Gwendolyn Turns Four! (weeks)

I guess the title of the post is pretty self explanatory.

Here's a picture of our little cherub (sometimes she's not as cherubic as others) at four weeks. This of course was today. Just four weeks ago we were happily and perhaps rather tiredly sitting around in a hospital room with loads of company (my family). I guess those are the times of which memories are made.

Gwendolyn came into this world at exactly 7 lbs, and has been doing just fine ever since. We weighed her tonight, and she was exactly 8 lbs 13.2 oz. So her average (I have a spreadsheet for this, I assume that's normal) is an increase of 1.04 oz per day since birth. One of Jenny's books about babies assures us that it's normal for a newborn to grow at an average of 4 oz weekly for the first month. We're at 7.3 oz per week (spreadsheets are fun). So I guess she's going to be a little porker soon at this rate.

Anyway, maybe I should get on my soap box for a bit. Or rather maybe I should just tell you my experience with a certain thing that you may have heard about. Swagbucks. I thought it was getting such rave reviews by some folks that I'd try it out. If you're tempted by the idea of getting money back for searching the web, etc, you can give it a try for yourself. Basically, they pay you (minutely) for using a search engine that gives advertisements for search results. You have to set it as your default search engine, or go to the swagbucks site to search in order to get credit/ "swagbucks" for your search. Depending what you search for you may get points or you may not. Supposedly it doesn't reward you based on what you search for, but I'm not so certain. Eventually, at least in theory, the points add up to enough that you can redeem them on the swagbucks site for stuff.

I used it for about three weeks and never got enough points to redeem for anything. I think there could be two reasons for that. Either I don't spend enough time surfing the web randomly, or else my searches aren't the kind of searches companies are willing to shell out money to get "found" on. In other words, if you search for a retail item or merchandise of some kind, swagbucks will dole out the points because you are looking at the "add" space they are selling to companies. If you are searching for information on say, "pruning grapevines", you aren't as likely to get points for that search, because you aren't searching for something someone can sell you. So for me who doesn't surf all day for new merchandise it was pretty useless. It seems to me that if they didn't pay people to use their search engine, no one would since their top results are 100% advertising on every search.

I could have got on here and said how wonderful it was and given you all a link to click to sign up (cause that would have given me points), but I think I'll just skip that since I cancelled my account and went back to a useful search engine. Now I'll get off my soap box.

~GB