As usual you’ll find me photographing not just the kids, but food, toys, random household objects, friends, groceries, and other miscellania.  I love filter and photo effects, especially instamatic and vintage effects.

Some of my favourite iPhone apps that I’m currently using are:

• Instagram
• Camera+
• Hipstamatic
• Snappr
• Snapseeed

I love the CWAs because they are a juried award, not an ‘contest’ award for most clickthroughs. The panel of 46 jurors had their work cut out for them this year, as there were 461 nominees across their 37 categories. There are so many wonderful blogs of all different genres in this years’ winners; check out the full list of winners on the Canadian Weblog Awards website.

Thanks Schmutzie and the team for bringing us the CWAs again this year. There are so many talented Canadians out there, and I look forward to checking out the full list of winners and discovering some new blogs to read!

2012 didn’t start out the way I expected. At all. Actually, if you want to get specific about it, 2012 started in the back of an ambulance. New Year’s Eve we were having a quiet night at home. One minute I was sitting on the couch playing video games with my family, the next I was frozen with chest pain so bad I couldn’t move. My dad called an ambulance and somewhere between here and the hospital 2012 began. My ECGs were clear and the hospital couldn’t find anything urgently wrong with me, so after a few hours I was sent home. The next few days I was completely and utterly exhausted, and then I started coughing. On the 4th I spent a 20 hour day getting diagnosed, first at the Urgent Care clinic who then sent me back to emerge for X-rays and a CT scan. The doctors suspected a pulmonary embolism (blood clot on the lung) but in the end the CT scan showed pneumonia. Leave it to me to present with less-than-common symptoms and keep things interesting!

I spent over two weeks propped on the couch in a funny sideways position because it hurt too much to lie on my back. The pain was brutal and the fatigue relentless. I was too tired to play a game or even read. By halfway through January I had watched more tv than I did for all of 2011. By the third week, I was still feeling tired but well on the way to being back to normal when I got the flu. I have no idea where I even got the flu, since I’ve been too sick to go anywhere! I think because my body was still fighting the pneumonia it took me a little longer than usual to shake it off. This, combined with all my other health issues, has put me into an unscheduled hiatus for the last month.

I’m slowing catching up with everyone, online and off, and will have my blog and PATHWays to Life back to a regular schedule (whatever that is!) soon enough. In the meantime, I’m still chatting away on Twitter and Facebook and passing lots of time on Pinterest so look for me there!

This holiday season, are you looking for something unique to get your Super Mario loving child, relative or friend? Here’s a list of great finds on Etsy for kids of all ages that will remind them how awesome these games are!

Rebecca is a mom of two and believes that Super Mario 3 was the best of the best.  She’s also a parenting blogger, food blogger and lover of social media and community giving.

1. Pack away the kids summer clothes
• This took no time at all, I’m not sure why I put it off for so long?
2. Synch/Back-up/Re-organize my iPhone (for a geek, I’m really a super slacker when it comes to synching)
3. Replace my Twitter background with something that works in “new Twitter”
4. Implement Family Game reviews on this site
• Almost sortta kinda done. I wrote a post about it and have some drafts, but I’ve had a hard time getting around to actually reviewing any games. It’s a work in progress.
5. Unpack at least two of the boxes hidden in my closet
• They were the small two, but it still counts.
6. Clear a decent, reasonable path from one end of the garage to the other
• I delegated this job to the kids, but it’s still done!
7. Reorganize Penelope’s bedroom furniture and toys
• She has such a nice room in our new house, I’m very glad this is done. She has an area to play and a new bed, and it looks super cute.
8. File our income tax returns from last year (shame shame, I know)
• Taxes are done, but not filed. I’ll do that this coming week. I’m grumpy that I only worked half time last year and still owe a lot of money, but the sooner I get it taken care of the better.
9. Help the kids reorganize their playroom
• This was a job of mammoth proportions, as everything wasn’t properly organized  when it was unpacked. We ended up re-evaluating where the kids were going to play and moving the toys to a new room, and turning what was going to be their playroom into a nice little TV room. We literally dumped out every single toy, threw out any junk and started from scratch. Between the two big kids and myself we tackled it over two days and I’m so glad it’s done!
10. Figure out where I go for my mammogram and actually book it
• OK, so apparently I should have started with “read the requisition” because the number to call for the appointment was printed right on it. Surprisingly the wait time is only a couple of weeks, so not only did I make the appointment but I already went and got it done! I get extra credit for that, right?

So all-in-all I think I did pretty well, especially considering I also started exercising 3-5 times a week and sunk 60 hours into a brand new RPG. All this, all while getting ready for the holidays, taking care of myself and getting the rest I need, and cooking up a storm in the kitchen; I call November a successful month!

How did you make out with your (formal or informal) to-dos for November? And specific goals for December?

The magic of Christmas can’t be found wrapped up under a tree.  For me the true magic of Christmas has always been made up of all the ‘activities’ of Christmas.  My fondest memories of Christmas are not of the toys I received as a child but the things I did with my family.  Things like making crafty homemade decorations with my Mom, baking Christmas cookies (and sneaking them frozen from the freezer in the basement) and my all time favorite packing ourselves up in the car with Christmas Carols on the radio, and sipping eggnog while we drove around the neighborhood looking at all the lights.

As a stay at home mom, I have the luxury of a lot of time with the kids and I like to make the month of December as packed full of activities as I can.  One of our traditions has been to sit down and make a list of all the things we want to do in the month.  This past weekend we made our list up on a napkin while eating burgers at The Works, so I took the liberty of taking that list and making it pretty in Photo Shop, now its ready for my December Daily Album.

The December Daily album, was made very popular among the scrapbook crowd by Ali Edwards and this will by my 5^th year documenting each day in the month of December in a little mini album.  I keep these albums out in the kitchen in a pretty little bowl for the kids to look through.  I have to say they love peeking through the Christmas Season’s past, and getting excited to do it all again and I love filling the pages of these albums with the ‘Magic’ of Christmas.  What activities are your family favorites this season?

Katie is a bouncy kind of girl, nicknamed Kataroo (yes she nicknamed herself, why not?) like Kangaroo.  This bouncy happy go lucky girl enjoys scrapbooking by the seat of her pants at http://katarooskitchen.blogspot.com/ and getting sweaty and fit at http://lauriekatiesowrite.blogspot.com/

Search engine optimization (SEO) is something that mystifies a lot of bloggers, especially beginners. Many articles can be lengthy and overly technical, but optimizing your content for search engines needn’t be difficult or time consuming.

Today I’m sharing a few easy tips to improve the SEO for your blog without having to sift through a ton of technical articles or remember anything complicated. And the good news is, your blogging software and plugins can do a lot of the work for you!

But first a quick definition of what SEO is and how it works: Search engine optimization is the process of refining your content to raise your position in search engine results. The better your optimize your content, the higher ranking you’ll have with Google and other search engines. You don’t need a lot of statistics to know that most people click results on the first page, so the higher you rank the better! The good news is there are many little things you can do to increase your ranking in Google search results without having to understand all the technology behind it.

1. Title:

   Giving your post a catchy title is great for flexing your creative muscle, but not so great for search engine optimization. Make sure your title includes the keywords that people will be searching for, and set your blogging software to use your post title in the URL (www.blog.com/blog-seo-for-beginners vs www.blog.com/post_id=1234). In WordPress you can find this under Settings>Permalinks. Stay away from titles that don’t tell search engines anything about your post (www.blog.com/cute-saying) and save the creative spin for promoting it on social media.

2. Keywords:

   Keywords are simply the words you would type into Google if you were trying to find your post. Give some thought to what you would be searching for and make sure to use those words throughout your post. There are specific frequencies that are often recommended, but in brief just try to remember the following tips: Use keywords in the beginning and end of your post, ideally once in bold and once in italics. If you have the option to add keywords manually, do that as well. WordPress has many great plugins for this, some of which will allow you to edit your description as well. Just remember that more is not better, and keep it relevant; Google frowns on “keyword stuffing”: adding lots of extra words to try to artificially increase your ranking. This will actually hurt your SEO efforts.

3. Description:

   This is a 150 word description of your post; by default it’s the first 150 characters, but there are plugins or blogging software that allow you to change it. If you’re not sure what your description is, it’s the snippet that comes up when you share a post on Facebook. This is part of what the search engines ‘read’ when they are indexing your blog. You can flex a little more creative muscle here, but be sure to use your keywords to increase your ranking. Bonus: it also makes you look a little more polished when people share your posts.

4. Images and video:

   Google loves photos and videos, but since the it can’t actually see them, you need to tell them what they are! Use good and relevant file names (puppy.jpg vs photo1.jpg) and fill in the alternate text with something descriptive (black miniature daschund puppy dog). Try to always add a picture to your posts; there are many free stock photography sites out there.

5. Links and interlinks:

   Outbound links and “interlinks” (a fancy way of saying linking to your own blog pages) increases your ranking, and interlinking to previous posts – when relevant of course! – has an added bonus of increasing your page views.

So you see, blog SEO isn’t difficult and you don’t even need to understand all the mechanics behind it. Using these few simple tips – while continuing to create your awesome, blog content – can really help attract new readers and increase your audience. Keep creating, keep engaging, and your blog post search engine ranking will continue to grow!

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net