But Mommm: Community

by guest blogger, Deanna Cogdon Miller 

For the last week I have been wrestling with what I should write about in this blog post. After all, it’s the week before Christmas, this will be my last post before the end of the year and I’ve now been blogging for HRM Parent (and loving it) for a year. On top of all of these possibilities, I’m entering the last few days of a contest where my family could win $10,000 and because we’re in second place, I’m in desperate need (yes, I’m admitting my desperation) , of help from the community.

So for one of the first times in my life, I’m choose rational over emotional and going with the contest.

About two months ago we were in the car and I was keeping the kids busy with a friendly game of “I spy”. As my turn approached, I took notice of the radio dial that I knew both girls could see from the back seat. “I spy with my little eye something that is grey.” The girls hummed and hawed for a minute until suddenly my five year old yelled out, “I know Mom, those little hairs on the top of your head!!” The comment caught me so off guard that I burst out laughing – to be honest, I didn’t even know that I had an issue with that but I now foresee extended visits with my stylist in my future.

About a week later I was surfing the Today’s Parent website, as I often do, and came across a contest where you could enter funny things your kids that were the length of a tweet. So with my daughter’s quote top of mind, I submitted it and that was that. It wasn’t long before I noticed a tweet from Today’s Parent saying the ten national finalists had been announced in the contest. Since I hadn’t heard from them, I assumed we didn’t make it but of course I wanted to read the funny quotes so I hit the link to have a smile. As I made my way down the page, you can imagine my surprise when I came to the last of the top ten and it was mine! We had already won $100 for being a finalist and according to the site, the quote that received the highest number of votes by Thursday, December 22nd would win $10,000.

We set to work contacting family, friends and colleagues. We shared the link on facebook and started rallying people around us. The wild thing is that once you vote you are locked out for 24 hours but then you can go in and vote again. So essentially, we needed people to vote every 24 hours for four weeks. Everyone has been incredible and our supporters have kept us in the lead or a very close second.

In the past week, our main competitor has somehow pulled way ahead and in order to catch her, we need a pile of new people voting for us for the next four days. That’s where you come in. Please take a few minutes to join the Today’s Parent website for free (it’s a great resource and they don’t send spam). You can do that here where it says ‘join now’ on the top right: http://www.todaysparent.com/. It only takes a minute and once you’ve joined and are logged into the site, the easiest way to vote is to click on this link and it’ll take you directly to us: http://www.todaysparent.com/todayskidssay/tweet/11132. Click the green vote button, it’ll thank you for voting and our number will go up one. It’s as simple as that.

I know it’s an incredibly busy time of year but we would so appreciate you taking the time to vote once a day between now and Thursday. We are completely reliant on others to help us close the gap – please join the wild ride we’ve been on for the last few weeks and accept my apology for this completely self-serving blog post. I’m hoping that if you were this close to a prize like this, you’d do the same thing. Happy holidays everyone and thank you.

Deanna lives in Dartmouth with her husband and three children. When she’s not reading stories, dancing to ABBA or burping a baby, she works in communications for Bell Aliant.