The Mom Trap: A Mommy Review Blog: parenting

FREE eBOOK translates common chat and IM abbreviations, helps parents identify dangerous online cyber bullying situations.
If you have no idea what your kids are saying in text messages, IMs or emails, you are not alone. To help parents identify potentially dangerous internet risks, TrueCare, a provider of a comprehensive Internet monitoring service for parents, to announced the availability of a new eBook titled “IDK (I don’t know) What My Kids Are Saying Online”

This free ebook, available for download from the TrueCare.net website, includes some of the most commonly used online abbreviations used by kids when they instant message, email or chat online using social networking websites. But be warned, some of the abbreviations are not for children. The ebook includes a number of abbreviations that may be warning signs that your kids are chatting with strangers or engaging in dangerous online behavior.

“Parents have a responsibility to know what their children are doing and saying online,” said David Barker, spokesperson for TrueCare.net. “At TrueCare, our primary concern is keeping children safe from the dangers of online social networking. We’ve released I Don’t Know What My Kids Are Saying Online because we want to give parents easy access to this ever-changing language, so they can decode what their kids are saying to their friends.”

Some of most popular codes kids use when texting and chatting might surprise you. Did you know that MOS means “Mom over Shoulder?” Here are a few other abbreviations you might not know:
• CD9 means “Parents are Around”

• ASL means “Age, Sex and Location?”

• DOC means “Drug of Choice”

• MIRL means “Meet in Real Life”

Learn about these abbreviations and many more by downloading the FREE eBOOK at: www.truecare.net/idk

First my first Tuesday Tribute, I thought I'd do a nice tribute...to my mom.

I choose my mom because who better to pay tribute to than the person who gave you life.

And not only did she give me life, but she has stood beside me every step of the way. Even when I didn't deserve it.

She raised me to know right from wrong. To be a good person. To be independent and strong.

And I know I disappointed her during my teenage years. Boy, was I a handful.

I remember when she learned that at the age of 17 that I was going to be a mother myself. She was so disappointed in me. She'd had such high hopes for my future - college, a wedding, then children.

In a split second, I was destroying all her dreams.

I had never seen my mother so devastated. I thought she would never forgive me.

Five months later, I gave her a grandson. While her hopes had been crushed, you could never tell the way she held her grandson and looked at him.

And each and every time I have had a child (four times in all), she has been there by my side; she has been my strength in the most difficult of parental situations. She has loved her grandchildren without conditions, even when they too have disappointed her with choices they made (well, the oldest two - the only ones old enough to be held accountable).

After having my first child, she once told me that once you are a parent, you are a parent for life. I'm not quite sure that at 18 I understood that, but I do now. Because even as life hands me lemons, she is there to remind me how to make lemonade.