I’m now a licensed clairvoyant/fortune teller; which means I can actually now advertise and promote my business without having to take just donations.

We’re looking into other forms of small business protection right now, making ourselves an LLC, and also changing out fictitious names and things given I’m getting rid of ceruleansoul.com by not renewing it when it expires on Valentine’s Day.

I say the bad thing about helping people with webdesign though is that it makes me want things I don’t need. I’m helping someone to register a domain right now and just for kicks I’m running other domain names through the whois finder on GoDaddy and I think, “Oooh that would be so shiny to have!” and I restrain myself, which is good.

It was a lengthy process to get the licensing, given our county charges $231.64 for license to do tarot; the lady who signed me up was very nervous about coming back and telling me how much I would pay, but I’d already gone through my freakout in October about the difference between a tarot license and a hypnotherapy one. Which I’m sure she was very relieved about.

Right now I’m looking for places to advertise. I can’t seem to find what I’m supposed to do to get into our local yellow pages. I can see I’m going to be spending as much time on the phone today as I was spending yesterday going backwards and forwards to various government offices.

Declan’s doing really well on the developmental checklist. I got to ‘nos’ because he’s not walking yet (thankfully). He’s saying ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’ pretty much to the right people, although he did call one of our friends ‘Dada’ as well over the weekend. He can crawl and sit up and scoot along on his butt like I used to do, walks all around the house…points to things and asks for them apparently ‘please’ is ‘ah-babababa’ or maybe that’s bottle? We’re working on it.
But he can hold himself in a standing position for a short period of time without support, and he took those two faltering steps the other day. He can put things in things…which isn’t always the greatesting thing, and he knows where stuff goes when you take it away from him unfortunately.

As Mum is fond of saying, “You know you have a baby now!” boy do we…

In other things he’s in the 50-75 for weight and head circumference, although I’ve no real idea what that means, and off the chart for height LOL. In English he’s 21lbs 7 oz and 31 1/2 inches tall. No wonder he keeps pulling down the DVDs and things no matter where we put them!

Well, we’ve had some events. Declan’s definitely been going through a growth spurt. He had a three and a half hour nap yesterday and he’d only been up for two hours. This is unheard of given I’ve been hard pressed to get him to sleep for an hour normally.
Then last night he slept and didn’t wake up until 7 a.m. today he’s been in really good spirits, which is a pleasant change.

The main WOW, though is that earlier Danny was watching the munchkin so I could get lunch on the go and look through some posting opps without Declan’s “help” and Declan took TWO STEPS by himself not holding on to anything at all! It’s all kinds of craziness.

I was going to edit the other post, but I’m being lazy. I found a very interesting link archiving site through a friend on LJ. It’s called Del.icio.us, and this is my page there. It lets you archive nifty sites and keep them in one spot so that you can access them if you’re not at your home computer.

I’ve been putting some of my favorite places in there, and also just random things I tend to visit quite a bit, or have seen on other people’s lists which look very nifty. I was so suprised that my Mom’s forum had so few tags that place has so many visitors and members. Ah, well, perhaps just most of the members haven’t found Del.icio.us yet?

I can’t believe my son is 9 months old today! That’s so very scary and wonderful at the same time. He’s such a little chatterbox, he just recently learned to clap and now is showing off for everybody, he’s so excited about eating solids; although I do wish he would rein in his excitement and only eat actual foods instead of trying to eat everything in the house (including myself, my husband, remote controls, cell phones, pencils, paper…and whatever else he finds that I could have sworn I vacuumed up).

He’s certainly keeping us on our toes.

I’m actually managing to get ahead with some of the business endeavors I was looking into.For more info on one of those I was hoping to be doing that one here, but I don’t have enough blog entries, LOL. It’s so much easier for me to do things on LJ because I remember that one is there. This blog is newer and therefore not so ingrained in my memory, especially because even if people read here I tend not to hear from them through it so it lapses from my memory. I blame the baby for my memory going crazy but really it’s never been the best. I think I left half my brain in England.

I’ve been blessed lately. I just tend to not realize it in amongst all the stress of day to day life in a capitalist society.

I recieved a wonderful package just over a week ago from my punky secret swapper. I was able to christen the chopsticks set yesterday when we ordered out Chinese, and we’ve made plans to try out the sake set on Friday when D’s off work. I’ve yet to find a place to hang the calendar.

In the ways of non-material blessing which are infinitely more important but much harder to find ways to brag about I’m just being grateful that we have a place to live, are safe and sound from day to day (no matter how many times lately I wonder at that given the munchkin is SO mobile and into EVERYTHING).

So, I feel in some ways as though I’m fighting a losing battle because at least four or five times a  day I’m diving across the house extracting things from his possession that in some cases I had NO idea we even OWNED let alone how he found them and is attempting to put them in his mouth.

I run a marathon daily even though there have been days lately I’ve felt like I can barely walk.

Which brings us to another piece of good news for which I’m grateful. I have health insurance, or at least I will once the paperwork goes through. There’s nothing that makes you appreciate growing up with socialized medicine so much as no longer having it, and also no longer having employment so therefore no longer having an insurance program. But now the city my husband works for has a new manager and a new health insurance program whose cost is not prohibitive. So, hopefully I’ll be feeling more like myself and less like someone who is danced on by herds of elephants in the night, very helpful when you have a small child who is starting to walk.

I was recommended this comic via MSN messenger.

Book of Biff it’s a bit off the wall but really funny. Check it out.

Although I know we’re almost a week in at this point, but we’ve had a very busy time.

We were lucky to be able to get a Nintendo Wii for our family present to ourselves this year, and we and our friends had great fun trying to best each other at the sports game over New Years Eve, and finding out exactly how unfit we were. Now that I’ve been using the Wii as part of my exercise work out my age has progressed from 72 to 57! Although my husband is 32. I knew I was older than him but that’s ridiculous!

Anyway, I’ve also been geeky and have invested in Coppermine Photo Galleries, and installed that on the domain, so that I can actually get the Family Photo Album back up and have it be more secure. I’m also in the process of redoing the family blog and getting New Years letters typed up given I was unable to find the time to do our family newsletter for Christmas and actually send it out with cards.

I hope everyone has had a good New Year so far, and that 2007 continues to be a good one.

We’ve also had a very nice holiday season. We got to spend Yuletide together, and despite getting struck down by a hideous virus right as my brother-in-law and our nephew arrived from New York. The holidays themselves were fun and relatively sickness free, with a lot of family bonding on the in-law’s side, and my family’s side.

Christmas-time is still a bit strange from me because Florida is so unlike where I grew up climate wise and attitude wise and the holidays are when you really feel that most, but this year was a very nice time and I think I’m starting to feel more settled.