Just a reminder to get your entries in for this weeks Carnival of Family Life. There are a pretty good handful already, but keep them coming.

I also have been thinking about the prize one lucky entrant used to get. I wanted to find a way to use a prize to help encourage conversations amongst the carnival entrants. Having a prize encourages all of us to enter a post, but it does not really do much to encourage people to come back and read other people’s posts.

So, here is what we are going to try this week. I will pick one comment from one of the entries. The comment that I pick will not be something along the lines of “Nice post” or “I agree.” I’m looking to get some real discussions. A sentence or two is fine as long as it contributes in some way to the discussion. It will be randomly picked. I will list out all of the entries and assign them a number and have my wife pick a number. Then I will do the same thing for the comments in that post.

That commenter will win a $10 Amazon Gift Certificate.

To be eligible to win, you must have also entered your own post so make sure you enter your blogs URL when you comment so I can keep track of everybody (Preferably by using the URL box if available instead of dropping your URL directly in your comment).

Later in the week, I will write a post on this blog announcing the winner by linking to the comment they wrote. If there is a way to contact their winner directly from their site, I will do so. Otherwise they will need to use my contact form to send me their address.

UPDATE: It was brought to my attention that “later in the week” is not a very good deadline. I will be pick the winner on Wednesday Dec. 6th at 9pm CT.

This week will be a trial run. Once I see how it works this week, I will decide if I want to continue.

Also, anybody interested in sponsoring future carnivals with prizes of their own, please contact me to discuss how we can make it worthwhile for us and you.

Please let me know if you have any questions/concerns/complaints/jokes or just see something that I probably didn’t phrase correctly.