We have a new photo contest starting today on MilwaukeeMoms.com -- the Special Grandparent photo contest. If your children have a special grandparent or grandparents in their lives and you'd like to show them off, please submit your photo(s) along with a short paragraph about what makes your grandparents so special.

Three lucky winning families will receive tickets to "The Neverending Story" at First Stage Children's Theater in March.

And don't forget about our Beautiful Baby photo contest! With nearly 700 entries to date, there's a lot of gorgeous little faces in this contest.

Don't miss out on either one! Enter your photos today.

 

This morning on "The Morning Blend," we decided to tackle a topic that is being talked about by moms (and dads and just about everyone else) all over the Milwaukee area. With the state of our economy and so much uncertainty, how do you cut back your family budget without feeling like you're making huge sacrifices?

In our MilwaukeeMoms.com discussion boards, moms offered up a lot of tips for those looking to spend less. Put all, or even most, of these ideas to work and you could save your family hundreds of dollars each month.  

MilwaukeeMoms.com Top 20 Money Saving Ideas

1)      Replace brand name cereals, canned goods and other items with generic.

2)      Make your coffee at home rather than buying it.

3)      Clip coupons and shop on double coupon days only if your local grocery store offers it.

4)      Do a big grocery trip at the beginning of the month and try to go during the month as infrequently as possible. More trips to the grocery store means more possibilities for impulse buys that you don’t need.

5)      Use tap water rather than bottled water.

6)      Make your own baby food.

7)      Eat at home and pack lunches for school and work.

8)      Visit resale shops for bargains on clothes.

9)      Buy children’s clothes in the next size up from the clearance rack at the end of each season.

10)  Make your own household cleaners.

11)  Take your own family photos or ask a friend to do it for you rather than paying to have it professionally done.

12)  Switch one or all of your cell phones to those that use pre-paid cards.

13)  Cancel your magazine subscriptions. Read them at the library or recycle from a friend instead.

14)  Make an agreement with your spouse to make a special homemade meal or treat rather than buying birthday or holiday presents for each other.

15)  Call your credit card companies and ask for lower interest rates.

16)  Install a programmable thermostat.

17)  Turn off lights when no one is in the room.

18)  Save up your laundry and dishes for full loads; don’t run multiple small loads.

19)  Drop your gym membership and work out at home.

20)  Leave your money and credit cards at home when you go out if you don’t want to be tempted to spend! Take only what you really think you’ll need and no more.

So yesterday was a big day around the MilwaukeeMoms office, but if we did our jobs right, you didn't notice. After months of planning and preparation, we switched the web site to a new content-management system, which is really just a fancy way of saying that we now have a different way of making changes to the web site.

It's all behind-the-scenes stuff, so if you're a regular user of this site, it shouldn't change your experience.

In making this transition, we decided to give the site an overhaul -- a freshening up, if you will. You'll find more restaurant reviews, new recipes, updated park reviews and lots more in our regular sections.

In addition, we created two new areas of the site: Photo Galleries and Money Savers.

Based on the phenomenal success of our photo contests (such as our Beautiful Baby contest, which currently has more than 1,000 entries), we built a Photo Galleries section that will allow you to share your best and cutest kid photos at any time. There are no prizes attached to the galleries -- just the chance to make other parents smile. We've started out with three galleries: I Dress Myself, Kids & Pets and Sweet Smiles. Feel free to add to any and all of the galleries!

Our Money Savers section puts together dozens of ways that you can still have fun as a family and spend less while doing it. The Dining Out page links to a listing of restaurants where kids eat free or cheap. Family Freebies lists local attractions that offer free days or free tours so you can get out without breaking the bank. And Coupons & Deals offers links to some great coupon sites to help you save on your everyday purchases.

We hope you like these new features and will tell us if you have ideas for more.

As always, we're here to help make life a little bit easier for moms (and dads!).

Enjoy, and we'd love to hear your feedback. Feel free to e-mail me or call (414) 224-2710.
 

When our daughter was in first grade, my husband and I made a classic parenting mistake. With children aged 7 and 4, we decided that our kids were at the right stage in their young lives to get a dog.

They had been begging for a dog, praying for a dog, dressing up as dogs and talking about dogs nonstop. My husband grew up with dogs and cats in his house, so he knew what it was all about. I grew up with neither, but since we married we always had cats, so I figured a dog couldn't be that much more work, right? 

So the woman who compared six stroller brands for three months before choosing one and who spent hours on the Internet and paging through Consumer Reports before buying a car decided in all of about five minutes that a dog was a good idea.

No, not just a good idea. Necessary to the proper development of my children.  

In hindsight, I should have realized I'd only use the stroller for a few years and that the car might end up being replaced. The dog -- the good idea, necessary dog -- has a slightly longer lifespan. Yeah, that's one decision that could have used a little more thought.

Now before you go and think I'm a dog-hater, I'm not. But something quickly became clear to me that no one told me before we had a dog: Many dogs prefer adults, and even if you get a family-friendly breed or an amiable mutt, dogs don't always gravitate toward the kids.

So before I knew it, I was the proud owner of one used dog between the ages of 2 and 4. With no identifying information, the shelter didn't know his true age. The name he came with, and the name our kids wanted to keep, was Patch, although he has no patches. He was a slightly overweight pup that resembled a giant Chihuahua. 

A giant Chihuahua that from day one only had eyes for me.

We had made solid plans to get a dog that would enhance the children's lives. Patch wasn't having it. He was going to enhance my life, and that was about it.

The bad news for him is that I didn't need my life enhanced. I had just gotten to the point where my children no longer followed me around anymore, and now I was the proud owner of a dog who did just that. Every time I turned around, Patch was right there. Sit down? He's up on my lap. Folding laundry? He's staring at me, adoringly, from the other side of the ironing board.

I am apparently pretty darn fascinating. You don't know that about me, but Patch does. If I'm awake, he's right there with those big, bug-eyed baby browns intently focused on my next move.

As for the kids, they still love him all these years later, even if he mostly uses them as something to step on to get to me on the couch. My husband doesn't do much besides occasionally feed him because he's "mom's dog." And I've become used to having a shadow, even though I never, ever saw that coming.

So the secret that no one ever told me was that, in the end, the dog often really only likes mom.

And the secret I don't tell?

I didn't need a dog, but sometimes it's kind of nice to have something that thinks the sun rises when you get up and goes down when you go to sleep. As we count down the weeks until my oldest is officially a teenager, maybe having my No. 1 fan always by my side will turn out to be just what I needed -- even if I didn't know it.

With the big peanut butter recall of 2009 still in full swing, you aren't hearing much positive news about this family favorite these days. But it's products made from peanut paste -- not often the yummy stuff in the jar -- that appears to be the problem, so those of us who love PB are continuing to consume.

Two local 8-year-olds loved it enough to enter Jif's Most Creative Peanut Butter Sandwich Contest. Alexandra Miller of Franklin and Adam Sprangers of Greenville are in the finals and now it's time to vote!

Alexandra's creation, The Happy Hedgehog, makes use of pretzels, raisins, almonds and more to make a cute -- and yummy -- sandwich.

Adam made the Peanut Butter Burger, which includes chicken, carrots and -- gasp! -- spinach.

Voting ends Friday, Feb. 27, if you want to support the home team kids.

Here's the whole story.

 

I didn't even realize it when I was in it, but it turns out I had it pretty great for awhile. For a few blissful years, I rarely thought about sleep.

For most of us, it is the birth of our first child that makes us realize just how precious sleep is and exactly what its purpose is. Doctors may tell you stuff about how sleep is important for recharging your batteries, cell growth and yada yada, but we all know the real reason for sleep.

We sleep because we don't want to burst into tears at the grocery store when our exhausted brains can't handle so many yogurt choices. We sleep because we have to operate cars and remember that today is Wear Red for School Spirit! day and cut really little rectangles off the top of cereal boxes to raise money for our schools. We sleep because without that rest, we might actually live out the dream in which we throttle our husbands for no better reason than forgetting to replace the toilet paper roll.

My first was born nearly 13 years ago, my second nearly 10 years ago. That means that from 1996 until approximately 2003, my sleep deprivation levels ranged from dangerously low to spotty with a chance of incoherent mumbling. 

But by the time my son was 4, we were kind of in our groove. Everybody slept for the most part, and if there was anything to gripe about, it was the early wakeup times. Anytime after 5:30 a.m. was not out of the realm of possibility, and even though the kids could get up and play for a bit before my husband and I got out of bed once they were out of the very little stage, just the morning noises were enough to wake me for good. If the kids were up, I was up.

I have no one but myself to blame that I said this out loud on more than one occasion: I wish my kids would sleep a little later.

Yep, I said it. I admit it; I did. Following the theory that you always want what you don't have, I said it. My kids went to bed great and slept the whole night. The only thing they did "wrong" was wake up too early for my tastes.

Turns out I should have just learned to like the flavor of early because I'm paying for that wish now.

In just the past few months, my kids -- both of them, to boot -- have decided that they do like sleeping in after all. However, they aren't interested in my plan, which offers them extended sleep-in hours on weekends but a more conventional schedule on weekdays. Nope, they want the unlimited plan with all the options, including the later wakeup time, even on weekdays.

I have tried to explain that this plan is not available in our area at this time, but they are not interested. The other problem is that they have gotten bigger. When they were little and wouldn't sleep, they might tuck into bed with us and nod off in just a few minutes.

Now it's the reverse: I'm trying to haul them out from under layers of fuzzy, warm blankets before they can grab the blankets back because the last thing I want to do is engage in a tug-of-war with my 9-year-old at 6:30 in the morning -- and lose. Add humiliation to annoyance and you've got a powerfully ugly combo playing out before "The Today Show" even starts.

So I'm kicking myself a little right now. I spent years "training" my kids to be good sleepers and the kick in the pants of it all is that they're rewarding me by actually doing it.