Girlfriendology

Who couldn't use a bit less spending and a little more saving? RIGHT?! Today's guest, ANDREA DECKARD, knows a thing or two about pinching pennies and saving dollars - and she's sharing what she knows though a wonderful website: MOMMY SNACKS. As a busy mom of three cute boys, she manages to share helpful information for realistic consumers who just need to learn and find out these cost-saving tips that Andrea shares for ... FREE! Check out her site and come join us for this helpful conversation with Andrea, aka: Mommy Snacks.

RACHEL WRIGHT is not your ordinary soccer mom. She has been named one of the “Most Remarkable Women” on ABC’s The View and has been featured as an expert on The Today Show, sharing her sage advice with millions of women. In the spring of 2007 Rachel founded National Mom’s Night Out, an extremely successful campaign, to encourage moms to take time off from the kids and celebrate who they are besides being a mom. Rachel is the author of Bye-Bye Boardroom: Confessions From A New Breed of Stay-At-Home Moms and Mom's Night Out: Even Inmates Get Time Off for Good Behavior. Join us as we talk with Rachel about the upcoming MOM'S NIGHT OUT and how women are reinventing themselves!

Two girlfriends are making the work a better place for so many women in South Africa - come hear how they're making a difference! JENNIFER DAVIS is a busy mom who wanted to get involved in helping others. Now she leads the non-profit BEADED HOPE. Beaded Hope employs women in South Africa in making beaded items (jewelry, decorative items). They are sold in the U.S. (on Beaded Hope's website, in some stores and at special events) and the money is returned to South Africa to support the largest AIDS Hospice in that country. (I've been there - it's wonderful and the women are so amazing!) Jennifer and author CATHY LIGGETT became friends and a new book resulted: BEADED HOPE. We'll talk to them about this amazing book and their journey of making women's lives better. JOIN US!

Sometimes it isn't easy to find new friends. (And we all know how important female friendship is, right?!) GirlfriendCircles is an online database that matches and connects women, facilitating face-to-face friendships. Founded by our guest SHASTA NELSON, we'll talk about how many sites cater to networking, romance, maintaining existing relationships or building a virtual community but GirlfriendCircles connects local women into small groups to foster meaningful friendships. She wants to make sure that wherever you live and whatever your current needs are, that you have good friends in your circle.

We love women with a WISH to connect and benefit women. Like ... Tera Warner is just your average run-of-the-mill kinda gal. As she'll tell you - she’s got no credentials, so don't bother looking for them. She's not got a fancy vocabulary with a whole bunch of scientific words to impress you, either. But she's loaded with passion and has enough girl-power to fuel a community 30,000 women strong. Her online healthy lifestyle programs and websites helped prepare her to create WISH: Women's International Summit for Health. It has always been her WISH to create a program that would touch the lives of millions of women in a powerful way. We believe her WISH has come true.

Girlfriend - Love your self! A new kind of self-love expert, Christine Arylo, inspirational catalyst, takes a fresh approach to redefining self-love for today’s woman as hip, hot and hers. Arylo traded in 12 years of creating powerful images for brands like Visa and Gap, to inspire women to bust through their limiting self images and self-expectations. As an author, speaker, and coach, Arylo is an expert at helping women to get the success and happiness they want by living and loving their most real and wise selves first. She is the author of Choosing ME Before WE and the founder of the Madly in Love with ME™ movement. Come join us for this inspiring conversation and to find out about self-love at this upcoming event: Madly in Love with Me Celebration.

CATHY RAFF has a passion for friendship. After struggling with medical challenges and infertility, she decided to devote herself to inspiring friendships through her company "The Friendship Stone." She'll call in from Israel to join us on this wonderful conversation on friendship. Join us!

JOAN FEE joins us to talk about creativity & creative ways to get kids to be healthy. Joan Martin Fee has loved making crafty things for a zillion years! You might remember her from the Aleene's Creative Living television show where she appeared on over 500 segments demonstrating how to make craft projects. Joan later became the editor of Aleene's Creative Living Magazine and Aleene's Craft Club. Working as a freelance writer, editor and designer, Joan is also very involved with COPE (Center for Obesity Prevention and Education) at California Polytechnic State University serving on the Community Advisory Committee for the organization as well as on the committee for the HANDS on Health Festival / Symposium. Her knowledge, skill, and amazing creativity make her a guiding force in designing kids' crafts that are healthy, easy and fun.

Stepfanie Romine is editor and writer of dailySpark.com, the healthy lifestyle blog by SparkPeople. She is an experienced writer and editor and a certified Ashtanga yoga teacher who has lived and cooked on three continents. In addition to healthy green living and from-scratch cooking, her passions include learning new languages, throwing vegetarian dinner parties, and teaching and practicing yoga with her girlfriends. Stepfanie tries to promote kindness in all she does and loves sharing stories about people and their passions. We're talking about health, fitness, resolutions and SparkPeople's new book - ?THE SPARK?.

Are you ready for 2010? Have you set your goals and a strategy to reach them? If you're a solopreneur or not, setting goals and creating a plan is the only way to reaching your dreams. So ... We're talking with DONNA AMOS on this special Monday edition of our BlogTalkRadio show. (Usually it's a fun, friend-filled Friday but we're in holiday mode so doing it on a Monday.) Donna is President and Founder of the International Association of Solopreneurs as well as a serial solopreneur running her own coaching practice. She is a passionate, positive believer in the untapped potential of individuals. Her joy comes from helping others discover their potential. Listen in as we talk about planning for reaching our dreams in 2010!

BE BRIGHT PINK Why should young women be concerned about breast or ovarian cancer? LINDSAY AVNER knows! She's founder of ?BE BRIGHT PINK organization.? This is the only national non-profit organization with an exclusive focus on prevention and early detection of breast and ovarian cancer in high-risk young women. Their mission is to empower young women to be proactive, not reactive - to see themselves as advocates for their health, not victims of a disease. ? Join us as we learn more about how to take care of ourselves and our girlfriends by learning together.

Do you celebrate your friendships? How? We'll talk with girlfriends TINA VAN ZANT BISHOP and DAWN WILLIAMS BERTUCA, founders of Girlfriend Celebrations, about how we need to celebrate our friendships. They'll share ideas on girlfriend celebrations for the holidays, birthdays and just any day . Join us to find out more about Tina and Dawn and how their friendship is inspiring women!

How would you get by without hope? Angelia White is Publisher, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Hope for Women Magazine. Her passionate dedication towards the Magazine has been evolving for almost a decade, and Angelia is proud to see her hard work come to fruition. Not only does Angelia oversee the entire workings of HOPE, but she also strategically brings her experience onto the scene. She has a background in publishing and is owner and president of Virtuous Publications, Inc., which serves as the Magazine’s publishing company. Angelia has over 20 years experience in business administration and is a business graduate of Ball State University. We're excited to talk with Angelia about HOPE and the power that it has for women. Join us!

Where there's food, a lot of times there are females - and vice versa. This isn't just a co-incidence! ANDREA ISRAEL and her girlfriend Nancy Garfinkel decided to write about this their new book, THE RECIPE CLUB - A TALE OF FOOD AND FRIENDSHIP. The Recipe Club is a 'novel cookbook' with a story and 80 recipes. Andrea will share with us all about writing this book and why food + females often = friends. Join us for this great conversation! Overview by Amazon: "Loyalty, loss, and the ties that bind. These are the ingredients of The Recipe Club, a "novel cookbook" that combines an authentic story of friendship with more than 80 delicious recipes. Lilly and Val are lifelong friends, united as much by their differences as by their similarities. Lilly, dramatic and confident, lives in the shadow of her beautiful, wayward mother and craves the attention of her distant, disapproving father. Val, shy and idealistic—and surprisingly ambitious— struggles with her desire to break free from her demanding housebound mother and a father whose dreams never seem to come true. The Recipe Club sustains Lilly and Val's bond through the decades, regardless of what different paths they take or what misunderstandings threaten to break them apart . . . until the fateful day when an act of kindness becomes an unforgivable betrayal. Now, years later, while trying to recapture the trust they've lost, Lilly and Val reunite once more—only to uncover a shocking secret. Will it destroy their friendship, or bring them ever closer?"

Female friendships are some of the most powerful and beautiful relationships in our lives. They are life-changing, dramatic and often fleeting. Yet sometimes we still find it hard to express our true sentiments to the women closest to us. In P.S.: What I Didn't Say - Unsent letters to our female friends, editor MEGAN McMORRIS gathers a collection of unsent letters from various women writers to their female friends, representing a wide range of unsaid emotions. P.S. includes expressions of love, feelings of anger, and friends apologizing to those they have drifted apart from. Join us as we talk with Megan about this touching, insightful and inspiring book. You might just want to write a girlfriend after hearing her!