tips that might help you sleep at night:

• Create a page that lists all of your potential "conflict of interests" and simply link to it whenever your post includes mention of one of those relationships.
• Tag any links with something visible and obvious. Such as (affiliate) or (sponsor).
• You don’t have to publish the full terms of your compensation. Simply stating "Company X sponsored this post…") or ("We received free XXX as part of this review…") will likely be enough to satisfy the FTC.

And finally, I have to link to AllThingsD’s coverage, because they used the cover of “The Who Sell Out” and I like the Who.

Warning: I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. This is my opinion and interpretation of vague FTC guideline statements that have yet to be made into concrete, specific policies.

More Works-for-me Wednesday

Photo credits: handcuffs—Penny Mathews; badge—Steve Woods

I probably can’t say enough about fathers, or say enough to thank the father of my children. The man does dishes, reads with Hayden, and can even put the kids to bed.

Thank you, Ryan!

So go ahead, brag on Dad here!

Not on Blogger? See more resources

Have you see one of the most popular new widgets/gadgets on Blogger blogs lately? They’re popping up all over: Followers. A grid of user pictures in the sidebar of popular blogs, showing off the wonderful mix of people that this blogger attracts:

So what’s this all about?

What’s Following?

Following is a lot like subscribing using RSS. When your visitors “follow” your blog, they get updates from your blog (and all the other ones they follow) in a centralized location—this time, though, instead of Google Reader or Bloglines, it’s their Blogger Dashboard:

How Do I Follow?

To follow your favorite blogs, click on the Follow button on their sidebar widget. You then get to choose what account to use to follow the blog—Google, Yahoo, AIM, Open ID or Netlog. (Google includes your Blogger account.)

Once you’ve signed in, Blogger gives you the option of following the blog publicly or privately.

Either way, you get to read updates on your dashboard, but if you don’t want this site added to your Blogger/Google profile, select Private. Note that Following a blog might also result in it being added to your Google Reader. Hasn’t happened to me, but I’ve heard reports.

Why Do I Want Followers?

You want followers for the same reason you want subscribers—it grows your audience. (If you don’t want that, that’s okay, too, of course.) Blogger Help explains this well:

The Followers widget is a great tool to help you grow your blog’s audience. Readers often visit a blog and enjoy it but fail to return. With the followers widget you can get all readers to return and become a fan.

You can also use a Followers widget to better connect with your readers—to see who they are and to find and comment on their blogs, even if they’ve never commented on yours.

How Do I Get Followers?

First things first, you have to add the Followers gadget. This is available primarily to Blogger blogs, but if you run a blog on your own hosting, you can also add the widget if you sign up for Google Friend Connect.

To add the gadget in Blogger, go to Layout > Page Elements (the default tab under Layout). Choose where you want the Followers box—your sidebar, your footer, whatever:

Click on “Add a Gadget” in your desired place. A window with a list of choices pops up. Right now, Followers is #1:

After you click the plus button to the right of Followers, you’re given options to give the Followers box a title (in my above example, from Literary Agent Nathan Bransford’s blog, the title is “Friends of the Blog”) and to customize the colors to match your layout:

Once you’ve added the Followers gadget, you’ll want to encourage your readers to follow your blog. Again, Blogger Help has some good advice here:

• Write a post about your followers widget.

• Encourage all readers to become a follower [Well, unless you're a grammarian. Then you'll encourage all your readers to become followers, because I don't think it's very healthy for all your readers to become just one follower ].
• Put your followers widget at the top of your sidebar so more readers will notice it.
• Many readers ignore sidebar items so by writing a post about your followers widget and moving the widget to the top of your sidebar, you will inevitably grow your audience.

The best way to encourage people to follow your blog is to have awesome content—something they’ll want to come back and read again.

Learn more about attracting readers with RSS and getting your visitors to stay and subscribe. I’ve written a free guide to increasing your blog’s stickiness, “Get Your Visitors to Stick!”

Good luck garnering Followers!

| More WFMW

Starting out strong

And a strong finish!

Thanks for running with me, Jai! That’s one resolution down, the rest of them forgotten. Er—yeah.

How was your weekend?