Today's Quote 

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

My New Toys

I love her smile in her bumbo chair.  Click on pictures to zoom in and check out her pretty smile.

My new playmat and bumbo chair

My new mirror

My new jumper/swing

Mama's (Girls) Night Out -

Me, Susan and Val went out for some karaoke Friday night.  

Fame finds four-eared feline

The owners of Yoda — a cat with four ears — could use a couple of extra hands to answer their telephones.

Ted and Valerie Rock said they've been inundated with television offers and media inquiries since their son posted a photo of their smoke-colored cat on a Web site. That turned the four-eared feline from a suburban animal oddity into an instant Internet celebrity.

The Rocks, from the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, have fielded calls from “Good Morning America,” “Fox News” and “The Tyra Banks Show.” The cat's photo has graced the London Guardian and a British tabloid. The Daily Mail said if Batman had a cat, it would be Yoda.

“It's amazing,” Ted Rock said. “For the past few days, our phone has just been ringing off the hook.”

Yoda's extra ears give him a hint of a devilish appearance. The Rocks said they found him in 2006 while watching a Chicago Bears game at a Blue Island bar.

Some in the bar were passing the then-eight-week old kitten around, making fun of his extra set of ears, mocking his appearance and calling him names such as “Devil Cat” and “Beelzebub.”

It wasn't quite love at first sight, but the Rocks felt sorry for the cat and offered to adopt the kitten from the bar's owner, who kept the animal caged atop the bar for his customers' amusement.

The price of a mom: $138,095

A new report assigns a salary to a stay-at-home mother, based on the jobs she does in a normal week.

What's a mom worth?

According to one new report, $138,095 a year.

That's the figure in a report by Salary.com, which calculates the wages that would have been paid a stay-at-home mom in 2007 if she were compensated for all the elements of her "job." That total is up 3% from 2006's salary of $134,121.

Moms who have jobs outside the house would earn another $85,939 for their mothering work, beyond what they bring home in existing salary.

The job descriptions that Salary.com used to determine a mom's salary includes 10 jobs that moms do on an average day: housekeeper, day care center teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, CEO and psychologist.

Plenty of overtime:

In calculating a mom's wages, Salary.com looked at the "overtime" that both working and stay-at-home moms put in each week.

"Mom works multiple jobs and rarely gets a break from the action, working an average of 52 hours of overtime," said Bill Coleman, senior vice president at Salary.com, in a statement.

According to the Salary.com survey, stay-at-home moms work a 92-hour week, with more than half the workweek spent in overtime.

Working moms, meanwhile, logged more than nine hours of "overtime," with an average 49-hour "mom" work week -- on top of their full-time paying jobs.

For the Salary.com survey, more than 40,000 moms quantified their hours per job description; Salary.com benchmarked the median salaries for each job to the national median salary for each position as reported by employers.

The final salary was calculated by weighting the salaries and hours worked in each role.