Mothers Day is my absolute favorate special day of the year.  It’s better than birthdays as those have gotten tedious over the years, nothing more than a contstant reminder that I’m growing older.  Mother’s Day, on the hand, is all about the love we share with our children, who we love unconditionally and could not think of a life worth living with out them.

Personally, I have never been a very traditional person when it comes to holidays thrusted upon me by Hallmark Greeting cards and mass marketing in the name of consumerism.  Our family chooses to celebrate said holidays in our own special way and rather low key.  That being said, we create celebrations for honoring one another, great moments we share, rights of passage, and the goodness and awesomeness of life in general.

Our most recent celebration was my husband, Michael’s, return home after being in the hospital for ten days. This past Easter Sunday was spent wearing surgical masks, gowns and gloves while visiting him in isolation with a contagious infection. Easter was a perfect day and a cause for celebration, nonetheless, because we were able to spend it together as a family and there was lots of love flowing in the room.  

We also recently celebrated my twelve year old son, Vincent’s, new braces.  The day before he got them,  we went out and ordered two racks of ribs and corn on the cob, two things he loves and won’t be able to eat for the next couple of years. A right of passage and a celebration worth honoring par none.

Today has been a perfect Mother’s day because I am blessed with a family I love.  We just got back from a local dive chowing down Mexican food. I was then presented with a beautiful card from my twelve year twins, Vincent and Noel.  No, it wasn’t a store bought Mother’s Day card from the Hallmark store. They proudly presented me with a three-dimensional diorama made of hand-made origami they had been secretly working on in Noel’s bedroom with a do not enter sign the door. It was absolutely beautiful and of course I cried mother’s tears.

I will cherich this gift along with all the other perfect gifts they have given me over the years – Christmas tree ornaments made out Popsicle sticks, pencil holders (50 at least) , lopsided pottery dishes, tree looking things wrapped in celephane and lots of other cool stuff - they are my pride and joy possessions.

I hope all you Mothers out there are having fabulous, blessed day with your kids. I know I am.  Life is good!

As usual Google chose a holiday to roll out index and Page Rank updates. This morning many webmasters woke up to see their site’s placement had changed. One of the first things I noticed was many more You Tube listings taking up top spots in the SERPS. This had to infuriate webmasters who worked so hard to obtain top placement, only to have a video take their top rankings. Much like the natives at the first Thanksgiving, Google can either give or take away, depending upon how well we Pilgrims communicate with them.

Over the last two months there has been an unprecedented amount of information pouring out of Google and their voices to the lowly like Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye. They have given a lot of good tips for webmasters to follow including how to avoid duplicate content penalties and why paid links can kill your site. Over the next month I will be digesting these topics and telling everyone what they were really saying.

Take a look at all your placement and Page Rank. You should also manually look at your primary keywords rather than use an automated rank tracking program. I have found that automatic rank tracking tools like Web Position are useful for an overall visibility score, but are useless when looking at Google’s own trends and changes. As they push their own properties to the top of the SERPS other sites have to move out. Hopefully Google will remove spam sites rather than good content producing sites.