Everything that happens in a baby’s first year is exciting. We can’t wait to hear them talk and see them walk. We are thrilled to be with them as they experience their first Halloween and their first Christmas. They may not remember this year as they get older but we will … and we’ll always have the photographs to show them how much they were loved and appreciated as soon as they were born.

Unfortunately, we can get trapped into spending a whole lot of money in this first year because of the excitement that we have about it. For example, many people spend a lot of money on infant halloween costumes. They want to see their child all dressed up in fairy costumes or dog costumes because of how completely adorable it will be.

Another big area of spending is the first birthday party. We want it to be big and elaborate and memorable so we call in the clowns and get the photographic birthday cake. It’s not bad to spend money on our babies like this but it’s important to keep in mind that these times don’t actually require a lot of cash. You might be better off going the cheap route while they’re still young enough to appreciate it because pretty soon those kids are going to be asking for more money than you’ve got!

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When my sister and I were growing up, we had these crazy neighbors whom we were very scared of.  It was an old couple with cranky dispositions and a backyard full of orchids.  I can remember them yelling at us for climbing over our own fence, riding our bikes on the sidewalk (evidently they wanted us to get run over), and for setting our sprinklers so that the overspray watered their precious flowers.

Our neighbors put a lot of effort into their orchids, that’s for sure.  If anyone ever was an expert on orchid flower care, it would be them!  Seriously, if you asked them about phalaenopsis orchid care or cattleya care, you’d probably get a full lecture on the subject.  They even experimented in creating their own hybrids.

Even though they still live next door to my parents today, they don’t seem to have changed much.  I often joke that they were old 20 years ago, so what does that make them now…?  They are still as cranky as ever, of course, although they don’t seem as scary now as they did when I was eight.

Technorati Tags: childhood, neighbors, orchid flower care, phalaenopsis orchid care, cattleya care

Christmas time is about giving, and being conscious of what you have while others may not be so lucky. While some people are prone to helping their fellow man at Christmas time, many people prefer the company of four-legged people, or pets, during the time of brotherly love. Making donations of fancy dog beds, collars and leashes, dog toys, and other types of dog furniture is a great way of making sure that you are doing your part for your pet community this Christmas.

What costs a few bucks to you could really help the local Humane Society or shelter in your area, (check out the ASPCA website to find locations) to make a comfortable, festive place for the community pets this Christmas and hopefully entice people to feel festive enough to take somebody home for the holidays.

Of course, you don’t have to donate any particularly fancy beds for dogs this Christmas, but any type of bed will do. Fancy dog beds are great for a while, especially during Christmas time when workers do their best to spruce everything up at the shelter but after a while they just become some regular dog bed as it is.

On the other hand, if you are taking a pet home this Christmas to become part of your family, the fancier dog beds may be a better idea. Not only are they going to look that much better in your home as part of your décor, but the Christmas holiday is a great time to get in the habit of buying your four-legged friend the best of everything there is from dog furniture to collars and leashes to toys and just about everything else.

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The enigma of a drowned continent has stimulated wonder among students of the unknown and confounded academics for more than two thousand years. In the modern Info-Age, Online book store readers have at their disposal a wide variety of literature theorizing about the myth of Atlantis, both from a scholarly perspective and a more fantastic read.

There are more ideas concerning what the nature of this legendary locale engendered and beneath which sea the wisdom of the ancients can be recovered than virtually any other story of a Golden Age. Yet the tale of an advanced culture which preceded ours has lived on precisely because it resonates so clearly in the New Age.

New Age icon Edgar Cayce wrote of Atlantis as a vast continent, rivaling the dimensions of Greenland. As it is told in the seer’s amazing version, the Atlanteans had mastered powerful psionic abilities and tools, and were the progenitors of the strangely reminiscent solar-worshiping civilizations of the early Mesopotamians and the Empires of native America. The topic is frequently associated with reincarnation as well as the paranormal, and is part of the mythos of Awakening 2012 prophesies.

Plato, student of Socrates, first began to write detailing a mythical continent, known as Atlantis, during the height of his own Athenian civilization. He believed the lost Island lay near the Straits of Gibraltar and thrived until approximately ten millennia before his time. Hypotheses on the location of the "Lost Continent" stretch from the Far East to the Western Atlantic, though, as might be expected the likeliest candidates that are islands in the vicinity, most notably Sardinia and Malta.

The mystery may always remain concerning the actual details, however, the evidence appears overwhelming: human kind has attained great levels of sophistication rising and falling in a process of development and decimation, maybe over and again, long before that which we commonly regard as being "beginning".

Technorati Tags: New Age, Metaphysics, History, reincarnation, science fiction, myth, philosophy, prophesy, past lives, magic, paranormal, spiritual