What a day it was! Yesterday I turned 32. It’s kind of the same as being 31, only with a rounder number (and quite possibly a rounder waist?). Wanna know what I got? I cleaned up good, yo!

Let’s start with this gem. It wasn’t actually a birthday gift, but it might as well be. Last week I won a contest at Crossway books and they sent me a brand new leather ESV Study Bible! It’s gorgeous. And I love reading it. Love, love, love the single column text, the really cool study notes and great illustrations. It’ll take a bit of time to get used to a format that’s different from my chain reference Bible, but that was NASB and this is ESV, and oh, I love it.

Then there was this. I married a man who does not cook. Does not generally step foot in the kitchen unless it’s to clean up a mess, make a sandwich, or well, let’s be fair, make coffee. I told him a week or two before my birthday that I only want 1 present. A homemade cake. Made by him. He laughed at me. Asked which bakery I’d like my cake to be ordered from. But I insisted, and he came through. Oh, how he came through. Look at how beautiful it is! Look how he decorated it! And oh, if you could taste it… But you can’t. Because I ate the whole thing. Well, I shared a little, but I would have eaten the whole thing. Holy smokes, my man can bake!

He had a little help. Only in my house we sometimes spell help as h-i-n-d-e-r!

Got milk?

And then I got this. I’ve been carrying a well loved Coach bag (a Christmas present from a while back) for a couple years. And the leather is wearing thin. And it’s starting to look a little raggedy. So my mom got me this. And check this out. My new Claire V. purse was made by women in Cambodia who have suffered the tragic consequences of genocide and land mines. And it’s silk. Silk damask, in fact. And oh-my-gosh-gorgeous!

And then I got this book, which is great. And this one too. It’s my 3rd copy of that one – I keep giving away my copy… And a few accessories for my iPod, err,  iPot, as Bean calls it. And best of all, my kids gave me some lovin.

We ended the day in my room with my iPod hooked up to my new iPod speaker (thanks, hubbs!) while me and my kids danced to Ingrid Michaelson, and finished that off with a few lively rounds of ring-around-the-rosie. Good times.

It was a great way to ring in 32.

Little Man was laying on the floor playing with legos. He was on his tummy, with his legs from the knee down tucked under the couch. Bruiser walked in, saw that the couch was swallowing his big brother, and he literally ran to the rescue, with that cute little 18-month old run where his feet desperately try to keep up with the momentum of the rest of his body.

Bruiser went straight for the couch and pushed as hard as he could. When it didn’t budge he grabbed Little Man (much to Little Man’s dismay) and pulled and pulled. Little Man didn’t budge either. Bruiser began to cry – he couldn’t rescue his brother from the people-eating couch! It took some convincing, and then a lot of distracting to get Bruiser to calm down and let Little Man lie comfortably where he was. Eventually Little Man, with eyes rolling, pulled his legs out from under the couch, showed Bruiser that all was well in the world, and then replaced his legs under the sofa.

It was a welcome change from the typical sibling rivalry. In fact, it was good to see Bruiser concerned about him, since just the other day he refused to play ring-around-the-rosie if it meant holding Little Man’s hand.

I’ve come to love twitter, and you can find me as kcozonac. To tell you why I love Twitter, I want to share a few Twitter finds with you this morning.

From @Phil_Johnson_:

From @mashable 26% of teens have texted while driving. (And WordPress doesn’t think “text” can be a verb…)

From @PauloCoelho “I have never used Twitter” says @BarackObama (that is, his Twitter ID) to Chinese students. (So much for setting an example of transparency…)

So, do you tweet?

When Little Man gets really sleepy – as in, beyond the tired, whiny phase where every disappointment results in a meltdown – he settles down a bit, snuggles up to me, and very carefully, very gently winds his fingers through my hair.

Cherishing the moment here.

Your three year old can use your iPhone apps better than you.

Is this what they mean when they say kids grow up too fast?

I don’t know about you, but ABC’s story today (that I found because people tweeted it) about Russian officials wearing ridiculously expensive watches was in my category of non-news. Having lived and traveled extensively in that part of the world, it doesn’t surprise me that Russian officials wear status symbols on their wrists. It doesn’t surprise me that they may have accepted them as bribes, that they give them away like candy, or that they might actually be able to afford them, given all the pies they have their thumbs stuck in.

What does surprise me is that any serious journalist would turn it into a story. Come on, people. Is anyone delusional enough to think that Russian officials exercise transparency, honesty, and integrity? Sure, there might be one or two – and it would be a much better story to find out which Russian officials (if any) have scruples, and if so, how on earth they got into their positions.

It doesn’t matter that Bean is home from school for the 4th day in a row. Or that we’ve long since run out of rainy day ideas for things to do in the house. Or that Bruiser knows what buttons to push to make our hair stand on end.

All that matters is that I have a steaming cup of Harry & David Witch’s Brew coffee in my hands. (spare me the comments about me and my attitude resembling the proverbial witch…) Well, that and the fact that hubbs took this picture of Bruiser yesterday:

I can’t stop laughing. Now that’s expression!

Can you hear me now?

These days I’m feeling a wee bit as if I had multiple personality disorder. Remember when I told you, say, about a week ago, that I was giving up on the family-friendly blog thing and moving on to a profit-driven online mumbo-jumbo geared to my job hunt?

Well, hubbs and I solved that problem. No jobs, at least not yet. But we’ve started a consultancy, and our little consultancy website gives me a place to put all those boring posts about, you know, the real world and stuff. Business, marketing, copywriting… blah, blah, blah…

So Mudlark Tales can return to what it was originally meant to be – a place to sit down over a cup of coffee and embarrass my children write about life.

Speaking of which, today I mentioned to hubbs that I’d take the boys with me when I was running errands, you know, “to get them out of your hair.” Bean replied, “But mama! He doesn’t have any hair!”

And my dad saw Bruiser put on one of Bean’s pretty headbands, so he taught him to say “gay.” Gee, thanks dad.

And Little Man? Well, he still shoots off scary things (like thunderstorms) with his imaginary quill of arrows, but as of today he can also pull off a very convincing Spiderman move. After which he announces nonchalantly, “Yeah, that’s my new Spiderman move. I just learned it.” (I think he actually picked up a Tarzan move from the Disney movie, but I suppose Spiderman could use it just as well.)

From Halloween – the dragon/dinosaur/aligator, the giraffe, and the witch.

I’ve always loved the Ukrainian city of L’viv (or L’vov, as Russians call it). It was the first city outside the US that I spent considerable time in, and its cobblestone streets and Parisian architecture are enchanting.

L’viv got creative recently and installed what might be the world’s biggest crossword puzzle.

This 10-story apartment building has a crossword that’s blank by day but the answers appear at night. Clues to the crossword are found at various locations throughout the city, and, as you might expect in the center of Ukranian nationalism, the crossword is in, you guessed it – Ukrainian.

Thanks to Jessica Lee for her post about the effectiveness of Facebook pages. Between SEO benefits and news feed postings, it’s hard to imagine why marketers wouldn’t use Facebook pages. Add to that the use of rich media and it means that you can publish video directly to the news feed and profile pages of all your fans.

Ben & Jerry’s, with close to a million fans, has a well-designed dynamic FB page, complete with pictures, frequent wall postings, and embedded links. All they’re missing is video.

With polling capability and Facebook’s page management system, complete with tracking and statistics, FB pages are much more useful than groups or even causes. Barack Obama’s page is only 2/3 as popular as Ben and Jerry’s, and Starbucks is about half as popular, even though they seem to have left it mostly static.

The big question is, how many of their Facebook page visitors and fans translate into transactions – either online participation or actual revenue stream? Or have we moved past transaction thinking into a realm where traditional stats don’t tell the whole picture?