My good friend Susanne Myers, “The Hillbilly Housewife”, comes up with the best things!  She just published a fun e-book “The ABC’s of Christmas” and after a bit of coaxing, I convinced her to let me share it with you!  You see, she runs a really fun club, called the Hillbilly Housewife Club, (that I am a member of) and in the club the past few weeks, we’ve been talking a lot about homemade and frugal gift ideas.  To really get our creative juices flowing, one of the members started a post in the forum called the ABCs of Christmas Gift Giving.  This e-book is a compilation of the best ideas from those forum posts.  So for every letter of the alphabet there are several gift ideas.  These are really fun and creative – a lot of things I hadn’t thought about!  For example B:  Baking Lessons and I:  Ice Candles  (I had never heard of those!)

Before I tell you how to grab your copy of the e-book, I also wanted to let you know that Susanne has decided to extend her Thanksgiving special offer, to you, for a Hillbilly Housewife Club Membership.  This is such a great deal!  (I honestly can’t believe she is offering memberships this cheap, but SHHHH don’t tell her I said that – I don’t want her to change her mind.)  It is normally $15 per month to be a member of the club (see
here:  http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/christine )  But until Wednesday – Dec. 9th, she is offering a year membership for $50 or a 6 month membership for $30!  That is like paying for a little over 3 months to get a YEAR worth of access, or paying for 2 months and getting 4 months free!  That is a total no-brainer to me!  At any rate, obviously she can’t extend this offer much longer (it took work to convince her to leave it up for you guys until Wednesday) so hurry over and grab your membership while you still can!  http://www.dinewithoutwhine.com/hbhwsale

And no, I didn’t forget.  Here is your ABC’s of Christmas Ebook http://www.dinewithoutwhine.com/abcgifts-christine.pdf Enjoy it, I know I did!

C-

I am pleased to itroduce you to Miss Annika Rose Steendahl!  She was born Oct. 14th, 2008 at 8:10 p.m. weighing 8 pounds 10 ounces and 20″ long.  We are getting used to having a baby around the house again.  She loves being held and keeps us very busy, but we of course love her to pieces!  Her three big brothers think she is pretty great as well!

Christine
“The Menu Mom”

Hi there,

If you have visited Menu Planning Central in the last week or so, you have probably noticed that things aren’t quite right.  Last week our web-host was doing some minor maintenance on our site. When he finished he went to restore our site from the back-up. The only problem? For some reason the back-up feature had not been working properly since September. Apparently this had never happened before to our hosting company, but it happened to us. Therefore, when our site was restored, it was restored back to September.

What does this mean exactly?
- Most member accounts were deleted
- My Menu Maker Recipes were all deleted
- The Blog disappeared
- The Forum only has posts from Sept. and before

As you can imagine the staff and I were devastated. For one we lost hundreds of hours of work, second we obviously lost quite a bit of income, but most importantly we let you – our customers down. After the initial panic, we spent hours crying and trying to decide what to do.

Honestly, we considered just closing Menu Planning Central’s doors and writing the business off. However, after we came to our senses, we realized that we still feel very strongly that menu planning is an important issue, therefore we have decided to work our tails off and re-open Menu Planning Central’s doors.

Here’s what you need to know:

- All Accounts have been cancelled
- If you don’t want to continue as a MPC member, you don’t need to do anything
- If you would like to remain a Menu Planning Central, you will need to sign-up again with a new account
- If you are an affiliate, you should have been contacted by Nicole our affiliate manager with information.

Here’s where we’re at:

- We are working hard at re-entering recipes into My Menu Maker
- We have moved our hosting to a dedicated server to hopefully prevent anything like this from ever happening again
- We need YOU to continue to join us and help us rebuild. We will be re-opening our doors today. We will be offering past members the first month for $.01 and then every month from then on out at $9.97 per month. We will be offering new members a half-price discount – $9.97 per month instead of $19.97 per month – good though the end of January.

If you have any questions, please contact our support desk at
support@menuplanningcentral.com

Thanks for helping us rebuild Menu Planning Central!
Christine Steendahl
“The Menu Mom”