Rocket Moms Fall 2011 Session

Challenge #1 -- About Me

We were tasked with creating a lens about anything from about our lives to about a favorite hobby, travel spot, pet, or anything else that tells about ourselves.

I'd done some 'About Me' challenges in previous RocketMoms sessions, but they were all about much lighter, breezier aspects of my life. For this one, I knew I had to get closer to the heart to talk about the process that had been consuming inordinate amounts of my time and emotional energy over the past several months.

Embryo adoption.

Fall 2011 marked the official acceptance of my husband and I into an embryo adoption program. We'd been wanting to expand our family since our daughter was born, and after a lot of prayer, research and thought we embarked on this particular journey. During this RocketMoms session, I also created an adoptive family profile book, which was very fun and a labor of love, but also incredibly time-consuming.

What is embryo adoption, you ask? Actually that's the overarching reason why I created the lens for this challenge -- to explain what embryo adoption and embryo donation are and how they work. It's not something on most people's radar and can be a bit complex to explain, so I was excited to have this lens (which had been brewing in my mind for awhile) match up beautifully with the first challenge of RocketMoms Fall 2011.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hey__paul/6137000776/

Challenge #2 -- October Fun!

This was all about creating great fall lenses, whether they be about Halloween, fall festivals, fall foods, crafts, etc. Anything fall or October-related was fair game.

The lens I created for this challenge easily married several of my favorite foods (pumpkin, chocolate, muffins) with one of my favorite topics, gluten-free recipes. I was diagnosed with a wheat allergy at age 25, so wheat-free/gluten-free recipes have become my stock and trade. One of my delights is making over 'regular' recipes into gluten-free ones that taste so good no one even suspects they're gluten-free. Another of my delights is sharing the recipe love.

Pumpkin is such an icon of fall, and it's a flavor that I rarely tire of, so these fabulous muffins that I make year-round were a clear choice for me. I'm about to go bake another batch now, actually. Writing about them has made me hungry.

photo credit: http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/BunnyFabulous

More Gluten-Free Eating

Challenge #3 -- Nice (Super) Niche

A niche is a specific topic within a broader category. For example, 'wedding invitations' is a niche within the category of weddings. A super niche is even more specialized. 'Traditional wedding invitations' is a super niche of 'wedding invitations'

Woo hoo! One of my favorite niches to write about is Toys for Babies and Toddlers, and this challenge gave me an excuse to build out another super-niche within that: Top toys for babies 3-6 months. I'd been building out a Top Toys for Toddlers series, and it was about time to work on the baby end of things. It brought back lots of happy memories of my daughter enjoying some great baby toys and playing with and alongside her.

I like to play and explore almost as much as my daughter does. If I could have a dream job alongside being a stay at home mom, it would be a toy tester like Tom Hanks' character in the movie 'Big', so I figure writing Squidoo lenses about toys is the next best thing!

photo credit: http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/BunnyFabulous

More Toy Lenses by BunnyFabulous

Challenge #4 -- In the Kitchen!

RocketMoms were challenged to make a cooking or food lens centered around fall.

Hmm. I'd already done my favorite fall recipe in challenge #2 so my mind wandered around to a few different ideas before coming up with a solution for a common dillema -- at least in my family. We tend to eat Thanksgiving dinner mid-afternoon, so if you eat a regular lunch you won't be hungry for the big meal, but going from breakfast straight to Thanksgiving dinner, you end up wanting to eat a chair leg in the meantime.

What to do?

In general, we tend to have some snacks out during the day on Thanksgiving to keep the natives from getting too restless waiting for dinner. Since we watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade AND football, it's nice to have some tasty tidbits on hand to go with those as well. Voila --- the lens idea was born. I also needed an excuse to talk about the adorable turkey veggie trays I've seen and to make my sister's pumpkin dip again to take a photo of it. Do you like my rationalizations? ;)

photo credit: http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/BunnyFabulous

Challenge #5 -- Picture Perfect

You know the saying 'every picture tells a story'? With this challenge, we were tasked with picking one of our own photos to display in a lens introduction and creating the rest of the lens around it.

So many photos! So hard to choose! I think I have around a bazillion photos on my computer, many with great stories. I went through my iPhoto gallery, but none of them seemed to jump out at me until I saw the one of my daughter packing herself and her blankie and stuffed animals in a moving box.

I had to coordinate 90% of the move myself since my husband was traveling extensively for work at the time, so I was forced to come up with more ways to make the whole thing the easiest possible for myself and our then-two-year-old daughter. I learned a lot about how kids adjust to moves and made up some fun new games in the process. Why not share what I learned with the world?

Moving was a big event for last fall when we sold our house due to economic reasons. So this year we were celebrating one year in our new/old house. Ironically enough, we moved back into the house we'd first lived in as a married couple. The guy we sold it to then rented it back to us. We finally got to enjoy some of the improvements we made to it when we sold it to him back in 2004!

photo credit: http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/BunnyFabulous

Challenge #6 -- Dream Vacation

Pretty simple explanation -- writing a lens about my dream vacation.

Fortunately for me, we could write about a dream vacation we'd already been on. My husband had surprised me with a honeymoon to French Polynesia; in particular the islands of Tahiti, Moorea and Bora Bora, and it was an incredibly amazing experience...a feast for the senses.

Especially meaningful is that I got to write this French Polynesian Honeymoon lens just weeks after our 10th wedding anniversary. I'm so blessed to be married to him, and to me, crafting that lens was a tribute to the thoughtful, adventurous, joyful man that he is. We would LOVE to go back to the Society Islands someday. Maybe he'll surprise me again!

photo credit: http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/BunnyFabulous

Purple Star Winning Lenses

On Squidoo, a purple star signifies a standout lens with excellent content. I'm both proud of and humbled by having earned six purple stars to date, half of which were crafted for RocketMoms challenges.

RocketMoms Fall 2011 Challenge Compilation Lenses

Want to see what all the RocketMoms created for their challenges? Here's a compilation lens for each challenge