Swistle: Reviews

Hellmann's? Where Did It Go?

2011-11-22T13:33:00.001-05:00

Are you looking for the Hellmann's review post? It's over here now! Sorry for the mix-up!

Home Depot Fall Energy Review

2011-11-15T11:00:00.002-05:00

We bought our house ten years ago. It was built in 1960 and not much had been updated since then, so over the years we've been gradually making changes. We had guys come and spray that shredded newspaper stuff all over the attic. When the roof needed to be reshingled, we also had roof vents put in. When my dad put in a second bathroom for us, he replaced the old drafty window with a modern energy-efficient one. When our electric water heater needed replacing, we replaced with a gas model. When we remodeled the bathroom, we chose a more water-efficient toilet than our old 1960s aqua one. (I would have been sorrier to see that pretty vintage aqua go if it hadn't been heavily stained with nicotine.) (I HOPE it was nicotine.)

You get the idea: it would have been incredibly overwhelming and expensive to swoop into our new house and convert it all at once, but by doing it gradually over ten years (mostly at points when a change needed to be made anyway, such as when there was a big puddle in the basement and we suddenly had no hot water), we've managed to make a lot of changes without too much stress or extra expense. Not to mention the money the changes have saved us on utility bills.

We also make a lot of smaller changes. I dithered over switching to fluorescent bulbs for AGES before realizing it didn't have to be all-or-nothing: if I didn't want fluorescent lighting when I was looking in the mirror, we could still switch to fluorescent in the basement and kitchen where I didn't care. And even though it would have been extremely expensive to replace every bulb in the house at once, it wasn't bad at all if I just bought a bulb or two at a time and replaced each incandescent bulb as it burned out.

Paul got some rain barrels on Freecycle and used them to water the garden this year, and we've been experimenting on a small scale with composting. We mess with the thermostat to try to find the point where we're not uncomfortable but also not wasting heat and air conditioning we aren't even appreciating (this is another area where it doesn't have to be all or nothing to make a difference: every single individual degree helps).

I put furnace filter replacement on the calendar so I won't forget to do it: it's not very efficient if all the air for the furnace has to be sucked in through a filter full of cat hair. We're trying to ~~nag~~ teach the kids to turn off lights when they leave a room (Elizabeth has over-learned this lesson, so that if I get up to get a snack, I'll find my reading light switched off when I return).

We try to concentrate on making the changes that are more appealing to us, to make it more likely we'll actually follow through. Paul LIKED the idea of rain barrels and composting, so those were easy changes and we didn't feel like we were martyrs for the environmental cause. I HATE calling repair guys, so it appeals to me to make each change as we go, when I have to call anyway for a malfunction.

And I get overwhelmed if I start thinking all changes have to be "perfect or nothing" (don't bother to compost unless you compost EVERYTHING!! don't bother to convert to gas unless you also LIVE IN FREEZING MISERY!! don't bother to compost and convert to gas unless you have $200,000 to do a complete environmental home remodel!!) so it's really helped me to work in small increments: one near-painless degree lower now inspires a second or third or fourth degree (and perhaps a pair of wool socks) later on; one almost unnoticeable $5 fluorescent bulb now inspires more extensive fluorescent bulb use later (but, really, not in the bathroom, thank you, no).

The Home Depot gave me $50 to spend on some of the small-environmental-change devices they carry: caulk and organic potting soil, environmentally-friendly cleaning supplies and fluorescent bulbs, composting bins and seeds for our garden. (They carry tons of large-environmental-change devices as well, but we were on a $50 mission this time so we tried not to get distracted by all the solar panel stuff that is our next big interest.)

Paul was keen on composters, but the ones he was drawn to exceeded the $50 allowance. Besides, it was MY post to write, so I chose a fluorescent lighting fixture---the shop-light kind.

Half of our downstairs area is unfinished basement, divided into Paul's workshop area and a storage/pantry area. Paul had put up fluorescent shop-lights over his workbench, but there was still an incandescent fixture in the storage area. Now we're fluorescent there, too---which is especially good at our house, where I'm likely to send a child downstairs to get a new box of cereal, and then go down hours later to find the light still on. (This'll be a two-part change: continue to nag and lecture the children, and in the meantime reduce the waste when they forget.) And it's made such a difference down there: the incandescent light got lost in all the shadows and beams and pipes, but now I can see every last can of tomato paste hiding behind the soups.

I'm not saying it's pretty. I'm saying it's AWESOME.

What big and small changes have you made at your house, and what big and small changes would you like to make in the future? (And do you want to play with solar panels like we do? Mmmmmm...solar panels.)

Want more tips on how to become eco-conscious?
Visit the Prizes & Promotions Section on BlogHer!

Winner! (Don't Fret The Sweat)

2011-11-07T19:47:00.002-05:00

The winner of the Don't Fret The Sweat giveaway ($100 Visa gift card and a giftpack) is Juliloquy! I'll email you!

Don't Fret The Sweat---and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2011-10-04T11:06:00.007-04:00

You have probably heard someone describe their son's room as "smelling like a hamster cage." And I have four sons. It has been an eye-opening and persuasive argument against acquiring actual hamsters.

The younger two are 4 and 6, and those are not the ages that contribute to the smell at our house; it is the 10.5-year-old and the 12.5-year-old, and it is only getting worse as they get older.

They're nice boys,
just a little LESS THAN ENTIRELY FRESH from time to time.

The weird thing to me is that I have to keep nagging them about taking showers and using deodorant. I'm imagining if someone pointed out to ME that the air in my general vicinity was reminding them of rodents kept in small enclosed spaces, and how few milliseconds would pass between that announcement and a new policy of showering twice-daily and spreading cakes of deodorant on a tarp so I could roll around on them after each shower.

Perhaps it's puberty that flips the cleanliness switch, or perhaps it's the feedback their peers will soon start casually flipping their way. I'd like to protect them against that sort of feedback, so for right NOW, what I do is wait until they're buckled into the car and I'm going about 60 down the highway, and then I make them listen to me discuss whether they DID or DID NOT manage to address the SCENT issue that morning, and WHAT exactly defines "addressing." (What? I'M nicer about it than a middle-schooler.)

I use Degree® Women and Dove® deodorants myself (which is why I was motivated to take this review: so easy to write honest positive reviews about things I already like and use), and I've been buying Degree® for them. I like how it doesn't have the strong cologney scent of so many men's deodorants, which I'd prefer not to smell on an oily 12-year-old.

The clearance stickers aren't pretty (except for those of us whose hearts leap at the sight of that shade of orange), and they're non-ideal for showing off the sponsor's name. But you'll notice they cover up the "Women" so the boys don't notice, which is why I can't remove them. So I put Paul's Degree® Men deodorant in the picture, too, for brand-showing purposes. (Also, please note that one of these deodorants HAS NOT EVEN BEEN OPENED. Sigh.)

Part of the point of this post is to direct you to Don't Fret The Sweat's Facebook page. Unilever (they're the ones who make Degree®, Dove®, and Suave®, so they're the sponsors of this post) is ON-BOARD with the idea of keeping tweens non-sweaty/non-smelly even in stressy/sweaty situations such as middle school, so they gathered their own assortment of experts and advice and tips. Parents can add their own ideas for helping children transition from smelly little savages into fresh and sweet-smelling little savages.

I clicked through to make sure I wasn't directing you to anything I wouldn't feel comfortable directing you to---and I found some stuff that I'm going to use with my ~~hamsters~~ sons (and I suppose my daughter as well, though I remember my own tweenage years as a time of near-excessive grooming/deodorizing, so perhaps I will not have to trap her in the car first). There's a Product Matchmaker (you have to click the "Like" button in order to access it), and a FAQ section that has questions like how young is too young (I was using a search engine for that very question a few years back), as well as questions about aluminum.

The Giveaway: To enter to win the $100 Visa gift card and a Don't Fret The Sweat gift pack from Unilever and BlogHer, leave a comment on this post between October 4 and November 4, 2011, saying how old you were when you started using deodorant, OR how old your kids were. (Or both if, like me, you find this discussion kind of fun.) I was twelve years old when I first made my parents buy me deodorant. Three of my kids aren't old enough, but one of my sons was 9 and the other was 10 when I first thought "...What is that AROMA? Surely it is too early for this sort of thing?"

For more chances to win, visit the BlogHer Prizes & Promotions section. For more information, visit the Official Rules. For the quick version of the rules:

No duplicate comments. You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry
methods:

Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
Tweet about this promotion and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post (click on the "2 seconds ago" or "5 minutes ago" part of your tweet to get to the Twitter page with that tweet's URL)
Blog about this promotion and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post
For those with no Twitter or blog, the official rules contain information about an alternate form of entry

This giveaway is open to U.S. residents age 18 or older. Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected.

(Again, the Full Official Rules are available here.)

ARM & HAMMER® Spinbrush® MY WAY! ™ Toothbrush and Orajel ® MY WAY!™ Kids' Toothpaste---and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2011-05-12T12:00:00.006-04:00

This is a review of:

ARM & HAMMER® Spinbrush® MY WAY! ™ battery-powered toothbrush for Girls,
ARM & HAMMER® Spinbrush® MY WAY! ™ battery-powered toothbrush for Boys, and
Orajel ® MY WAY™ Kids' Toothpaste

For the review, they sent me five complete toothbrush sets: five containers of toothpaste, four "for Boys" toothbrushes, and one "for Girls" toothbrush.

Each toothbrush kit contains one ARM & HAMMER® Spinbrush® toothbrush (this is the same brand we already use), plus 141 stickers for custom decorating---including alphabet stickers, which is awesome because the night before last, I broke up an argument about whose toothbrush was whose, so I was especially keen on the idea of PERSONALIZATION.

Although the official names of the toothbrushes include "for Girls" and "for Boys," the boxes themselves don't include those words---which I think was a good decision. I already feel a little uncomfortable with the division of "the stickers in the blue box" (dinosaurs, race cars, sports, robots) and "the stickers in the pink box" (make-up, unicorns, high heel shoes, princesses, rainbows, flowers). The 12-year-old son said, "Hey, no fair---it's all cars and sports. Can I have some of the rainbows and smiley faces?" The 10-year-old son said indignantly, "I got THESE [held up a sheet of skateboards and a sheet of race cars] and Elizabeth got THESE [held up a sheet of cute animals]. AND she got 'LOL' and 'OMG'! Those aren't anything to do with girls! They should be in all the boxes!"

There are way more stickers in the box than any one toothbrush can hold, so I had the boys wait until Elizabeth was done with hers, and then they used the extra cute animals for their brushes. I suggested they use their alphabet stickers for writing things such as LOL.

Perfectly happy with her stickers

The toothpaste has it right, I think: one single variety, orange box, and an assortment of stickers including animals, rainbows, sports, princesses, skulls, and cars. Message: Anyone might have any variety of interests! Choose your own combination!

Left to right:
ARM & HAMMER® Spinbrush® MY WAY! ™ for Girls
Orajel ® MY WAY™ Kids' Toothpaste
ARM & HAMMER® Spinbrush® MY WAY! ™ for Boys

One option is to have the child open the toothbrush and toothpaste at the same time, so the child would have access to the more general assortment of stickers from the toothpaste box to use on both the toothpaste and the toothbrush. I should have thought of this as soon as the trouble started brewing. That's what I'll do next time.

I KNEW William and Elizabeth would be interested in this: they're the ones who routinely sit down with craft supplies ANYWAY---special fun project or no. We keep stacked bins in the living room full of crayons, colored pencils, stickers, paper, card stock, scissors, glue, cotton balls, etc., just in case of a craft attack. And those two WERE very interested, but really they ALL were.

Five toothpastes is too many for the bathroom counter, so I divided the kids into two groups: Rob and William shared one, Elizabeth and Edward shared one, and Henry bowed out because he'd gotten a little overexcited with all the stickers and needed a lie-down.

Sticker ease-of-use report: One child (one of the 5-year-olds) had a little trouble getting the tiny letter stickers peeled off the sheets; four children (including the youngest) had no trouble taking stickers off the sheet and applying them to the toothbrush/toothpaste, as long as you are not particular about getting the stickers completely flat as directed, which I was not.

Fun-level report: all five kids LOVED this project. Sure, there was the little kerfuffle about the boy/girl stickers, but if I'd better anticipated that I could have divided the stickers differently, or had them open the toothpaste stickers at the same time. Everyone hugely enjoyed choosing the stickers and where they should go, and there was lots of happy discussion and some trading, and every child was so pleased with his/her resulting toothbrush. When I wanted them to use the toothbrushes for a photo, everyone WANTED to.

And last night, when I started brushing Elizabeth's teeth, she said, "Oh, you're using my FAVORITE toothbrush and my FAVORITE toothpaste!!"

The toothbrush head is not replaceable, so the entire toothbrush needs to be replaced when the brush head wears out; the package recommends doing this every 3 months. I have a feeling the children would be happy to decorate another by then.

The Giveaway:

There is a giveaway associated with this review:
BlogHer and ARM & HAMMER® will give away one $100 Visa gift card to a randomly selected winner. To enter, see the rules below. To enter with method (a), below, the question/prompt is: If YOU were decorating a toothbrush (as I badly wanted to by the time this project was over), are you more the "Several well-placed stickers" type or more the "PILE THEM ON!" type? (I'd be filling every square centimeter.)

Rules:

No duplicate comments. You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:

a) Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post (above, the part about how you'd decorate a toothbrush)

b) Tweet about this promotion and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post

c) Blog about this promotion and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post

d) For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.

This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older, from May 12 - June 9, 2011. Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected. For more details, see the Official Rules.

For more information about Spinbrush:
the Official Spinbrush® MY WAY! ® site.
For more information about Orajel:
the Official Orajel® MY WAY!™ site.

For more reviews and chances to win, visit the Exclusive Offers section.

Winner! (La Crème)

2011-04-04T20:22:00.001-04:00

The winner of the La Crème giveaway ($100 Visa gift card) is sweetsue!

Winners! (GE Ecomagination)

2011-03-02T15:43:00.004-05:00

I have the winners of the two $50 light bulbs from the GE Ecomagination giveaway! The winner of the first week's bulb is DawnA of the February 21, 9:02 a.m. comment! The winner of the second week's bulb is s8r8l33! I've sent your email addresses to my boss, and she'll be contacting you for your mailing information!

La Crème Coffee Creamer Review---and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway!

2011-03-01T11:59:00.004-05:00

This is a sponsored review from BlogHer and La Crème.

May I recommend aspiring to a career that allows you to receive Rush Delivery of packages? It is super satisfying, and there are cool stickers for you and the kids to try to figure out.

We THINK this one means it's perishable and liquid
but not a hazardous chemical.

Inside this particular package was an assortment of La Crème coffee creamers for me to try. They need to be used within a week of opening and I opened all four, so please do come by for coffee if you're in the area.

From left to right: Hazelnut, French Vanilla, The Original, and Cinnamon Vanilla

I normally use powdered or liquid non-dairy creamers, always the sweetened/flavored ones. Let's compare my creamer usage to yours, so you know how to incorporate the review. This is the color I like my coffee to be:

(I keep thinking that's a drip down the front of the bottle)

I like to be able to taste the coffee, not just the creamer, but I also want distinct creaminess, sweetness, and whatever the flavor is.

I first tried The Original, which is unsweetened. I do sometimes take my coffee with a slosh of milk or cream and no sweetener, and that's exactly what this was like. Since La Crème is lactose-free, this would be the perfect one for someone who wants real cream in their coffee but needs to avoid lactose.

I next tried the Hazelnut. Again, very good creaminess. Less sweetness and flavor than I'm used to: I don't think I would have known it was hazelnut.

I next tried Cinnamon Vanilla. Very good creaminess, light sweetness. I could taste the cinnamon but not the vanilla---but I find vanilla very hard to detect in coffee. I have a bag of vanilla-flavored coffee that's supposed to be intensely vanilla, and I find the vanilla mild even in that.

The French Vanilla smelled AMAZING, like melted ice cream, or like buttercream frosting, so I put in twice as much as I usually would. It was delicious, and with the double dose I could taste the vanilla---but I couldn't taste the coffee anymore. What I had was like a delicious French Vanilla non-chocolate hot chocolate.

So, overall, comparing the flavored/sweetened three dairy creamers to the non-dairy flavored/sweetened creamers I'm accustomed to, I'd say the La Crème creamers have significantly more creaminess with noticeably less sweetness and flavor. The perfect thing for me would be a combination: the actual dairy and creamness of the La Crème, but with more sweet and more flavor like the fake-dairy ones.

And I'm picturing some of you saying, "Wait--I never use those artificial creamers, because they are TOO SWEET and I hate the fakey flavors!" In which case, OMG YOU HAVE TO TRY LA CRÈME! You will be so happy!

I know it's what's on the inside that really matters, but I'd also like to praise the bottles, because they really do look classy and awesome. If I wanted to give someone a coffee gift (mug, package of good coffee, creamers), I would choose these every time because they're so pretty. They look EXPENSIVE. And I don't know if you can tell from the photos, but the coating is satiny rather than shiny, so it not only looks nice but feels nice.

To enter to win a $100 Visa gift card, leave a comment on this post by March 31, 2011, saying which creamer flavor you'd want to try first: Original, French Vanilla, Cinnamon Vanilla, or Hazelnut.

Rules: (copied directly from BlogHer)

No duplicate comments. You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:

a) Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post

b) Tweet about this promotion and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post

c) Blog about this promotion and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post

d) For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.

This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older. Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected. The Official Rules are available here: The Official Rules.

To read other reviews (and to enter their sweepstakes), visit the Exclusive Offers section. For more information about La Crème, visit the official site.

GE Ecomagination, and Two Giveaways of a FIFTY DOLLAR Light Bulb of Awesomeness!

2011-02-15T09:00:00.003-05:00

This is sponsored content from BlogHer and GE.

Here are some changes we've made at our house that haven't made any difference:

1. Stopped using fabric softener, except with a particular blanket that is otherwise a mass of painful, sparky static.

2. Reduced the amount of laundry detergent we were using by about a third.

3. Set the wash time for most loads from 10 minutes down to 8 minutes.

4. Stopped using the "pre-wash" compartment for dishwasher detergent.

No noticeable change in results. And this is exactly the kind of environmental change I like to make: a change that DOESN'T BOTHER ME AT ALL. (And in all these cases, also happens to save us money.) Better yet are the changes we've made out of a feeling of environmental responsibility but then ended up LIKING BETTER:

1. Switched to cloth napkins. (They're so pleasant on the hands! They don't tear into little shreds! They feel gratifyingly like wiping our hands our on clothes! They're fun to choose!)

2. Switched to cloth, er, feminine products. (They're so soft and comfy! They're available in fun fabrics!)

3. Switched to handkerchiefs. (They're so soft and comfy! They irritate our noses less! They keep stuff off our hands so much better!)

4. Switched to reusable grocery bags. (They hold so much more! They don't tip over in the car! The handles are comfy and don't cut into our hands!)

I talk about these things on my blog sometimes, and in fact I've done giveaways to try to persuade other people to try them too, to see if THEY like them. But the thing is, we do these things because we PREFER them and we like them BETTER---so if someone else DOESN'T prefer them and DOESN'T like them better, you're not going to catch me trying to push them or guilt them into it. They should find the environmental changes THEY prefer. We're not ALL going to do EVERYTHING---so it makes sense that we'd all choose our own most-appealing assortment. Some of us will use cloth diapers but think cloth feminine products are gross; some of us will be the opposite; some of us will use neither but will be faithful composters, or have a hybrid car, or take shorter showers, or switch to cloth napkins.

Pretty, pretty cloth napkins.

I talk about this with the kids, too: there are some things you should do whether you like it or not (that empty can is going into the recycling and you're not going to complain about having to walk the extra two steps; turn the water off when you're done using it), but there are other areas where we can actively seek out the things we don't mind doing---or at least mind doing LESS. I think it's important, with a subject as big as Environmental Improvement, not to get overwhelmed and discouraged by the vastness of the task. It's tempting to think, "I don't even compost---isn't it kind of lame/hypocritical to turn down the heat?" NO. No it is NOT. Which is better for the environment: not-composting and keeping the heat at 72 degrees? or not-composting and keeping the heat at 68 degrees? Dang straight: it's better to do something than nothing.

And when you do something, you might find it leads you to do the next thing. When we started recycling paper, we found it more appealing to turn the thermostat down; when we turned the thermostat down, we found it more appealing to reduce the minutes the washing machine ran; when that worked out fine, we found it more appealing to try reducing the detergent too. It starts to feel almost like a game, instead of a painful sacrifice---and making changes gradually help them not to be too overwhelming.

Or to turn the subject to light bulbs since that's the giveaway, it's overwhelming to think of going out and buying twenty expensive fluorescent light bulbs to replace all the bulbs in the house, but it's easy to buy just one to replace the next bulb that burns out. And then maybe the bulbs go on sale and it's not too hard to buy a few more. And pretty soon the job is done, with much less pain, and now you're used to the price of the bulbs and you barely even flinch anymore.

In this case, the prize is for something I'd consider VERY PAINFUL to have to purchase: a FIFTY-DOLLAR light bulb. It's an LED bulb that lasts TWENTY YEARS and saves about $85 in energy costs over its lifetime. Comments will be taken for two weeks, and there will be one bulb given away each week. So not only can you make an easy change that might inspire you to make further changes, you DON'T EVEN HAVE TO PAY FOR IT. (Or replace it for twenty years!)

GE is doing this giveaway to draw attention to their Ecomagination Challenge, which is a massive idea-hunt for clever new ways to make good environmental changes (saving, managing, and even creating energy) at the household level---not the tip-sharing we all do, but, like, genius new ideas no one's thought of before. Yes, YES, I think we all know that the biggest, highest-impact changes could be made by corporations and factories---but as with the "not-composting plus thermostat-lowering," small changes ADD THE HECK UP, and our choices affect corporations. Furthermore, our changes get us in a frame of mind to feel invested in pushing for bigger change at a bigger level. AND, when we make these changes, we bring up our children to do these things automatically: I had to learn how to sort recycling and use a handkerchief, but my kids have grown up with it as the norm. AND-and, if people come up with some really genius ideas, perhaps those ideas will have even more impact even at the household level than the usual household-level changes do---and perhaps they could ALSO be used by corporations and factories.

To enter the light bulb giveaway, leave a comment on this post by February 28, 2011 about some of the energy-use challenges in your household, or some of the environmental stuff you find easy or pleasing to do. (To enter the GE Ecomagination challenge, see below after the light bulb giveaway rules.)

Rules: Contest is open to U.S. residents age 18 or older. No duplicate comments. Winner will be selected by random drawing, and I have to hear back from the winner within 72 hours or else I have to select a new winner. You may receive up to 2 total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:

Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
Tweet about this promotion and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post
Blog about this promotion and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post
For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.

For more details, visit the Official Rules. To read what other bloggers had to say on this topic (and to enter THEIR light bulb giveaways), visit the blogger round-up page.

For more information on GE and their Ecomagination Challenge, and/or to submit a genius new idea, visit their site and their Facebook page and their blog.

Winner! (MasterCard MarketPlace)

2011-01-19T15:16:00.003-05:00

The winner of the MasterCard MarketPlace giveaway ($100 gift card) is Cori! I'll email you!

Review of "MasterCard MarketPlace - A Smarter Way to Shop Online"---and a $100 Gift Card Giveaway from BlogHer

2010-12-22T11:40:00.010-05:00

This is a sponsored review from BlogHer and MasterCard MarketPlace.

This is a review of MasterCard MarketPlace - A Smarter Way to Shop Online.

The registration process required a full name, an email address, and a zip code. It also required me to choose a title (the choices are Mr., Ms., or Mrs.), which didn't seem like it should be necessary.

Next it asked me to choose at least three of my favorite stores from their options, and there was also a way to mark stores I DISlike, which was fun. You drag the store icons into shopping baskets marked "I like" and "I don't like"---and as you choose, more stores appear for sorting. I could have played that game all day. Altogether it took well under 5 minutes to register (if you don't count the extra time I spent playing with the shopping baskets--WHAT?).

When I was done, it took me to the home page where I saw it was already reminding me of sales and deals at stores I'd said I liked, and also telling me about related offers (deals it thought I might be interested in based on the ones I said I'd be interested in). When I clicked over later, the deals it was displaying were instead the current Hottest Deals, which included deals at stores I had put on my Dislike list---so you don't have to worry that disliking a store means you'll miss out when it's something super-awesome.

There were tabs to see lists of the newest deals, the deals ending soonest, and the most popular deals---I love that kind of thing, because I love the feeling that I'm not going to MISS something accidentally. Also, sometimes I might think I'm not interested in something (like a tool store), but then it might show up on the most-popular list with something that would make me think, "Oh! Actually, we need one of those!" And there are other tabs for looking at the top deals by category, like in Electronics, in Home, and in Kids & Babies. That would be fun for browsing.

(It looked like this.)
(Screenshot from http://marketplace.mastercard.com/.)
(You can click the picture to see it bigger.)

In addition, each day at 1:00 p.m. EST, until December 24th, there are special daily Holiday Overwhelming Offers, available only to MasterCard cardholders and only for 24 hours each.

You can sign up to have deals emailed to you if you don't want to poke around on a web site every day or if you might forget to check. You can also customize it so it doesn't bother you with deals that aren't at least 25% off, or at least 50% off, or whatever. Each deal makes it clear how much time you have left to act on it.

To participate in a deal, you click the "Shop Now" button and it takes you to it. Some are sales that the general public can also participate in; some are deals only for registered users. Some deals are improved if you use a MasterCard, or available only to MasterCard cardholders.

Overall, it looks like a good "deal center" for keeping track of all the places you like to shop and all the deals they have---and a good way to get EXTRA deals while you're at it.

BlogHer is giving away a $100 MasterCard gift card. To enter to win, leave a comment on this post by December 31, 2010, saying which store's deals (ANY store) you'd want to be able to track.

Rules:

No duplicate comments. You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:

Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
Tweet about this promotion and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post
Blog about this promotion and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post
Read the official rules for alternate form of entry.

Sweepstakes ends 5 PM PST on December 31, 2010. This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older. Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. You have 72 hours to get back to me; otherwise a new winner will be selected. The Official Rules are available here. For 19 more chances to win, visit the BlogHer Special Offers page.

From the client: "Overwhelming Offers (OO) are limited in quantity, reservation only and limited in time. Participating merchants and offers are subject to change. The OO discount is provided as a statement credit. See www.mastercardmarketplace.com for restrictions and complete terms and conditions."

Winner! (Tassimo)

2010-12-19T20:32:00.002-05:00

The winner of the Tassimo giveaway is Velocibadgergirl! I'll email you for your mailing info!

Winner! (SmartyAnts)

2010-12-17T21:08:00.001-05:00

The winner of the Smarty Ants and Phonics Reading Pup giveaway is AStarrA! I'll email you!

Tassimo Review, With TASSIMO GIVEAWAY MAYBE IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS

2010-12-16T09:14:00.010-05:00

Please imagine how exciting it was to get a Tassimo to review. Then please imagine how much coffee I have had in order to "collect data." Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I am going to make this quick (by which apparently I mean lonnnnnnnnnng), because I think we all know what a Tassimo is, right? It makes one single cup of coffee or tea or hot chocolate at a time. You put in a coffee/tea/cocoa disc, and the Tassimo reads the barcode so it knows what it's making and you don't even have to mess with settings. You just press "go."

So all you want to know, probably, is does it WORK, and is it FUSSY to use, and is the coffee GOOD, and HOW DO I ENTER TO WIN ONE OMG TELL ME QUICK!!

First, here is how I was compensated for this review:

1. One Bosch Tassimo Single-Serve Coffee Brewer.
2. One 8-drink package of Starbucks Cappuccino Primo.
3. One 16-drink package of Gevalia Signature Blend (Mild).
4. An additional Tassimo to give away.

Second, it is easy and non-fussy to use:

They know you're not going to read the whole manual first, so they just get on with it.

You fill the water reservoir.

You run it through the cleaning cycle a few times.
(What, you don't have self-promoting mugs at your house? Sad.)

If you do need the manual, it looks a little intimidating at first,
but in fact it's easy to use and understand.

You put a disc in.
(I did the cleaning the night before, so that's
why it's a different mug now.)

You close it with authority, and you press the start button, and it makes you coffee.

The coffee is good. I first tried the Gevalia Mild, and found it strong---but I always make my coffee kind of weak, so my coffee palate is off. There's a button you can press to make it brew a little longer, which adds more water and makes it a little weaker; I'll do that next time.

My mom came over and we tried the Starbucks Cappuccino, and we both agreed it was EXCELLENT: exactly what we'd expect if we went to a Starbucks and ordered it. Perfect sweetness (i.e., BARELY, so that we had to check to make sure it really did have sugar in it), really good-quality cream taste, just perfect. We were trying to have a conversation but kept instead turning back to how good the coffee was.

To me, some of the highlights of this thing:

1. The fun of the whole deal. It really is fun to choose a disc, put it in, etc. It's even more fun than you might think. I feel eager to go out and buy lots more discs so I have more choices. It would also be fun to have a friend over and let her make a drink.

2. The way it brews into your cup. The platform comes completely out to make room for larger cups or travel mugs.

3. The cup platform has a container that catches spills.

4. The water reservoir, which means that unlike my coffee pot, I don't have to add water every time.

5. It is FAST.

6. It is EASY.

7. It is WELL-DESIGNED: little details like a place in the back to tuck the cleaning disc so you don't lose it, and the way the platform is designed to catch spills and be completely removable, and the way the disc tab helps you line it up so you put it in the right way, and the way the water reservoir has a nice comfortable handle to make it easy to carry and re-install, and how easy both the long- and short-version instructions are (with good pictures, too). It really feels like someone was trying to make it RIGHT.

Some of the lowlights:

1. If you're used to making coffee in a regular coffee pot, the T-discs seem pretty expensive. (But if you're used to getting coffee at a drive-through, they will seem unbelievably cheap.)

2. You might find yourself drinking way too much coffee, just because it's fun to make (though I suppose eventually the fun of it wears off a bit), or because you have to make a full cup when maybe you otherwise would have just topped off your mug with a little more.

Various deals to be aware of:

1. If you register your Tassimo, you get two free packs of the T-discs of your choice.

2. Right now at Amazon (and I'm not sure how long this deal lasts), if you buy a Tassimo, you get a $50 Amazon gift card. Scroll down on the Tassimo product page until you see "Special Offers and Product Promotions," and there's a button to add both the Tassimo and the $50 gift card to your card. You DO have to add the gift card; it won't add automatically. But geez, that whacks FIFTY BUCKS off the price, bringing it from $130 down to $80. It's still not exactly FREE, but I can swing $80 in a way I can't swing $130. This brings it into what I consider "spouse gift" and "gift for your parents" range, too.

Finally, FINALLY, the giveaway part:

I want to do this FAST: I asked Tassimo, and they said that if I can give them the winner information on Monday, they might be able to get the Tassimo shipped to the winner by Christmas. So the contest will be open only until Sunday, December 19, at 5:00 p.m. U.S. Pacific time. It's open only to U.S. residents---or of course if you're NOT a U.S. resident you can still enter if you know someone in the U.S. you want it shipped to as the best Christmas present ever.

To enter, leave any comment. If that makes you feel tongue-tied, here's the optional prompt: say what you'd make first, if you had all the options in front of you: tea, hot chocolate, coffee, cappuccino, latte?

Winner! (Similasan)

2010-12-15T17:25:00.002-05:00

Do you remember the Similasan contest from long ago, with the $100 Visa gift card giveaway? A glitch at headquarters meant I couldn't announce the winner until now, but finally I can: the winner is fostertam! I'll email you!

Interview With an 11-Year-Old About Texting, Cell Phones, and Other Technology

2010-11-22T06:47:00.001-05:00

This is sponsored content from BlogHer and LG Text Ed

In Part One I introduced you to Rob, my 11-but-almost-12-year-old. He's in sixth grade. A bunch of us are asking our kids of different ages questions about sexting and technology and Facebook and so forth, to see at what point kids are still like, "What are you talking about?" and at what point they're more like "Duh, Mom, a little late for this talk." Rob is my firstborn, and when I was his age technology wasn't this kind of problem, so I'm trying to find out from him what he already knows, what is and isn't a problem at his school, and what he and I still need to talk about.

Swistle: Ready?

Rob: Yeah.

Swistle: Does it bother you if I use your picture on my blogs, or on Facebook?

Rob: I don't know.

Swistle: Well, does it bother you to have your picture on the internet?

Rob: No.

Swistle: What if it were an embarrassing picture?

Rob: Well, yeah, then it would!

Swistle: Why do you want a cell phone?

Rob: Because everyone else has one and they assume I have one already.

Swistle: But what would you use it for?

Rob: Calling and whatever else it did.

Swistle: Do your friends have cell phones?

Rob: Most of them, yeah.

Swistle: Are they allowed to use them in school?

Rob: Before school and after school, but other than that, no.

Swistle: Do they ever talk about people using cell phones to tease each other?

Rob: No.

Swistle: Have you heard of anyone at school getting bullied or getting in trouble for bullying?

Rob: Yeah, no one in particular, though---they don't say names.

Swistle: Did any of the bullying involve cell phones or Facebook?

Rob: Facebook, yes; cell phones, no.

Swistle: What was the bullying on Facebook you heard about?

Rob: They just often tell us about it.

Swistle: Did you know that there's a problem with kids bullying other kids on Facebook and with cell phones?

Rob: Yeah.

Swistle: How did you hear about it?

Rob: They just keep telling us about that kind of thing at school.

Swistle: On Parents' Night, the computer teacher told us that the assistant principal keeps an eye out for students on Facebook---had you heard of that?

Rob: YEAH! And also they told us that the police have 8 secret Facebook identities so that they can see when people are bullying other people.

Swistle: Do you know what happens if they see bullying on Facebook?

Rob: No.

Swistle: They told us that they've gotten student Facebook accounts suspended---especially if the student isn't 13 yet.

Rob: Wow.

Swistle: Is anyone you know on Facebook?

Rob: Yeah.

Swistle: Can you estimate what percentage of the other kids are on Facebook?

Rob: Probably 90%.

Swistle: NINETY percent? Even though they're not 13?

Rob: Yep. They just say they're 21.

Swistle: Really?

Rob: *nods*

Swistle: Don't they get caught?

Rob: I don't know.

Swistle: Have you heard of anyone getting caught?

Rob: No. They say their parents let them---if that's what you're asking.

Swistle: What about the asst principal and the police officer---don't they notice the kids?

Rob: Yeah, but they don't bust them. For some reason.

Swistle: Do you think it's because they only go after the bullying?

Rob: Yeah! Probably! But then if they get caught bullying AND they're not 13 yet, they're REALLY busted.

Swistle: Are you on Facebook?

Rob: No.

Swistle: Why not?

Rob: You won't let me because I'm not 13 yet.

Swistle: When you're 13, do you want to get a Facebook account?

Rob: Definitely.

Swistle: Why?

Rob: Because it sounds fun.

Swistle: If you had a Facebook account, would you be Facebook friends with your school friends?

Rob: Probably.

Swistle: And would you want to be Facebook friends with Dad and me?

Rob: Well, what can you do if you're Facebook friends with someone? Like, are they just on your list?

Swistle: You can look in their profiles and see what they're doing on Facebook.

Rob: Then yeah, sure.

Swistle: Do you know what sexting is?

Rob: Nope.

Swistle: Have you heard the word before?

Rob: Nope. ...Well, just now, when you said it.

Swistle: What would you do if one of your friends was teasing someone else using texting?

Rob: Well, like what?

Swistle: Like...what if kids were all talking meanly about some girl? And what if they sent around an embarrassing picture of her?

Rob: *looks shocked* I don't know!

Swistle: What if something was happening on Facebook, like everyone was talking on the wall about how dumb someone was or something?

Rob: *more shock* I don't know.

Swistle: Would you feel comfortable telling me about it?

Rob: I don't really know.

Swistle: Would you feel comfortable telling a teacher at school?

Rob: I'm not really sure. I'd assume that someone else would say something.

Swistle: And then there's those people at school already keeping an eye out.

Rob: Right.

Swistle: Does this make you feel safer, that people are keeping an eye out for bullying and trouble? or does it make you feel weird, like you're being watched?

Rob: Kind of both.

Swistle: Do you get to go online at school?

Rob: Only to look up library books and to get Google pictures for computer assignments.

Swistle: Could you get onto the internet if, like, the teacher wasn't paying attention?

Rob: I think they'd notice. And also, most of the sites are blocked. There is one place I go: I asked if I could go on [Wikipedia about a game he likes], and the teacher said, "If it lets you, go for it."

Swistle: Are some kids not allowed to go online, like because their parents don't want them to?

Rob: No.

Swistle: So everybody goes online during computer class?

Rob: Yeah.

Swistle: Can you get on Facebook from school?

Rob: I don't know---I've never tried.

Swistle: Have you heard of Myspace?

Rob: Yeah.

Swistle: Do kids you know have Myspace accounts?

Rob: Yeah. Are you supposed to be 18 to get one, or is it 13?

Swistle: I don't know. Do the other kids say what they do on Myspace or what it's for?

Rob: Not really, but I guess it's like Facebook.

Swistle: Do they teach typing at school?

Rob: Yeah: they did at the beginning of the year, and in fifth grade.

Swistle: Wasn't it before fifth grade?

Rob: Uh...

Swistle (to William): William, have you learned to type in school? [William's in fourth grade.]

William: Yeah.

Swistle: Do you ever get sick of technology? Like, sick of computers and stuff?

Rob: Not really.

Swistle: Do you like computers?

Rob: Yeah! I'm glad I have it every day at school.

Swistle: Do you ever wish there was a day without technology, or a project that didn't involve technology?

Rob: No. But sometimes I think about living out in the jungle!

William: That's new.

Swistle: Do your teachers mention Facebook groups, like they assume you use it or expect you to?

Rob: No. I don't really know what "groups" is.

Swistle: I guess since they specifically say they think Facebook is a problem with students...

Rob: Yeah.

Swistle: What do you think of parents being friends with their kids on Facebook---so the parents can see what the kids are doing and saying?

Rob: I don't know.

Swistle: I think we'll probably want to be your Facebook friend so we can make sure nothing bad is going on.

Rob: Okay.

To see interviews with kids in other age groups: the BlogHer round-up page.

From the client:

Have you had a conversation with your kids (or nephews/nieces, grandchildren) about texting, sexting and safety? BlogHer is matching LG’s donation of .50 to dosomething.org for every comment on this post, so please tell me about your conversation with your kids in the comments. Or if you haven’t had the conversation yet, what’s holding you back? Maybe another reader will have the perfect suggestion for how you can get your conversation going. It’s important for all our families, and dosomething.org will get a $1.00 for every comment, question or suggestion.

Visit LG Text Ed , where Dr. Rosalind Wiseman explains the dangers and consequences of this new form of flirting. You can also watch Emmy award winning actress Jane Lynch share a lesson on the sensitive stuff kids are sending around without thinking about the consequences.

Smarty Ants and Phonics Reading Pup Review and Giveaway

2010-11-18T10:25:00.004-05:00

This is a sponsored review from BlogHer and SmartyAnts.

I think this is my kids' favorite review program so far: a FedEx truck delivered us a singing, talking stuffed dog. The Smarty Ants Phonics Reading Pup comes with 10 songs already in his fluffy repertoire, which was good news because it kept the children busy squabbling over it while I went to the computer to set up the included one-month membership to the Smarty Ants reading program.

If I'd known he would start playing with it before
I even recycled the box, I would have cleared off the counter first.
I mean, salt? a crumpled towel? an electrical plate? PROFESSIONAL.

When I see a computer-based toy, I always want to know what is involved in it: I can use a computer, but I want to know how much information the computer will need from me and how long/difficult/confusing/frustrating it'll be to get things working. So that's the part I'm going to tell you about now.

It had me start downloading some software, and then it asked me for my email address and my birthdate, and then for my child's birthdate (it's one child per membership) and whether the child should be represented by a boy ant or a girl ant, and what the child's ant should be called. I felt squirrelly about the birthdates but I just fudged it a few days: this still gives the game the info it needs, without bothering my privacy issues. I also used a nickname for my child's ant's name, instead of using her actual name.

The next step was one of my favorites, as you would suspect if you read my baby name blog: choosing a name for the dog. Furthermore, there is a LIST TO CHOOSE FROM. How much would I have wanted the job of making a list of possible dog names?? SO MUCH!! I spent probably ten minutes trying out each name on our dog to see which I thought was best. This would have been really fun for the kids, if I had let them help. (I chose Murphy.)

(screenshot from SmartyAnts.com)

The next step is choosing three ant friends to play with, and I did call Elizabeth over for this part. There are three girl ants and three boy ants to choose from, AND you get to NAME THEM. Elizabeth chose the three girl ants, and she named them Kyra, Olivia, and Katie.

(screenshot from SmartyAnts.com)

Then I chose her reading level from a list of possibilities and entered the free one-month membership code that came with the dog. And...that's where it stopped helping me. There I was, looking at my account info, wondering what I should do next. I looked in the FAQ (click the "get help" button at the top of the screen) and followed the directions to unzip the software I'd downloaded (by clicking on the SmartyAnts.zip file on the desktop), then I put it in the Applications folder as instructed---but it didn't start installing as it said it would. So I double-clicked it, and THEN it started installing. (Computery types are rolling their eyes and asking each other if in the next version they should include "Continue breathing while installing this game.")

It took over 3 hours to install. According to the web site that's about double the time it would take with a slow internet connection, but we have a fast internet connection. The downloading was done before I was finished registering, and the installation is what took hours---but the web site says the installation speed depends on the internet connection. In any case, if you're giving this as a holiday or birthday gift to your own child, I recommend doing the installation ahead of time just in case you have the same experience.

Fortunately, the children were still playing with the Pup.

This is where we have Sadness and Woe, because after struggling to get the installed application started, it turned out the problem was that my computer didn't meet the system requirements. There was a hasty consultation with my bosses, and we decided this was a good opportunity to tell YOU about the system requirements.

(click it to see it bigger)

The Smarty Ants game really does look cool. The kids were very excited as we were setting it up and reading about it---so excited that Paul and I had a couple of discussions about whether it might be time to upgrade my computer ANYWAY. It's a reading game for pre-K, kindergarten, and first grade reading levels (even if your child is older than that), the kind that adjusts itself to the child's ability level and learning pace. I thought this was a good summary from the handbook:

For children who grasp reading concepts quickly or have advanced skills, the program accelerates to keep them engaged and challenged. For children who are struggling, the system slows the pace and increases the educational support and scaffolding.

The ants are appealing, and all three of my little kids found it very exciting to get to choose and name their little ant friends. It would have blown their little minds to learn that playing the games would let them earn "Smarty Coins" to spend on ant clothes and ant accessories.

Also, GET THIS: you plug the Phonics Reading Pup into your computer and it will automatically download the songs that go along with what the child is working on with the Smarty Ants. Then the dog can go with your child as, like, a mobile review unit! Plus, the dog shows up in the ant games, and the child can use the Smarty Coins to buy toys for him.

(screenshot from SmartyAnts.com)

It's exactly the sort of thing my kids would go nuts for, and if I'd seen it before the review I would have bought it for them for Christmas. (Remember to install it ahead of time!) The dog comes with a free 1-month membership, and when you go online for the first time you're offered a 2-week trial; I was wondering if the 1-month would get ADDED to that, or if it was INSTEAD, and it's added---so you get a month and a half right off the bat, which might be as long as the child would play it (a Christmas toy lasting well into February is very good). If the child was still crazy for it, or if you have a child who needs either reading help or more reading challenges, a year's membership is $24.99 for 3 months, or $49.99 for 12 months (twice the money for quadruple the time) (you will not be surprised to discover I have a math medal) (from seventh grade, WHATEVER). The Pup is $29.99, and since the grey/white version has a boy voice, and since half the dog name choices are girl names, my guess is that the white version has a girl voice. (It isn't necessary to have the Pup to play SmartyAnts, and children can still have a Pup online even if they don't have a real Pup.)

One of my twins can read but is timid about it: lots of saying, "But I CAN'T!!"---even when he can, and reluctant (to the point of tears) about sounding out words he hasn't seen before. And yet when he plays video games (and he LOVES video games), he reads all the instructions easily. This is why Paul and I were thinking, "Maybe the computer could stand to be upgraded anyway...": Smarty Ants is practically custom-made for Edward, who would be frantic to play the computer games and wouldn't even notice it was helping him with his reading confidence.

The giveaway is for your own Phonics Reading Pup AND a one-year ($50!) subscription to Smarty Ants AND a $100 Visa gift card---all from BlogHer. To enter the giveaway, do one or two (two maximum) of the following by December 17, 2010, each with its own comment so I'll be sure to enter you the right number of times:

a) Leave a comment saying which Pup you prefer, the grey/white or the white (you can see both here: Smarty Ants store).

b) Tweet about this promotion and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post.

c) Blog about this promotion and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post.

d) Follow this link and provide your email address and your response to the sweepstakes prompt, and then come back here and leave a comment saying you did so.

This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older.

Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail.

You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected. For more information, see the BlogHer.com Smarty Ants official rules.

To read more reviews and get more chances to win, visit the BlogHer.com exclusive offers page.

For more about Smarty Ants, visit SmartyAnts.com, or go see Smarty Ants on Facebook. To shop, visit the Smarty Ants store on Amazon.com

I Think We'd Better Ask Someone Who's On the Scene

2010-11-08T06:45:00.004-05:00

This is sponsored content from BlogHer and LG Text Ed

This is Rob:

Hi, Rob.

He's eleven years old, nearly twelve. He likes video games, logic puzzles, Rubik's Cubes, sleeping in, SpongeBob Squarepants. He gets cranky because so far I won't let him have a cell phone.

Here he is watching our street get torn up this past summer.

Oh, and here he is with all the kids,
watching William do an experiment.

I don't show Rob's face very often on my blogs. This is because I haven't figured out yet where "my writing job" and "his privacy" overlap---and where they don't. When I was his age (You: "HERE we go"), there WAS NO INTERNET, and so it's not like I can think back to how _I_ felt about having MY mother post MY picture online, or whatevs. So until I figure something out, or until he starts objecting, I err on the side of UNDER-posting his face.

In fact, the whole issue of online privacy/interaction for kids is a confusing and uncertain one for me. I can't tell him funny/embarrassing stories-with-morals about how when _I_ was a child I mishandled texting, or email, or Facebook. I can talk to him about the issues I've heard about, but I can't think to myself, "Let's see, I remember the online teasing started around grade ____, so I need to be sure to ask him about it more often and make sure we're staying on top of his Facebook account and texts."

It really is hard for us parents to know what's actually going on---and sometimes we don't find out until something's gone very badly wrong indeed. But we can at least ASK, right? So here's the deal: this is a 2-post series, and on this one you can ask any question you want Rob to answer about technology at school and/or at his age: bullying via technology, cell phone use, texting, all that stuff. And on the second one, I'll interview him and post his replies.

To ask questions of kids in other age groups: the BlogHer round-up page.

From the client:

Each comment left on this post benefits DoSomething.org with a $0.50 donation! Because this topic is so important for our kids and their futures, BlogHer really wants to get the conversation about texting, sexting and safety going – both with our kids and among parents. It will match LG’s donation of .50 to dosomething.org for every comment on this post, so please give me your suggestions on questions for my kids. Dosomething.org will get a $1.00 for each and every one.

Winner! (Kellogg's Week Twelve)

2010-11-05T11:12:00.001-04:00

The winner of the Kellogg's Week Twelve giveaway ($100 Visa gift card) is Sunnymum! I'll email you!

Winner! (Newman's Own)

2010-11-05T11:05:00.001-04:00

The winner of the Newman's Own giveaway (a Newman's Own gift basket) is Dave! I'll email you!

Winner! (Ragu)

2010-11-05T10:56:00.002-04:00

The winner of the Ragu giveaway ($100 Visa gift card) is Amanda! I'll email you!

An Idea for Managing Teenagers and Cell Phones

2010-10-26T14:20:00.003-04:00

This is sponsored content from BlogHer and LG Text Ed

My firstborn started sixth grade this year, which has sent me into a future-anticipating panic. I flit like a bumblebee from "What if I'm buying him clothes that will make him unpopular?" to "What if he gets teased so badly he Does Something Awful?" to "What if he's just one of those kids who is never going to fit in?" to "What if his grades aren't good enough for college?" to whole BOUQUETS of worries about EVERYTHING that could go wrong.

Which includes SEX and RELATIONSHIP worries. Fine, he's eleven years old, but eleven is sitting on the front steps of the Teenager Building. He'll be twelve in a few more months, and twelve is knocking on the door of the Teenager Building and calling out "Helloooooooo?"

I have what I would consider my primary fears for the next decade: (1) He'll get someone pregnant when such an event would plans-derailing; (2) He'll treat someone badly; (3) He'll choose someone bad for him.

And maybe more than the others: (4) He'll get involved in something I didn't even realize I was supposed to be talking to him about. Like sexting. I've HEARD of sexting, but I hadn't worried about it yet, and if you want HONESTY here, I wasn't completely clear on what it...IS. I had to look it up on Wikipedia to make sure I knew.

Rob doesn't have a cell phone. YET. Right now he doesn't need one, but as I understand it, pretty much all teenagers end up having them, is that right? And if I remember correctly from my teen years, it's not just a matter of setting up good rules, because SETTING rules for teens doesn't necessarily mean there is FOLLOWING of those rules, and therein lies the problem: How can I set rules AND ensure that they're followed---while minimizing privacy issues?

Here's my idea: What if we gave him a phone that would not be "his phone" but rather a FAMILY phone that anyone could use when they need to carry one along? This makes good sense for our family anyway: imagine if you will the cost of cell phone service for SEVEN cell phones.

This answers his complaint that he NEEDS a phone (by letting him take one to use when he needs it) and MY feeling that sometimes he needs a phone (so I can worry less, and so I can call him if I need/want to), but also allows us to keep better tabs on what the phone is being used for. It sure would be awkward to have a friend send a sexy text message if your MOM might have the phone that day.

From the client:

"Each comment left on this post benefits DoSomething.org with a $0.50 donation!

Kellogg's, Week Twelve: Morning Rituals, and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2010-10-26T10:30:00.000-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the LAST of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This week's topic is Morning Rituals: Do you have any annual breakfast traditions? A special Christmas breakfast, maybe, or special birthday breakfasts, or a special Easter breakfast?

When I was a child, my family had a birthday breakfast ritual: the Birthday Girl or Birthday Boy was served breakfast in bed, which meant that she or he had to pretend to be asleep while the rest of the family clanged and clattered around and shushed each other. Then the family came in singing the happy birthday song and carrying the breakfast-in-bed tray (a white-painted wooden thing with two magazine-rack-type things on the sides and a center tray that could be propped at a variety of angles---this was also the sick-in-bed tray). The breakfast was always, ALWAYS, sweet rolls from a can, the kind with orange frosting, with lit candles stuck into them, and I'm sure that was perfectly safe to have around piles and piles of loose, fluffy bedding. Plus orange juice, and coffee for the mama.

I'm picking up a tube of those sweet rolls this weekend, don't think I'm not.

We also have a Christmas-related breakfast ritual, which is that the morning after Christmas we have leftover worstebroodjes (sausages in bread, dipped in, er, ketchup and eaten for Christmas dinner) for breakfast. I don't know if our Dutch ancestors used ketchup, but if not they SHOULD have because it is DELISH. Paul is theoretically half-Dutch as well, but uses MUSTARD, and has taught our CHILDREN to use mustard, and I think you'll agree with me when I say that makes him less Dutch.

Thank you for sticking around for twelve posts about breakfast, and I do hope you'll associate Kellogg's with BREAKFAST and CEREAL despite all my talk about sweet rolls and muffin scoops and autumn soups and kittens. And if not, I do hope you'll fake it so that Kellogg's doesn't regret hiring me.

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment on this post by Monday, November 1, 2010 about an annual breakfast ritual, or else swearing to associate Kellogg's with cereal instead of with kittens. Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old.

For a second entry, you can:

Tweet about this post with a link to it (and put your tweet URL in a separate comment below), or
Blog about this post with a link to it (and put your blog post URL in a separate comment below)

Sweepstakes ends 5 PM EST on November 1, 2010.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week Twelve.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

From the client: "Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com."

Winner! (Kellogg's Week Eleven)

2010-10-26T10:19:00.002-04:00

The winner of the Kellogg's Week Eleven giveaway ($100 Visa gift card) is Meggan! I'll email you!

And in just a few minutes I'll post the LAST of the Kellogg's giveaways, with another $100 Visa gift card.

Winner! (French Toast)

2010-10-25T10:15:00.002-04:00

The winner of the French Toast giveaway (2 tops and 2 bottoms) is Clueless but Hopeful Mama! I'll email you!

Kellogg's, Week Eleven: Good Things in Bowls, and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2010-10-19T10:06:00.002-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the eleventh of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's. EACH POST will have its own $100 gift card giveaway. The plan is to have each giveaway start on Tuesday and run until the following Monday.

This week's topic is Good Things in Bowls: What's your favorite meal in a bowl? Soup? Cereal? Yogurt with granola and fruit? Oatmeal? ~~Ice cream?~~ Macaroni and cheese? Fried rice? Chili?

My favorite meal in a bowl is chicken-rice-egg-corn. It sounds icky and it looks icky, but it is SUPREME DELICIOUSNESS. I make one of the larger-size bags of brown rice (the kind that cooks in a bag), and I add a cup of cooked barbecue-sauced chicken breast cut into little pieces, a can of Niblets sweet corn, and four scrambled eggs, and I heat it all up in a skillet. And then I add, like, a FISTFUL of salt. It is so, so yummy.

My second favorite meal in a bowl is soup. I have a good autumn soup recipe (recently I've been leaving out the broccoli and putting in a can of black beans and a can of chickpeas, and it is even more good and autumny).

I hope some of you will say your favorite meal in a bowl is cereal, because otherwise I am going to feel a little awkward about using a cereal-sponsored post to write about soup. Oh: I CAN say that my favorite BREAKFAST meal in a bowl is cereal, for sure! (Unless I am eating leftover chicken-egg-rice-corn...)

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment on this post by Monday, October 25, 2010 about your favorite meal in a bowl. Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old.

For a second entry, you can:

Tweet about this post with a link to it (and put your tweet URL in a separate comment below), or
Blog about this post with a link to it (and put your blog post URL in a separate comment below)

Sweepstakes ends 5 PM EST on October 25, 2010.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week Eleven.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

From the client: "Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com."

Winner! (Kellogg's Week Ten)

2010-10-19T10:03:00.002-04:00

The winner of Kellogg's Week Ten ($100 Visa gift card) is Barbarawr! I'll email you!

And in a few minutes there will be the eleventh Kellogg's post, with another $100 Visa gift card.

Review: French Toast School Uniforms, With a Giveaway of Two Tops and Two Bottoms

2010-10-15T15:56:00.006-04:00

(Disclosure info: For this review I was given four pieces of children's clothing plus four more for a giveaway, but not otherwise compensated, nor told what to write.)

My mother used to teach at a school that required uniforms. And you can tell the uniforms were chosen by someone who lacked children or common sense or both, because these uniforms:

cost $50 per jumper, and that didn't even include the shirt, which was $30, and
were dry-clean only

DRY-CLEAN ONLY! THIRTY DOLLARS FOR A PLAIN WHITE SHORT-SLEEVED SHIRT! And please keep in mind that children need either five outfits for a schoolweek or else they need someone to do ~~laundry~~ DRY-CLEANING for them several times a week.

I am in favor of school uniforms: they appeal to me because they're easy, because I enjoy buying little stacks of duplicates of things, because I love mix-and-matching, and because I think they're adorable. But if I had to pay $80 for ONE DAY'S OUTFIT, and it would need to be DRY-CLEANED at the end of that day, I think I might go slap out of my mind.

So before I review some school uniforms that are NOT dry-clean only and NOT priced all krazy, I would like to turn to the camera and speak sternly to those in charge of choosing uniforms for a school: for the love of all that is good, CHOOSE SENSIBLY. It is not necessary to spend a BAZILLION DOLLARS to get wonderful school uniforms for children to dribble ketchup down the fronts of. An expensive uniform looks THE SAME as the less expensive ones, and no one looking at your school's students on the playground will think, "Ooo, those uniforms are the EIGHTY DOLLAR ones---it MUST be a good school!"

My mom is the one who first noticed French Toast: she was looking for a school uniform for a doll (don't ask), and she got pages of school uniform sites---and this is when she realized that the kids from her school could have ALL ALONG been buying their uniforms cheaper, because other sites had the SAME PLAID and the SAME JUMPERS but for WAY LESS and also MACHINE-WASH. Those are my all-caps but they were also my mom's, when she was telling me about it. And that was my motivation for doing this review unpaid: my mom and I BOTH wanted to know how these uniforms compared the the ones she was familiar with.

French Toast sent me two tops and two bottoms of my choice, so I chose to dress the twins, who just started school this year. Because the only thing cuter than school uniforms is LITTLE TWINS in school uniforms. I chose:

Plaid Two-Tab Scooter in navy-red plaid (item 1397B, $11.98 in size 5)
Sweater With Ribbon Trim in navy (item 1390B, $12.98 in size 5)
Adjustable Waist Pants in khaki (item 1219A, $14.98 in size 5)
V-Neck Pullover Sweater in navy (item 1028A, $11.50 in size 5)

That dressed both twins in not even 2/3rds the cost of one school uniform at my mom's school. And I could have dressed them for even less if I'd taken advantage of the clearance section where there were, for example, skirts for $6. Or if I'd chosen regular short-sleeved shirts for $6/$7/$8 instead of zooming right in on the more-expensive sweaters.

I was going for "Casual pose from children's clothing catalog,"
but I think maybe what I got was "That poor girl is about to fall out of the tree
and her brother isn't even going to notice."

The clothes seem GREAT. The sweaters are the perfect weight: Elizabeth's is a nice lightweight sweater (like the weight of sweaters used in twinsets) that could go over a blouse (ooo, like with a peter pan collar!), and Edward's is heavier but not too hot to wear over his shirt. The scooter feels like nice quality and looked even prettier than on the site. I was really happy with all the clothes. And they are MACHINE-WASHABLE.

My kids' schools don't require uniforms, but I plan to place an order anyway: these are excellent school clothes, uniform requirement or no. And the clincher was that after their modeling session, both twins wanted to wear the outfits to school today.

Who wouldn't?

The Giveaway
French Toast is giving away two tops and two bottoms of YOUR choice. They have sizes 2T - 20, and regular khakis and solid skirts and plain polos as well as school plaids, so that's a lot of choice. To enter the giveaway, leave a comment on this post by Saturday, October 23rd. Entrants must have a U.S. mailing address and be at least 18 years old.

Kellogg's, Week Ten: The Secrets of Breakfast, and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2010-10-12T10:48:00.002-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the tenth of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's. EACH POST will have its own $100 gift card giveaway. The plan is to have each giveaway start on Tuesday and run until the following Monday.

This week's topic is Breakfast Secrets: Do you always put vanilla and cinnamon in your pancakes? Do you know how to make blueberry muffins so the blueberries don't make soggy spots in them? Have you found the perfect whisk, or the perfect cereal bowl, or the perfect mug? Kiss-up points available for saying you've found the perfect cereal!

Here's my secret:

Do you hear the "heavens opening up" sound? WHHHHEEEEEOOOOOM! This is my disher: a #20-size scoop that has changed the way I feel about making muffins. Scoop, scoop, scoop, DONE. Paul bought it for me as a present. So much easier than spooning the batter in, especially for those of us who are not so good with spatial relations and estimating.

Also, I put cinnamon and vanilla and flax seed meal in pancake batter.

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment on this post by Monday, October 18, 2010 about a breakfast secret---er, a secret you don't mind telling everyone, which I guess diminishes the "secret" aspect. Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old.

For a second entry, you can:

Tweet about this post with a link to it (and put your tweet URL in a separate comment below), OR
Blog about this post with a link to it (and put your blog post URL in a separate comment below)

Sweepstakes ends 5 PM EST on October 18, 2010.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week Ten.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

From the client: Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Winner! (Kellogg's Week Nine)

2010-10-12T10:39:00.003-04:00

The winner of the Kellogg's Week Nine giveaway ($100 Visa gift card) is Champagne Wisdom! I'll email you!

And in just a few minutes there will be the next Kellogg's post, with another $100 Visa gift card giveaway.

Soothing and Cheering a Sick Child, and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2010-10-08T10:37:00.006-04:00

This is sponsored content from BlogHer and Similasan.

We have children in three different school buildings this year. We are doomed: we will get every single illness that goes around.

When one of the kids is sick enough to stay home from school, I build the child a "nest": the child can choose the couch or the recliner, and I bring out pillows and throws, stuffed animals and favorite blankies. A congested child gets a vaporizer nearby. A barfy child gets a bucket. Anyone can have a cat delivered to them, though it's up to the cat if the cat will stay.

The child gets to choose what's on TV, and can watch it all day long if he or she wants to. Or I can bring the child books, or clipboards with paper to color on, or handheld video games. And I bought one of those knitting spool things (the kind that lets the child can knit a long, useless rope), and we bring that out only for sick kids.

Usual meals are abandoned: barfy children get saltines, toast, rice cereal, bananas, applesauce; non-barfy children can have anything that appeals, which is usually graham crackers, cinnamon toast, saltines. Children who are not barfing can have as much juice as they want instead of the usual "one cup per day" limit, and children who ARE barfing can make frequent requests for small amounts of juice or water or even soda.

To enter to win a $100 Visa gift card, leave a comment on this post by November 18, 2010 with one of the ways you soothe/cheer a sick child---or one of the ways YOU were soothed/cheered back when YOU were the child who was sick.

For a second entry, you can:

Tweet about this post with a link to it (and put your tweet URL in a separate comment below)
Blog about this post with a link to it (and put your blog post URL in a separate comment below)
Read the official rules for alternate form of entry.

Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old. For more details, see the Official Rules.

See the BlogHer offers page for 9 more chances to win.

From the client: “Similasan Earache Relief ear drops and Pink Eye Relief eye drops are safe and effective remedies to help relieve the symptoms of earaches and pink eye naturally. Similasan uses 100% natural active ingredients in their products. Pink Eye Relief eye drops relieve the redness, watery discharge and burning associated with viral and environmental conjunctivitis (pink eye). Earache Relief ear drops relieve the pain of earaches and are safe for all ages.” For more information, see the Similasan USA site.

Kellogg's, Week Nine: The Morning Rush, and a $100 Visa Gift Card

2010-10-05T10:21:00.000-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the ninth of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's. EACH POST will have its own $100 gift card giveaway. The plan is to have each giveaway start on Tuesday and run until the following Monday.

This week's topic is The Morning Rush: Do you have tips for making the morning routine simpler? And are there breakfast foods that make the morning simpler?

Our morning routine is more complicated this year than in any previous year. My eldest child catches a bus at 7:00, and then my second child catches a bus at 8:00, and then the twins go to kindergarten at noon.

One thing that has dramatically simplified things for me is having a watch that can be set to beep at certain times. It beeps to let me know it's almost time for the first child's bus, and it beeps again when it's almost time for the second child's bus. This has already saved me from missing several buses.

I also have several morning milestones in a set schedule: I always wake the first child when I get up to take my shower 5:45, and I always wake the second child right after the first child gets on the bus.

A third thing that helps tremendously is SIGNS. I haven't put up this year's yet because we're still figuring out when each child needs lace-up shoes for gym and when the second child needs to bring his clarinet and how to make one sign include four different children, but here's an example sign from last winter when things were simpler:

This year we're adding lace-up shoes, clarinet, and remembering to brush teeth, but the gist of it is the same: a sign by the door lets us make sure we're remembering everything for everybody. IN THEORY, the children are supposed to check the sign themselves; what actually happens is that I say "Did you do everything on the sign?" and they say "Yes!" and I say "Including remembering your lunch?" and they say "Yes!...oh, er, no."

Simple breakfast foods: for us it's cereal or muffins. Both are easy to dish up, easy to serve in shifts, and easy for the older kids to serve themselves.

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment on this post by Monday, October 11, 2010 about either (1) tips for making the morning routine simpler or (2) breakfasts that make the morning routine simpler. Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old. One entry per post per person. To get an additional entry, blog or tweet the contest and then leave a comment with a link to the post or tweet.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week Nine.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Winner! (Kellogg's Week Eight)

2010-10-05T10:16:00.001-04:00

The winner of the Kellogg's Week Eight giveaway ($100 Visa gift card) is bdiane34! I'll email you!

In a little while I'll be posting the next Kellogg's giveaway, with another $100 gift card.

Ragú Traditional Pasta Sauce: A Review, and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2010-10-04T10:20:00.001-04:00

This is a sponsored review from BlogHer and Ragú.

Ragú has updated their Traditional pasta sauce, from one serving of vegetables per 1/2 cup to TWO servings of vegetables per 1/2 cup.

Ragú sent us one jar of the old version and two jars of the new version, so we could try them. We did two blind taste tests.

Paul and I both first tried a little spoonful of plain sauce:

Paul
Background: Grew up with jarred sauces
Preference: New version
Comments: Liked both, but slightly preferred new

Swistle
Background: Grew up with homemade sauces
Preference: New version
Comments: New version tastes less like a jarred sauce; old version tastes more like what I'd expect the children to like.

The old version is a little thinner and oranger, and tasted a little saltier to me; the new version is a little thicker and darker. But they're very similar: if I'd switched to the new without telling anyone, I would have been very surprised if anyone noticed.

I gave the kids each two bowls of pasta, one with the new sauce and one with the old, none of the bowls marked. ALL the kids preferred the old version, but it took them a long time to make the decision and they all ate both servings.

But this is where I like to compare:

(Click photo to biggify it)

I would buy the new version, because I like it better, Paul likes it better, the kids won't notice, and I would be swayed by the two-versus-one vegetable servings. But I notice that when I compare the actual labels, not much is different. The ingredients list is nearly the same, with sugar and dehydrated onions switching places. There are 10 more calories per 1/2 cup in the new version (14% increase), 60 more mg of potassium (19% increase), 1 more gram of sugar (17% increase), 1 more gram of fiber (50% increase). Iron went from 4% RDA to 6% RDA. Vitamins A and C are the same.

Still, I would buy the new version, because I preferred it---and because, as I say, I'm influenced by the fronts of labels as well as the backs.

We also thought we'd try a recipe other than "add sauce to pasta," so I went to Ragú's recipe page, chose "Dinner" and "Kid-friendly" and "Red sauce," and....whoops, I should have checked this more than half an hour before dinner, because we don't have all those ingredients. So then I chose "Dinner" and "Red sauce" and "turkey," and I got Turkey Chili Mac, which I made without the green pepper because (1) the children don't like green pepper and (2) we didn't have any green pepper. And then I left out the olive oil because (1) I didn't need to sauté the green pepper. And then I didn't read very carefully so I didn't see the part about simmering it covered for 10 minutes, so I just brought it to a simmer and that was it.

Which makes it pretty much the easiest recipe ever if you don't include ordering pizza: I cooked 8 ounces of pasta (I didn't have elbow macaroni so used whatever that straight, diagonally-cut-ends tube shape is), and while it was boiling I browned and drained a package of ground turkey, then added a jar of the new Ragú sauce and a tablespoon of chili powder. And by then the pasta was done so I added it to the meat and sauce and it was done. At 4:30 I was searching the Ragú site, and at 5:00 the kids were already eating.

This is what they were eating.
(The polite person would pretend she didn't notice
I'd photoshopped some of the gunk off of the stovetop.)

It was yummy and easy, and I admit I was thinking "two servings of vegetables per half-cup times six half-cups equals twelve servings of vegetables in this pan!" I'd prefer it with the green pepper (and maybe with some crushed red pepper), but the kids liked it like this.

To enter to win a $100 Visa gift card from BlogHer, leave a comment on this post by October 31, 2010, saying if you grew up with jarred sauces or homemade sauces.

You must be 18 or older and a U.S. resident to enter. One entry per person. For a second entry, you can:

Tweet about this post with a link to it (and put your tweet URL in a separate comment below)
Blog about this post with a link to it (and put your blog post URL in a separate comment below)
Read the official rules for alternate form of entry.

For the more complete details, see the official rules. For ten other chances to win (or twenty, if you go for the additional entry on each one), see the BlogHer.com special offers page.

But wait, there is more:
Ragú is also having a non-BlogHer-Ads-related Meal Makeover Kit sweepstakes on their Facebook page, with HUGE cooking gift baskets (more than $300 worth of stuff) as prizes: Macy's cookware, Crate & Barrel and Williams-Sonoma kitchen accessories/utensils, Ceriello of Manhattan pastas, and a bunch of Ragú sauce. Go over there for details on how to enter. (But leave a comment here first if you want to enter for the gift card.)

Winner! (Juicy Juice)

2010-10-02T14:56:00.001-04:00

The winner of the Juicy Juice giveaway ($100 Visa gift card and a juice prize pack) is clynsg! I'll email you!

Winner! (8th Continent)

2010-10-02T14:41:00.002-04:00

The winner of the 8th Continent giveaway ($100 Visa gift card and 12 half-gallons of soy milk) is Sarah! I'll email you!

Kellogg's, Week Eight: Weekend Mornings, and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2010-09-28T10:25:00.001-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the eighth of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's. EACH POST will have its own $100 gift card giveaway. The plan is to have each giveaway start on Tuesday and run until the following Monday.

This week's topic is Weekend Mornings: How do they differ from weekday mornings? And does your family have any breakfasts they make together?

Weekend mornings aren't much different at our house. I'm usually in my pajamas while making it, and it's more common for us to eat in shifts since the big kids are allowed to sleep in, but otherwise it's the same: five cups, five bowls or five plates, five vitamins, five muffins or five bowls of cereal. And then me trying to get out of the room with my coffee.

The kids do like to help make muffins, and in fact sometimes I make the muffins in the evenings after their bedtimes just to cut down on the number of sous chefs.

Edward stirs the wet ingredients; Elizabeth stirs the dry

Three of the five can help make cereal without getting more cereal on the floor than is worth it for me, and the other two can help carrying things to the table.

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment on this post by Monday, October 4, 2010 about either (1) how your weekend mornings differ from weekday ones or (2) what breakfasts your family makes together. Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old. One entry per post per person. To get an additional entry, blog or tweet the contest and then leave a comment with a link to the post or tweet.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week Eight.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Winner! (Kellogg's Week Seven)

2010-09-28T10:10:00.003-04:00

The winner of the Kellogg's Week Seven giveaway is Type (little) a! I'll email you!

And in a little while there'll be a NEW Kellogg's post, with another $100 gift card giveaway.

Kellogg's, Week Seven: Quality Mornings, and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2010-09-21T11:22:00.001-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the seventh of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's. EACH POST will have its own $100 gift card giveaway. The plan is to have each giveaway start on Tuesday and run until the following Monday.

This week's topic is Quality Mornings: How do you start the day on a positive note? And do you always have breakfast in the morning?

I'll start with the second question because I already answered it in another of these posts: HECK YES we always have breakfast. Do _I_ always have it? Er. But the kids always do. Always! ...Although, this is not the superhuman feat I'm implying, because so far only one of them has ever wanted to skip breakfast, and we've let him try skipping and then he's complaining he's hungry when it's still 2 hours until lunch.

I know Kellogg's is paying me so you may find my cereal-related opinions of suspicious worth, but they haven't been paying me for the last ELEVEN YEARS and I've still given the kids cereal most mornings. I think of cereal as the good choice: many cooked breakfasts are high in fat and/or sugar, as are many "convenience" options, but cereal is full of, like, GRAINS! Grains are GOOD! And sure, you can get super-sugary or low-quality-grains cereals, but there are tons with very low sugar and/or very good grains, or ones where the sugar seems "worth it" to me (like in Mini-Wheats, where the little frosted part is the only way I'll eat the healthy good-grains part).

Now, for the other question. There's another mother who waits at the bus stop with me in the mornings, and she says she tries very, very hard not to snap or grouch at the kids either right before school or right before bed. She and I are both impatient types and would have a natural tendency to say things like "Come ON, let's GO, what is the PROBLEM here?!" in the mornings, but we try to work against our natural tendencies. It doesn't always work, since those also tend to be the two times of day when the children seem to need the most pushing and reminding and managing, but we TRY.

I also make sure to make my good-bye affectionate, even if my "trying" has been more like "failing" that day: I'll say, "Bye, honey, have a good day at school!" or I'll leave out "honey" if it's an older kid who might be embarrassed.

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment on this post by Monday, September 27, 2010 about either (1) how you keep mornings all cheery and positive or (2) whether or not you always have breakfast. Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old. One entry per post per person. To get an additional entry, blog or tweet the contest and then leave a comment with a link to the post or tweet.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week Seven.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Winner! (Kellogg's Week Six)

2010-09-21T04:55:00.001-04:00

The winner of the Kellogg's Week Six giveaway is AmyNaab! I'll email you!

Later this morning there will be ANOTHER Kellogg's post with ANOTHER $100 Visa gift card giveaway.

Superpowers, and ABC No Ordinary Family

2010-09-15T11:30:00.005-04:00

This is sponsored content from BlogHer and ABC's No Ordinary Family.

The assignment was to write about what superpowers I would choose, for myself and for the members of my family. I mulled this over. Soon I realized I was thinking TOO SMALL: I could be INVISIBLE or I could WALK THROUGH WALLS or I could READ MINDS---but instead what was I thinking of? I was thinking it would be great to have a superpower that would...rapidly clean my house. Er.

I have a superpower advantage at my house because I have more than the average number of family members to assign powers to. We can really diversify. But speaking of that same larger-than-usual family, the housecleaning thing really would be nice, because, really, we could clean the bathroom DAILY and not be overdoing it. Hm. If one of us is going to have the power of, um, Rapid and Thorough Cleaning, it seems like we should super that power up a notch by putting that person to work cleaning up oil spills in the ocean and earthquake-collapsed building rubble and so forth, too. A full-time job cleaning up disasters is not a career that appeals to me, so I'm giving the Power of Cleanliness (to be used for our own personal house as well as for major environmental messes) to Rob: a classic firstborn and also a pre-teen, he's big on environmental indignation. Plus, he should learn to clean a toilet before he grows up and gets married.

I think I should choose/distribute all the superpowers the same way: powers that would benefit our family or the individual person on a small and individual sort of scale, but ALSO let them make a fulfilling and world-hugging career out of their superness. Because that is THE SUPERHERO WAY. It is how superheroes ROLL.

The problem, then, is how am I going to "also benefit the world" with invisibility, because I would really enjoy all the snooping and eavesdropping I could do with that, but I can't find the philanthropic angle. Oh! No, wait, I change my mind: I want the power to explain anything to anyone, so that they understand and, ahem, agree with me. No, no, wait, I want to be able to do something with TIME! ...Can we come back to mine later?

I know what my husband Paul would want, because every time he catches anything before it falls, he flexes his muscles and says "Luckily, I have LIGHTING-QUICK REFLEXES!" So that's the superpower I'll give him: not just reflexes, but lightning-speed all around. The kind of superhero who sees a truck about to hit someone and can dart in, get the person, and dart out again, so fast no one even sees it. This would also be convenient when we're making dinner and realize we're short an ingredient. SHWOOSH to the store! SHWOOSH home again!

And now I know what I want: I want to be able to speak any language fluently. I want The Power of Babel, as it were. (Geddit, GEDDIT??) This would be great for traveling ("not knowing the language" is my number one fear), and I'd enjoy working in translating---both spoken and written. This may not be as AMAZING as invisibility, but I WANT IT. I'm already imagining myself delivering a speech to the United Nations that would bring everyone to tears, and peace to the world. And being able to understand any language gives me excellent eavesdropportunities.

I think SOMEONE should be able to go back in time to change things: it's just SO convenient on mornings when an alarm doesn't go off or we leave a lunchbox at home or we get in a fender-bender. Let's give that power to Henry: not only is he the youngest so he's easiest to contact and use, he lovvvves dinosaurs and could in his spare time go visit them. Plus, he already wants to be a "paleo-tah-jolist" (paleontologist), so this gives him a BIG edge over future colleagues.

It seems like someone should have invisibility or telepathy, too, but I don't like the idea of any of the kids being able to do that.

William, a fourth-grader who spends all his allowance on magic tricks, can have the power of elemental transmutation: being able to change one thing into another by changing the arrangements/combinations of molecules. Not only will this be excellent for college (he's interested in chemistry), I assume this would make him a pretty fast cook. And perhaps he could work with Rob on environmental issues afterward, if only he and Rob could stop their INCESSANT BICKERING.

That leaves Edward and Elizabeth, and it seems like twins need complementary powers, and Power Rings to click together to activate them. But instead let's give Edward the power to heal, which he can use for his own deeply traumatizing owies ("AAAAAAAAAAAAA, IS THERE BLOOD??, AAAAAAAAAA!!!") and also as a worldwide career later on. And Elizabeth, who likes to know EVERYTHING, can have one of those powers where the person knows something is going to happen right before it does, and can whisk someone out of trouble and/or stop it before it happens.

I suggested they put on superhero capes. I think they need more practice.

What superpowers would YOU choose for YOUR family?

We're discussing this topic because there's a new show on ABC called No Ordinary Family, in which all four members get superpowers: one super speed, one super strength, one mental telepathy, and one super intelligence.

To see the video better than my blog format will apparently let me show it: better version of the video.
To see stories by other bloggers: BlogHer.com special offers page.
For more information about the show: ABC No Ordinary Family show page.
To visit them on Facebook: No Ordinary Family on Facebook.

Kellogg's, Week Six: Back to School, and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2010-09-14T11:06:00.001-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the sixth of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's. EACH POST will have its own $100 gift card giveaway. The plan is to have each giveaway start on Tuesday and run until the following Monday.

This week's topic is Back to School: How do you transition from a summer schedule to a school schedule? Do you have any tips for other parents to use? And what's your school-day breakfast?

Transitioning

I start a couple of weeks before school, mentioning each day how many days are left of summer. We start buying school supplies as we see them on sale. The little kids are always up early anyway, but I start waking the bigger kids earlier and earlier, until we're at the time they'll need to get up for school. For the little kids, every time we drove past their school, we said, "There's your school!"

To prepare myself, I start thinking in terms of what I'll need to be doing on school days. I start roughing out in my head what the schedule will be like: "Let's see...Rob needs to catch a bus at 7:00, so that means he needs to be up at 6:00, so that means I'll need to take a shower either before 6:00 or else after he leaves, and then I can wake up William right after Rob's bus leaves..."---and so on, getting a good rolling fret going so that I'll be well-rehearsed by the time school starts.

Tips

One tip I follow is to put everything in a sensible place on the LAST day of school. It feels like it's SO LONG until school starts again, it's tempting to just chuck everything in the corner to worry about it later---which of course leads to intense frustration when it's the day before school starts and I KNOW Rob still has his pencil case from last year but WHERE COULD IT BE??

Another tip I use is to get all the school supplies sorted into backpacks several days or a week before school starts. That seems like such a "duh" tip, but every year I have to actively work to do this rather than letting time go by until it's ~~the morning of~~ the night before and I'm sorting bags and bags of school supplies into four piles and saying, "I KNOW I BOUGHT MORE PENCILS THAN THIS, SO WHERE ARE THEY??"

And a sub-tip: treat class supply lists as if they are made of pressed gold. Ideally, keep them in one place where they can't be found/destroyed by children/pets/husbands. ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO LOSE LISTS! I keep them in a baggie in my purse, so I'll have them with me at the store as the school sales start appearing.

Tuck it into your bra if necessary

School-day Breakfast

Our school breakfast is muffins or cereal, plus milk and banana. I make the muffins myself, with whole wheat flour and flax seed meal and so forth, and I choose cereals that are nutritious with lots of good grain stuff happening in them. The cereal is easier and lower in sugar.

The Giveaway

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment on this post by Monday, September 20, 2010 about (1) tips for transitioning from a summer schedule to a school one, or (2) school-day breakfasts. Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old. One entry per post per person. To get an additional entry, blog or tweet the contest and then leave a comment with a link to the post or tweet.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week Six.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Winner! (Kellogg's Week Five)

2010-09-14T11:02:00.001-04:00

The winner of the Kellogg's Week Five giveaway is MCantu1019! I'll email you!

And in just a few minutes I'll be posting Kellogg's Week Six, with a chance to win another $100 Visa gift card.

Not a Bad Mom: 8th Continent Soy Milk, With Many Giveaways

2010-09-08T11:59:00.015-04:00

This is a sponsored post from 8th Continent and BlogHer.

I have a pet peeve, and it is this: women referring to themselves as "bad moms" when they've made small, understandable mistakes. A woman accidentally pinches her child's fingers in a drawer, or the child falls and gets a scrape/bruise on his face while the mother is reading a novel, or the mom loses her temper and makes a snappish remark, or the child falls off just a very low changing table to a perfectly ordinary hardwood floor, and then the woman writes that she's ready to receive her Bad Mom Award.

Well, piffle. I won't plague our minds by calling up imagery of women who are ACTUALLY bad mothers, but suffice it to say that becoming a mother doesn't mean receiving the Holy Gift of Perfection, and good mothers are still HUMAN and will still make mistakes at the same rate as other humans (and in fact FASTER, with the sleep deprivation and the constant distractions and the OMG PLEASE STOP TALKING TO ME FOR TWO MINUTES, JUST TWO MINUTES, I BEG OF YOU, BEFORE I LOSE WHAT'S LEFT OF MY MIND), and that this variety of non-perfection has ZERO RELATIONSHIP to women who are, in fact, BAD mothers.

So. Pet peeve. Now you know. "FEEL LIKE" a bad mother sometimes, sure. "ARE" a bad mother, piffle.

Oh, and ALSO, I guess I am still not done, because if a woman says she's a bad mother for making a small and unintentional mistake, she's implying OTHER women are bad mothers if THEY make small and unintentional mistakes. And let's not do that! Especially because I am about to tell you about one of my own small and unintentional mistakes.

Okay, here it is. I was out on errands with my then-toddler-aged firstborn Rob, and he was thirsty, so I got him a cup of water from the diaper bag. (Yes, do we all know where this is going? It is because these mistakes are VERY COMMON.) Of course he was sputtering and saying yuck, and of course I was irritated and thought he was complaining because he wanted juice. He started crying and saying again that he was thirsty, so I got even more irritated and wanted him to just DRINK THE WATER, THEN, IF YOU'RE SO THIRSTY. Which---yes, yes, wait for it---was full of mold. REEKING with mold. Who knows how long that cup had been brewing that revolting...brew.

Oh, and there is more. Women are not the only ones who remain fully human in the parenthood state, oh dear no. I went home and put a bleach/water solution in the cup to kill the astonishing mold colony, and I put it among the dirty dishes on the counter so I could scrub it out later when I was doing the dishes. And when Rob whimpered that he was thirsty, PAUL GAVE HIM THE CUP OF WATER. The cup that was AMONG THE DIRTY DISHES. The cup FULL OF CLOUDY BLEACH SOLUTION.

Well, it's been ten years and blame has not yet been distributed to our satisfaction. Suffice it to say, I looked at a child who was sputtering out his drink for the second time in one day, and this time I had to call Poison Control.

It all ended just fine, with a child barfing as Nature intended into a large mixing bowl and sustaining no injuries (and perhaps even conveniently ridding his system of the mold he drank earlier?) (NO, I AM KIDDING, PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS ON PURPOSE IF YOUR CHILD DRINKS MOLDY WATER). But then of course I received in the mail the Packet of Shame from Poison Control: a big envelope of information for me, teaching me that I should not be feeding poison to my toddler or putting it where he (OR HIS FATHER) could reach it. O RLY?

To review: We do our best and we TRY not to screw up, but NEVERTHELESS we ALL make mistakes, even mistakes that make us FEEL like bad mothers. This does not mean we ARE bad mothers. Well, maybe some of you ARE, but I don't mean YOU, then. I mean those of you who FEEL like bad mothers when you accidentally run over your child's hand a little bit with the shopping cart or pin a teensy bit of your child to her diaper, but who are in fact GOOD mothers who sometimes screw up a little.

Plus, have you noticed how relieved and bonded you feel when other mothers talk about how they screwed up, so you know you're not the only one?

And this is what makes commercials like the 8th Continent Soy Milk ones so funny. And I do hope you'll find them funny: it's bizarre but there are some people who don't find it funny to hear small children yelling "d*ckhead," or to watch small children get hit in the head with a piñata bat. Crazy, AMIRITE? And if you are likely to find it non-funny, just say you need to go to the bathroom or something and no one will even notice you sneaking out before the show starts.

“D*ckhead”

“Piñata”

Now, goodness, we have many, many giveaways to discuss. The FIRST giveaway is the one to be given away on this post: it's a $100 Visa gift card AND twelve coupons for free half-gallons of 8th Continent Soy Milk. To enter, leave a comment on this post by September 30, 2010, sharing one of your own "Not a bad mom" moments. And if you have not yet had such a moment, or if it's hard to think of one on the spot like this, you can still enter by saying which video you like best.

Then there are, like, a million other giveaways (disclaimer: not a million), and you get to them by going to visit 8th Continent on Facebook. This is where you can see other people's stories and submit your own. The giveaways include two room makeovers from Home Line Furniture and a complete adventure package from Caravan Tours. On second thought, forget I said anything about these prizes, because if you enter you'll decrease MY chances of winning. So never mind! La la la!

PLUS, there are 8 other bloggers doing the same giveaway we're doing here, so you can go to the BlogHer.com special offers page for 8 other chances to win 8 other gift-card-and-soy-milk prizes.

You can also go visit 8th Continent on YouTube, to see the videos (there's one I didn't include on this post that involves a hamster and a reason for not vacuuming too thoroughly). Or you can become a fan on Facebook, and I'm not saying it'll increase your chances of winning (because it won't), but I AM saying it doesn't hurt to cozy up to the people giving out the prizes. And you can follow them on Twitter, too, if you want the full soy milk media experience.

Got all that? FIRST leave a comment here about one of your own little non-perfect moments (or, if that hasn't happened to you yet, say which video you like best), and that will enter you to win the $100 gift card and the free soy milk. THEN go visit 8th Continent on Facebook and enter to win the Home Line Furniture room makeovers and the Caravan Tours adventure package. THEN go to the BlogHer.com special offers page for 8 other chances to win the gift card and soy milk prize.

On this post, the rule is that you must be at least 18 years old, you must be a U.S. resident, and you can enter one time only. If you want a second entry, blog or tweet the post and leave a link to the blog/tweet as a second comment on this post. For the complete rules, see the official and complete rules. For more information about 8th Continent, see their site.

"Submit your amusing parenting faux pas on our 8th Continent Facebook App and join the hundreds of stories from moms just like you. Share it with your friends and vote on your favorites. You could win a room-of-choice makeover from Home Line Furniture or the grand prize of a complete adventure package from Caravan Tours."

Kellogg's, Week Five: Top Summer Activities, and a $100 Visa Gift Card

2010-09-07T09:23:00.004-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the fifth of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's. EACH POST will have its own $100 gift card giveaway. The plan is to have each giveaway start on Tuesday and run until the following Monday.

This week's topic is Top Summer Activities: What were your favorite family moments/activities this summer? And, you know, did any of them involve a memorable BREAKFAST or CEREAL, since breakfast/cereal is our theme for this series?

This was a particularly fun and eventful summer for us. My favorite moment was the most recent: my daughter got her ears pierced. But we also got a kitten and got a goldfish and made jam from berries growing in our yard. And let's not discount the thrill of running into the girl my high school boyfriend cheated on me with when I was dressed cute and she was wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh t-shirt.

Sadly for someone who has been hired to write a series of breakfast cereal posts, none of these memories involve breakfast, or cereal. But if you will allow it, I'd like to point out that this can be considered a point in cereal's favor: because cereal is such an easy and fuss-free way to feed children, we could get on with our summer stuff unhindered. And, AND, it's inexpensive, so we had lots of money for earrings and kittens! Yeah? Yeah? Would you go along with that, since that's what I've got?

Eat up, Henry, you little savage

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment about your memorable summer family moments/activities (especially awesome if BREAKFAST is involved---in which case I should have asked you to guest post) on this post by Monday, September 13, 2010. Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old. One entry per post per person. To get an additional entry, blog or tweet the contest and then leave a comment with a link to the post or tweet.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week Five.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Winner! (Kellogg's Week Four)

2010-09-07T08:50:00.003-04:00

The winner of the Kellogg's Week Four $100 Visa Gift Card giveaway is Mommy Daisy! I'll email you!

A little later today we'll have another Kellogg's post with another $100 giveaway.

Winner! (Just My Size)

2010-09-01T11:33:00.000-04:00

The winner of the Just My Size $500 Giveaway is AJ! I'll email you!

Newman's Own Pizza: a Review, and a $75 Gift Basket Giveaway

2010-09-01T11:32:00.002-04:00

This is a sponsored review by BlogHer and Newman's Own.

A few years ago my dad read Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good by Paul Newman and A.E. Hotchner, and he recommended it to me, and I read it and I liked it a lot. I wish I could remember more about it so I could show off a little, but what I got out of the book is that Paul Newman stuff is a really good idea to buy: all the profits go to charity, and Paul Newman is a cool cat.

Plus, he's kind of a rascally scamp, and it's fun to see how his business succeeded despite him being all, "Nope, I'm not doing it that way, I'm doing it my own way." And there are funny made-up stories on the food packages.

After I read the book I was all fired up and felt like "WE MUST BUY NEWMAN'S OWN AT ANY COST!! BECAUSE HE IS SO AWESOME!!"---but that wouldn't have held up long if everything were priced too high or didn't taste good. What surprises me is that they've given over three! hundred! MILLION! dollars! to charity while charging the same as everyone else for a jar of sauce or dressing. We've had the cookies, the pasta sauces, the coffee, the salad dressings, and they're all really good. Plus, he's big on natural and no-artificial and good-quality and minimal processing and no-nitrates and no-trans-fats and no-modified-starch and etc., so if you're ALSO big on those things you will find fewer things to scowl at on the labels.

Anyway, this is not a book review or a business review, it's a pizza review. I had two coupons for free Newman's Own pizza so that I could try it. I bought one Roasted Garlic & Chicken pizza and one Italian Sausage pizza.

I tried the chicken and garlic one first. You cook it directly on the oven rack (slip a cookie sheet under it to take it out of the oven---I hope I am not the only one who stood there slack-jawed, wondering how would I get the pizza OUT), and it took about 10 minutes in my oven. The crust is PERFECT: thin and crispy without being crunchy or crackery.

There was just the right amount of chicken. The garlic isn't just a garlic flavor: you can SEE the garlic. (Recommended: sharing the pizza with anyone you share a room with. The flavor is DELICIOUS, but also STRONG and LINGERING and they were right to list it first.) The sauce is a cheese sauce and has a nice sharp/savory cheese flavor.

A serving size is 1/3rd of the pizza, so I cut it into sixths and put two pieces on a dinner plate so you could see how much that is:

That amount has 270 calories, which seems low to me, especially with a cheese sauce. I ate FOUR pieces and still was at just over 500 calories. If you're on a 1800-calorie-a-day diet, that's still well under a meal's worth of calories. If you ate a salad, too, two people could share the pizza and still have spare calories for ice cream.

The next night, I tried the Italian Sausage, and....meh. I should have tried it first, because after the interesting and complicated and intense flavors of the Roasted Garlic & Chicken pizza, the Italian Sausage seemed one-note and disappointing---more like a standard frozen pizza, though a YUMMY standard frozen pizza. And although there was a generous amount of Italian sausage, the cheese and sauce were BOTH skimpy. The crust was still perfect, and the sausage was yummy, but I don't think I'd buy this variety again because I'd always reach for the garlicky-chickeny-cheesy one first.

I was given two coupons for free pizzas, but the measure of how much I like the Roasted Garlic & Chicken one is that not only WOULD I spend my own money on it, I already HAVE: I went to the store to look again for the pepperoni one I wanted to try, and I came home with a Supreme and another Chicken & Garlic. Because the coupons had said something like "value up to $8," I'd thought the pizzas would be $8, but my store had them for $4.99 and that wasn't even a sale price or anything.

The giveaway for this post is a Newman's Own gift basket valued at $75. To enter, leave a comment by October 31st saying which variety you'd be most likely to try of the eight: Four Cheese, Supreme, Uncured Pepperoni, Roasted Garlic & Chicken, Margherita, White, Roasted Vegetable, or Italian Sausage. (For more information about the pizza and the varieties, see the Newman's Own pizza site.)

Entrants need to be at least 18 years old and residents of the United States. One entry per person. To get an additional entry, blog or tweet the contest and then leave a comment saying you did so. For more information, see BlogHer.com Newman’s Own official rules.

"All profits to charity. Newman’s Own Foundation continues Paul Newman’s commitment to donate all profits to charity. Over $300 million has been given to thousands of charities since 1982."

Kellogg's, Week Four: The Breakfast Squeeze, and a $100 Visa Gift Card

2010-08-31T11:59:00.001-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the fourth of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's. EACH POST will have its own $100 gift card giveaway. The plan is to have each giveaway start on Tuesday and run until the following Monday.

This week's topic is The Breakfast Squeeze: what do you feed the kids if you are in a huge hurry?

We DON'T skip breakfast. Our school system fairly BEGS parents to give children breakfast, especially on testing days, because it so dramatically improves their attention levels. I'd let the kids skip a shower before I'd let them skip breakfast.

Granola bars work well: quick, already wrapped, easy to eat in the car or at the bus stop. A banana works well: quick, already "wrapped," easy to eat in the car or at the bus stop. But I'm more likely to follow this formula:

Step One: Put cereal in baggies.
Step Two: Eat cereal out of baggies.
Step Three: Feel happy at how well this formula merges with cereal-related gig.

We do this on rushed school mornings but also when the bigger kids sleep in on weekends: when they finally get up, none of us want to wait around while they eat breakfast. Cereal in baggies, and we can get going. And it's common for me to get everyone else ready and then realize I haven't eaten my own breakfast yet, so I eat cereal out of a baggie while I'm driving.

If I found myself ROUTINELY in a hurry, I might pre-baggie cereal and load the baggies into an empty cereal box: even faster, even easier. This would also be a good way to use up uneaten dry cereal on unhurried mornings: combine all the remnants into a baggie and toss it into the box.

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment about your hurried breakfast on this post by Monday, September 6, 2010. Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old. One entry per post per person. To get an additional entry, blog or tweet the contest and then leave a comment with a link to the post or tweet.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week Four.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Winner (Kellogg's Week Three)

2010-08-31T07:02:00.002-04:00

The winner of Kellogg's Week Three is d e v a n! I'll email you!

And later today we'll have another Kellogg's post with another chance to win $100.

Kellogg's, Week Three: Favorite Breakfast Cereals, and a $100 Visa Gift Card

2010-08-24T10:34:00.003-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the third of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's. EACH POST will have its own $100 gift card giveaway. The plan is to have each giveaway start on Tuesday and run until the following Monday.

This week's topic is, understandably, what are your favorite Kellogg's cereals? And are there any Kellogg's cereals you enjoyed as a child that your children now like?

Perhaps, like me, you don't always notice the maker of your cereal? In that case you are in luck, because I am sympathetic to your plight and have copied and pasted this chart from the Kellogg's site to make it easier to answer the question:

When I was a child the Granola was my favorite, but I also liked ALL the sweet ones: Froot Loops, Honey Smacks, Corn Pops, Cocoa Krispies, Apple Jacks. We only got them when we visited our grandparents, or a friend's house, or when we went camping and got the little boxes, because I was a child of the '70s and was lucky my parents allowed us to have something as sweet as RAISIN BRAN.

What I remember is that in those multi-packs of little cereal boxes, the non-sweet ones got left for last---which is how I discovered how yummy Product 19 was. It was one of the ones my brother and I considered non-yummy because of being insufficiently sugared, but the deal was that we had to eat ALL the little boxes and not just the sweet ones, so I ate Product 19 and...well, hey! It's...YUMMY! I need to go write it on the shopping list; why haven't I been eating Product 19? (Also, I would love to have been in on the meeting where they decided to actually name it that.)

My favorites NOW are the Mini-Wheats (I like strawberry, and I eat them dry with a glass of milk on the side), and the Granola, and the Raisin Bran Crunch. When I'm pregnant, I crave the Frosted Flakes. And we use the Corn Flakes and the Rice Krispies in recipes.

My kids like the strawberry Mini-Wheats and the Cracklin' Oat Bran. They sometimes like the Granola, but the kids who eat it without milk manage to make SUCH a mess of it, I tend not to offer it.

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment about your favorite (or your kid's/kids' favorite) Kellogg's cereal on this post by Monday, August 30, 2010. Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old. One entry per post per person. To get an additional entry, blog or tweet the contest and then leave a comment with a link to the post or tweet.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week Three.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Winner! (Kellogg's Week Two)

2010-08-24T07:46:00.002-04:00

The winner of the Kellogg's Week Two Giveaway is kamewh! I'll email you!

Later today there will be the Week Three post, and another chance to win $100.

Juicy Juice Review, With $100 Visa Gift Card and Juicy Juice Prize Pack!

2010-08-18T11:20:00.001-04:00

This is a compensated review by BlogHer and Juicy Juice.

I like diet soda. I don't drink a TON of it, but I drink it regularly and I like it, and I prefer it to the kind with sugar. But the pressure of "ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS ARE MANUFACTURED IN SATAN'S LAIR, PROBABLY WITH HIM NOT WASHING HIS HANDS FIRST" finally started getting to me, so I tried switching to unsweetened sparkling water. At first it was weird, but now I like it. It's nice to be drinking something fizzy but no longer have to struggle with the sugar vs. artificial sweeteners issue.

I'm still not anti-soda, and I let my kids have it if we go to a restaurant (and I drink it too). But the Juicy Juice carbonated juice seems like a really good idea as something THEY can start replacing THEIR soda with: FIZZ and a CAN to make it feel like soda, but without the conflict about sugar vs. artificial sweeteners. (Er, the conflict for ME; THEY don't give it a single thought yet.) Nestlé sent me a bunch of cans of the sparkling apple flavor so the kids could try it out. The littles are too little for it, but the bigs liked it.

Trying it out. Reaction: favorable.

For those of you who watch out for high fructose corn syrup, it has none of that. It's carbonated apple juice. Here's what it says on the label: "Ingredients: apple juice (water, juice concentrate), water, and less than 0.5% of natural flavors, citric acid, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), carbonation added." The cans are 8.4 fluid ounces and 90 calories each.

The sparkling canned version is new to me, but I was already familiar with Juicy Juice juice boxes because of field trips. There's always a notice that goes home beforehand, asking for the child to bring a lunch that's fully disposable and contains nothing breakable. I usually put in two juice boxes, one for with lunch and one for with snack.

My mom also likes to bring juice boxes and cookies for the kids if we make them come shopping with us: while I do the Really Boring departments, she sits and reads to them and gives them a snack.

They are fans.

The Juicy Juice boxes are 6.75 ounces each, and the fruit punch flavor has 100 calories per box. The label: "Ingredients: apple juice, grape juice, and passion fruit juice (water, juice concentrates), natural flavors, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), citric acid." Again, no high fructose corn syrup or other added sugars.

The prize is a $100 Visa gift card plus a Juicy Juice prize pack. To enter, leave a comment on this post by September 30, 2010 saying your favorite flavor of juice---or your kid's/kids' favorite. Mine is grapefruit. OOooh, or pineapple! Or cranberry! The kids like orange or apple or grape.

One comment per person; must be 18 or older and a U.S. resident; no cheating. To get an additional entry, blog or tweet the contest and leave a link to the blog/tweet in the comments. For a more detailed set of rules, see BlogHer.com Juicy Juice 2010 official rules.

You can get more chances to win by touring the other bloggers reviewing Juicy Juice and entering their contests too: BlogHer.com Juicy Juice 2010 Round-up page.

For more information about Juicy Juice juice boxes: Juicy Juice fruit juice site

For more information about Sparkling Juicy Juice: Juicy Juice Sparkling Fruit Juice site

To enjoy saying juicy-juice-juice-juicy-juice with me, join in now: Juicy juice juice juice juicy juice!

Kellogg's, Week Two: Summer Fun, and a $100 Visa Gift Card

2010-08-17T11:59:00.003-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the second of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's. EACH POST will have its own $100 gift card giveaway. The plan is to have each giveaway start on Tuesday and run until the following Monday.

This week's topic is Summer Fun as Summer Ends: if school hasn't yet started in your area, what summer things are you doing with the last bits of summer that remain?

During the school year we miss the swimming pool the most, so we've been going almost every day. We play outside a lot, and it feels nice to just run out without having to mess with outerwear. We set up the sprinkler. We play with sidewalk chalk in the driveway. We scooter. We'll have an ice cream treat at least once more, maybe twice. We'll go out for burgers to commemorate the last day of swimming lessons.

And this will sound a little odd and not at all parent-magaziney, but I'm also letting them have plenty of television and video games. During the school year, they're not allowed to do either until they've finished their homework, but they usually don't finish their homework until after dinner, and Go To Room Bedtime (as opposed to Lights Out Bedtime) isn't long after that. So while it's still summer I'm allowing the Wii and Kimpossible marathons.

To enter the giveaway, leave a summer-fun-related comment on this post by Monday, August 23, 2010. Entrants must be U.S. residents at least 18 years old. One entry per post per person. To get an additional entry, blog or tweet the contest and then leave a comment with a link to the post or tweet.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week Two.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Winner! (Kellogg's Week One)

2010-08-17T06:54:00.001-04:00

The winner of Kellogg's Week One is Janet! Yay, Janet! And Week Two's contest starts later today, with another $100 gift card to win.

Kellogg's, Week One: The Breakfast Routine, and a $100 Visa Gift Card

2010-08-11T11:59:00.001-04:00

This is sponsored content by BlogHer and Kellogg's.

This is the first of twelve weekly posts sponsored by BlogHer and Kellogg's. EACH POST will have its own $100 gift card giveaway. With the exception of the first post, the plan is to have each giveaway start on Tuesday and run until the following Monday. (For this first post, the giveaway starts on Wednesday and runs until the following Monday.)

This week's topic is The Breakfast Routine.

We have a household of seven, and the morning routine requires organization, an easily-repeatable plan, and saying "Come on, come ON, the bus comes in NINE MINUTES and what is the DEAL with your HAIR??"

Paul leaves for work at 6:00, so I'm up and showered by then. The first child wakes between 5:45 and 6:00, and three others wake between 6:00 and 6:30. I get the last one of out bed at 7:00---although this year he starts middle school so he'll need to be up earlier to get an earlier bus.

I start the coffee, and then I put out five plates or bowls on the kitchen counter, and five cups. I drink my coffee and dish out the food. As each kid is ready for breakfast, he or she takes his or her own plate/bowl and cup out to the coffee table in the living room, where PBS is on. As each kid finishes breakfast, he or she is supposed to bring the dishes back into the kitchen and get on with the routine, but in FACT he or she sits there watching TV until I say "Okay, now clear your dishes and keep getting ready for the day."

We have two main breakfasts at our house: either everyone has cereal, or everyone has muffins. If we have cereal, four of the kids eat it dry and have cups of milk to drink, and one eats it with milk and has water or juice to drink. If we have muffins, four kids have milk to drink and one has water or juice because he doesn't like milk unless it's on cereal. Everyone gets a chewable vitamin. Most days, everyone gets a half or whole banana.

To enter the giveaway, leave a breakfast-routine-related comment on this post by Monday, August 16, 2010. Entrants must be U.S. residents and at least 18 years old. One entry per post per person. To get an additional entry, blog or tweet the contest and then leave a comment with a link to the post or tweet.

For the complete rules, see The Complete Rules, Week One.

For more chances to win, visit the other participating bloggers.

For more about Kellogg's, visit their site.

Mom’s Breakfast Club was started to help educate moms and families about kids’ cereal and share the scoop on their nutritional benefits and ingredients. To learn more about the program, visit www.loveyourcereal.com.

Just My Size Try-On Session, With a Five! Hundred! Dollar! Giftcard Prize!

2010-08-04T08:23:00.003-04:00

This is a sponsored review from BlogHer and Just My Size Sportswear apparel.

Hey, do you remember when I was all stressed out about a holiday party, and some of you recommended wearing a cute outfit to tamp down the anxiety but I despaired of finding one on short notice, and then I found the perfect outfit, which included an awesome sassy brightly-colored fitted button-down shirt, and I felt TOTALLY CUTE and also PERFECTLY DRESSED? That shirt was a Just My Size shirt, by Hanes, and I bought it at Wal-Mart.

And now let's fast-forward to July of this year, when I have in my hand a gift certificate to spend on Hanes Just My Size clothing so that I could write this review. Score much? JMS is a plus-sized line, and what I like about them even more is that they're inexpensive enough that they don't trigger my must! wait! for! clearances! impulse.

It was so thrilling to find a bunch of stuff IN MY SIZE, I even tried on a denim miniskirt. I KNOW, RIGHT?? It looks more like a knee-length on me, but my legs are shortish so your results may vary. I had to do some Photoshop retouching to my legs to hide all the scratches I've gotten recently while picking black raspberries. I really like the shirt, too.

Some JMS jeans, which I really liked. I might need to get a second pair. Plus a JMS shirt, super comfy and soft, with Bust-Enhancing Pockets.

And this is where the fitting room clerk said we couldn't take photos and called the manager, and the manager came over and asked me to "Please step over here" (no, really), and apparently Wal-Mart has a very strict policy that no one is allowed to take photos in their stores (because clearly there are huge security implications in...taking pictures...of outfits...), and anyway from now on the photos are taken by me in the dressing room while making a cough sound to cover the click. And I guess I was thrown by the unexpected managerial encounter, because I kept forgetting to look at the CAMERA.

I loved this shirt, but I felt like it looked too small so I bought it one size bigger. Now I'm second-guessing, because in the photo it doesn't look too small, so maybe I'm just not accustomed to fitted clothes? (Taking photos of clothes is so valuable! And not at all a security breach!) Same jeans again, because I didn't want to take them off.

Here are the jeans on their own.

Here's another pair I tried. These were pretty good but had the wrinkles dyed-on, and that looks okay in the photo (in fact, in the photo I think they're more flattering than the first pair) but in real life I felt like it made me look like I was straining out of the jeans.

Can you tell I feel kind of awesome in this? This is the wrinkles-dyed-in jeans (okay, I admit, in photos I'm reconsidering---I may need to go back and get those too) (see, Wal-Mart? this is what happens if you let people take photos) and a grey shirt that came with a necklace.

Fine, I'm going back for those jeans. And then I will always stand in Dressing Room Pose with one leg back and the other leg bent. (I will not, however, do the crossed-leg "I badly need to pee" pose so many celebrity women do. What is WITH that?)

Total change of pace. I never, ever, EVER wear sleeveless, not even to BED, but I was feeling adventurous. There had a ton of good tank tops, plus good basic camis like this one.

Cute hoodie! Model starting to look sweaty and frizzy. You know what would dramatically improve purchase-rates in clothing stores? Adjustable heat/cooling in each dressing room. Plus GOOD LIGHTING. It is so hard to feel enthusiastic about outfits when one's face looks yellowed and tired and damp.

I like this basic crew tee and think I'll go back for more of them. This is pretty much exactly what I usually wear, except this fabric was better and thicker than the shirts I usually get. They also had them in v-neck.

There were a ton of other things I wanted to try on but then Wal-Mart didn't have my size in it. There'd be a whole bunch of 4X and nothing smaller, or jeans in 16W and 26W bootcut but only petite and non-bootcut left in between. But if you shop at Wal-Mart regularly, it would be easy to keep an eye out: keeping things in stock is a classic Wal-Mart problem, not a JMS thing. After trying a bunch of things on, I felt like I had a good idea of what my size was in JMS and which styles in general looked good on me, and I don't think I'd even need to try on: HUGELY VALUABLE, since I don't usually get dressing-room time without three to five accompanying children.

The prize is a FIVE! HUNDRED! DOLLAR! Wal-Mart gift card. You could pretty much throw out all your old clothes and buy one of EVERY SINGLE THING in the JMS line with that, plus underwear and socks.

To enter, leave a comment on this post by August 31, 2010. Maybe tell me how cute I looked in something (flattery doesn't improve chances of winning, but I'm sure it improves the mood of the universe), or say what clothing item you'd try on, or suggest a different combination, or mention how many more clothes you'd buy if the dressing rooms were chillier.

One comment per person; you have to be at least 18 years old and live in the United States; no cheating. You can get an extra entry by blogging about the contest or putting a link to the contest on Twitter; then come back here and leave a link to show you did it. For more details, see the Official Rules.

AND you have a bunch of other chances to win: see the other Just My Size reviewers to leave flattering comments and see lots of other pieces from the JMS line. (I am definitely going to go look: now that I've poked around the racks, I want to see what other people put together.)

To do a little pre-shopping (there's a mix-and-match tool for those of us who get sweaty and frizzy but can't tell what we'd like until we try it all on), go to JMSstyle.com. It's really fun: like playing with paper dolls. It didn't have the jeans on there, and there were a bunch of capris/shorts my Wal-Mart didn't have, but I recognized a lot of the other things.

(screenshot taken from JMSstyle.com)

Maybe I should try on all my outfits with beige high heels? My green sandals suddenly look flat and dowdy. And I am totally going to try that thing with my hands.

If after all this you find yourself feeling all warm and lovey toward JMS, you can also friend them on Facebook.

Winner! (Pop-Tarts)

2010-07-05T14:10:00.002-04:00

The winner of the $100 Visa giftcard from BlogHer for the Pop-Tarts posts is C (Kid Things)! Email me (swistle at gmail dot com) and I'll give your info to my BlogHer boss!

Pop-Tarts Outing and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2010-06-28T11:30:00.001-04:00

This is a compensated review by BlogHer and Pop-Tarts.

My 5-year-old twins are starting kindergarten this fall, and the school suggests bringing them to the playground during the summer so (1) they can get used to playing on it and (2) they will associate kindergarten with fun things. So off we went, them with their playclothes and me with my book, to do our respective fun kindergarten things.

Fun thing!

My job for my second Pop-Tarts post was to bring Pop-Tarts on a fun outing, so I saw the perfect opportunity to merge two tasks. I had coupons from Pop-Tarts for free boxes, so we had a selection of flavors on hand: Elizabeth chose Frosted Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Edward chose Frosted S'Mores, Henry chose Frosted Blueberry, and I chose Frosted S'Mores. (I would not have predicted that I would like the S'mores flavor, but the key is that the pastry part tastes like graham cracker. So then it's like a chocolate-marshmallow graham cracker cookie. Mmmmm.)

Fun thing!

The giveaway portion goes like this: BlogHer is giving away a $100 Visa gift card. I've written two Pop-Tarts posts, this one and the previous one. There's one gift card for the two Pop-Tarts posts together. The random drawing will be July 4th, 2010.

To enter, leave a comment telling me what your favorite flavor of Pop-Tarts is, or telling me whether you like them toasted or right-out-of-the-box, or saying which unusual flavor you might be willing to try, or really anything about Pop-Tarts.

You have 9 other chances to win: go to the BlogHer.com special offers page to get the links.

See the official rules for more details.

Pop-Tarts Fourth of July Recipe and a $100 Visa Gift Card

2010-06-21T07:40:00.003-04:00

This is a compensated review by BlogHer and Pop-Tarts.

The challenge: come up with a 4th of July project/recipe using Pop-Tarts® Ice Cream Shoppe(tm) Vanilla Milkshake.

The research: eating Vanilla Milkshake Pop-Tarts while thinking. (The taste, in case you are curious: kind of like frosted sugar cookies.)

One thing I like about Pop-Tarts is that they are already DONE. They are mixed, filled, baked, cooled, frosted, and sprinkled. They are FINISHED. There is no need to deconstruct them in order to make something new, although I admit it's pretty genius to use them as a pie topping.

(And by the way, if you click that link and then want to "Browse All Our Tasty Creations," there is a little slider bar to the right of the six little pictures, do you see it? You use THAT to browse. You don't, for example, repeatedly click the words "Browse All Our Tasty Creations" as if they are a link, and then keep clicking it even when nothing happens. Ahem.)

I would be more likely to make something like the ice cream sandwiches. Or maybe the Celebration Flags, where you take unfrosted Pop-Tarts, add some frosting yourself, and then add pretty flag-fruit a la the classic 4th of July cake.

(This is a photo I yoinked from the Pop-Tarts site,
which is why it looks so much better than
the photos down below.)

I would be even MORE likely to make what I did in fact make, which didn't require me to have additional ingredients on hand OR cut and arrange tiny bits of fruit. Here is what you will need:

1. Cookie sheet
2. Cutting board
3. Sharp knife
4. 8-count box of Pop-Tarts
5. Photoshop, to "clean" your walls

If you are nervous and/or Pop-Tarts has sent you a case of Pop-Tarts, you could have TWO boxes on hand instead of one.

Now! CUT the Pop-Tarts into letters.

Go for SIMPLICITY. To make a P, for example. I cut out a big chunk and then cut off two little corners, that's IT. I didn't try to do the middle cut-out, I didn't try to do a cool font, I did as little as possible.

If there is a little mishap, and the Pop-Tarts are splitting as you cut them, DON'T PANIC! Just sort of smoosh them back together and then put them carefully on the cookie sheet.

ACK! It split and blurred when I cut it!!

DON'T PANIC. It's fine. Just smoosh it back together.
And hold your camera a little steadier.
And maybe consider a newer model that takes better flash-free photos.

And here they are on the cookie sheet:

The exclamation point is one of the pieces I cut off the T, plus a triangle scrap that seems like it must be from the top of the Y, but isn't, but could be.

I like my Pop-Tarts toasted, so I put the cookie sheet in a pre-heated 350F degree oven for 7 minutes, which was perfect. Do I need to remind you that things that come out of the oven are BURNING HOT, and that sugary sizzly melty fillings are PARTICULARLY burning hot, and that you should not TOUCH or EAT hot things until they are COOLER THAN BURNING HOT?

So! This project was a total success. I forgot to look at the clock but it took maybe 10 minutes to cut the letters. And then 7 minutes to bake them. And the result was shaped, filled, frosted, sprinkled sugar cookies (this would also work for birthdays or anniversaries or whatevs). And in case this is something you go for, it totally got a "WHOA!!!" reaction from the children, who were super impressed with my mad skillz and/or were kissing up to get sweets.

Yes, our coffee table cover is repaired with duct tape.
That poor cover.

The giveaway portion goes like this: I'll be writing two Pop-Tarts posts, this one and another one in about a week. You can enter on each post, but there's one $100 gift card from BlogHer for the two Pop-Tarts posts together, so the drawing will be on July 4th, after the second post.

To enter, leave a comment telling me how AWESOME you think my recipe is (I especially like the way it has EIGHT letters so it takes exactly one 8-ct box of Pop-Tarts), or what your favorite flavor of Pop-Tart is, or whether you like them toasted or right-out-of-the-box.

And dudes, you have 9 other chances to win (plus 9 other chances to see what recipes other people came up with): go to the BlogHer.com special offers page to get the links.

See the official rules for more details.

Winner! (Perching at Home)

2010-05-28T08:51:00.002-04:00

The winner of the Perching at Home contest is Babies on the Brain, whose choices of yellow polka dots with orange terry and blue polka dots with pink terry were closest to my own choices. Yay, email me with your mailing info! (swistle at gmaildotcom)

Etsy Love: Perching at Home

2010-05-20T06:59:00.006-04:00

I'm a reader of Parking at Home, and I saw she had an Etsy shop called Perching at Home, and I like Etsy shops so I clicked through. I saw the burp cloths:

I wished I had a baby to test-drive them, because they're EXACTLY the kind of thing I would have wanted when I had spitty babies, and they're so cute, and it's so fun to custom-choose the vinyl and terry combination. So I ordered a set of two for a friend of mine who has a baby, and said they are IDEAL for the kind of baby who goes along acting all innocent and then burps up a quart. The terry side soaks it up, and the vinyl side keeps it from getting to your clothes while the terry is working.

When I bought the two burp cloths for my friend, I chose the colors I thought would be most to HER tastes: navy polka-dot with white terry, and red polka-dot with green terry (I think she would have preferred the white terry on the red polka-dot one, actually, but I preferred the green so I guess it was a COMPROMISE). That was fun, but I'd rather choose two to MY tastes. So! Here is the giveaway deal: Leave a comment on this post saying which two vinyl/terry combinations YOU would choose.

The person whose choices are most similar to what I'D want to order, I'll buy you YOUR two choices. United States mailing addresses only on this, because I'm going to have them shipped to you directly from the seller---but if you're non-U.S. and know someone to have me send them to in the U.S., that would work too!

I'll choose the winner on Thursday, May 27.

Edit! Parking at Home says: "Allow me to sweeten the deal: Anyone who orders teething rails or bumpers can get two free burp cloths if they mention they're from swistle."

!!!

Winner! (Rascal Flatts and S'Mores)

2010-05-12T13:20:00.002-04:00

The winner of the S'Mores Kit and Rascal Flatts giveaway is Jenn of the May 3, 11:24 p.m. comment! Email me, Jenn, and I'll send your mailing info to the S'Mores peeps! (I'm at swistle at gmaildotcom.)

S'Mores Kit and Rascal Flatts (With a Giveaway!)

2010-05-03T14:38:00.008-04:00

Why is a UPS truck pulling up? I haven't ordered anything. Or maybe I ordered something really fun and then forgot about it? Or maybe it's something dull, like when I thought "Why is the UPS truck pulling up, maybe it's something fun" and I'd forgotten about the work shirts I'd ordered for Paul.

Oh my. OH MY.

Perhaps I shouldn't have taken this photo on such a distracting rug. The items on the distracting rug are: a box of Honey Maid graham crackers, a bag of Kraft marshmallows, a 6-pack of Hershey bars, a set of S'mores telescoping toasting forks IN A SPECIAL TOASTING FORK CARRIER (only you can prevent tragic S'mores-fork-related injuries), and the Rascal Flatts CD Unstoppable. Awwww yeahhhh.

The unusual marriage of S'Mores and Rascal Flatts has resulted in a free song (this is not the giveaway referred to in the title, just hold on another minute): the first 350,000 people to visit PureSmores.com will get a free download of Rascal Flatts's off-album song "Your Day to Get Away." And already you have one fewer chances to get it, because I already got mine.

To get it for yourself, you buy a 6-pack of Hershey bars (OH DARN, SOMEONE WILL HAVE TO EAT THOSE NOW), and then you enter the 10-digit UPC code from the package. You also have to register, which involves giving them your date of birth, your name, your address, and your email address. I registered, even though I am wary of giving out that kind of info, because I don't really mind Hershey's having it. If you are what you eat, I'm already genetically related to them anyway. (I didn't give my real birthdate, though. I assume that's just to make sure you're an adult.)

I was given this package as a sample, because one of you is going to win one too and clearly I had to make sure everything was ~~delicious~~ worth trying to win. To enter, leave a comment on this post telling me how you like your toasted marshmallows. Mostly white with only small areas of light tan? Just barely tan? Brown all over? Blackened? You have until Monday, May 10th to enter; I'll choose a winner on Tuesday, May 11th.

Winner! (Weber Flavors)

2010-04-10T14:23:00.002-04:00

The winner of the Weber Flavors giveaway is Msargeant! Yay! I'll email you and connect you with Melissa!

Weber Flavors and a Giveaway

2010-04-03T14:17:00.002-04:00

After I wrote about my sweet, sweet vanilla victory, Melissa of Shaken Meltini (she also has an Etsy store: Somewhere in Time) emailed me that she WORKED FOR WEBER FLAVORS, and she would send me a box of flavorings to try. And furthermore, that she would do the same for one reader.

This is particularly nice of Melissa because her company doesn't sell to the public so it doesn't benefit at all from this giveaway. So she is doing this for the sheer niceness and fun of it! And lucky us, getting to try flavorings we wouldn't be able to try otherwise!

Here's what she sent me:

Take a closer look at those labels:

Swistle's Bakery! Hee!

I am going to have so much fun experimenting with these. One of them is TOASTED MARSHMALLOW flavor! Another is CARAMEL! Another is HAZELNUT!

If you would like to win a box of flavorings, leave a comment on this post before Friday April 9th, when I will choose a random winner.

Winner! (Hannah Brown's Apothecary)

2010-03-15T17:39:00.004-04:00

The winner of the Hannah Brown's Apothecary giveaway is Randonn! Email me (swistle at gmailDOTcom), Randonn!

Etsy Love: Hannah Brown's Apothecary (With a Giveaway!)

2010-03-08T08:13:00.003-05:00

Hannah Brown's Apothecary sent me three kinds of soap to try: Man Soap (Not Just For Men!), Juicy Grapefruit, and So Fresh & So Clean.

Paul tried the Man Soap first, and he liked it a lot. He said it smelled nice and strong while he was using it but that he didn't feel like he smelled too strongly of it after rinsing. I gave him the sniff test and confirmed that although he had a pleasant faint soapy smell but not Too Strong (he doesn't like to be scented). He said it lathered great and "didn't seem like girl soap."

I tried it next, and I liked it because it reminded me of some of my unisex perfumes: a very pleasant smell, not floral and girly but also not like Men's Cologne. It's described as a "warm and spicy" scent and that's right on. Paul said it also smelled to him like pine.

So Fresh & So Clean is described as "tea tree, rosemary, hint of grapefruit." It is NICE. And they sent me an extra bar to put in a future care package!

Juicy Grapefruit makes me thirsty, which is the test of a good grapefruit scent.

All three were great, and I am usually very particular about scents: it's common for me to like about 1 in 20, so liking all three makes me feel like I could order anything from the shop and be pretty sure of liking it.

Here are some photos I snitched from the shop:

Hannah Brown's Apothecary will give away one bar of soap of the winner's choice: leave a comment on this post saying which bar you think you might like to try, either from this post or from the shop (you can change your mind if you win), and I'll choose a winner on Monday, March 15th.

Winner! (Digiorno)

2010-03-01T15:09:00.002-05:00

The winner of the DiGiorno Sweepstakes is Sagessa! Yay! I'm emailing you right now!

DiGiorno 200 Calorie Portions Pizza and a $200 Visa Gift Card

2010-01-25T13:00:00.006-05:00

DiGiorno sent me three of their 200 Calorie Portions pizzas: one Chicken with Peppers & Onions, one Pepperoni, and one Cheese and Tomato. There are two 200-calorie pieces of pizza per 6.0-6.6 ounce box.

Chicken with Peppers & Onions

The pieces were bigger than I'd expected. I've had "100-calorie snack packs" of things like candy and crackers, and it always seems like it's not enough for a snack. And I'm accustomed to hearing horror stories about how many multiple thousands of calories are in something we'd eat as a regular meal, so I guess I'd have thought a 200-calorie piece of pizza would be about the size of a saltine. But this is a piece I would consider "a piece of pizza"---not some sad little "serving" that would encourage jokes about saltines.

The pizza can be cooked in the microwave or in the oven, so I cooked one piece each way. I started them at the same time, and the microwaved slice was cooked and eaten before the oven was preheated. It took about two minutes to cook a piece in the microwave, and it came out better, I thought, than the piece I did in the oven: the piece in the oven was crisper, but to the point of seeming almost like a cracker, whereas the piece in the microwave was crisp enough to seem pizza-like but not so crisp as to seem cracker-like, and seemed more flavorful and more like regular pizza.

The piece done in the oven LOOKED way better, though. With all three varieties, I had trouble cooking them in the microwave so that all the cheese was melted as the instructions specified. The cheese went from "some melted, some not" to "liquefied" in what seemed like a single second. Whereas the cheese on the pizza cooked in the oven behaved more as cheese usually does. Behold and compare:

Cooked in microwave

Cooked in oven

I think next time if I used the microwave I'd try setting the microwave temperature lower, and if I used the oven I'd try decreasing the oven cooking time to see if I could make the crust less crunchy. Because the oven way definitely results in something that looks more like the front of the box:

Oven way, close-up

I thought it was delicious. I easily ate both 200-calorie pieces, but I have a good-sized appetite and also I wanted to compare microwave vs. oven. I also could have eaten one piece plus a salad, and that would have made a very good meal. My favorite flavor was the Chicken with Peppers & Onions: I thought the taste was best, but also I think the chicken made it the most filling/satisfying variety.

It didn't taste like "diet pizza," it tasted like really good thin-crust pizza. And in fact it's NOT diet pizza: per ounce, the calories are about the same as the DiGiorno thin-crust Pizzas For One.

61.18 calories per ounce for the Pizza for One, thin crust chicken and vegetable
60.60 calories per ounce for the 200 Calorie Portions, chicken with peppers and onions

70.24 calories per ounce for the Pizza for One, thin crust pepperoni
66.67 calories per ounce for the 200 Calorie Portions, pepperoni

I think the 200-calorie portions are useful the same way the 100-calorie snack packs are useful: of course we could cut a regular pizza into 200-calorie pieces, but...well, we could also eat 100 calories' worth of cheesy crackers but somehow it ends up being more than that when we're eating them right from the box. A measured portion cues us to stop, and also forces us to eat mindfully: if we have another slice/packet, we know exactly what we're doing. For people starting a new eating plan, measured portions are like training wheels until we get the hang of it. Delicious, delicious training wheels.

You can win a $200 Visa gift card to go get some delicious training wheels of your own. Leave a comment on this post telling me your favorite pizza toppings by 5:00 p.m. PST on February 22, 2010, when I'll randomly select a winner. The gist of the rules:

1. You have to be at least 18 years old.
2. You have to live in the U.S.
3. One entry per person.

See The Official Rules for the full scoop.

Nine more chances to win gift cards: BlogHer.com special offers page

For more information about 200 Calorie Portions: Official site

For more information about DiGiorno products: DiGiorno Main Website

DiGiorno on Facebook: DiGiorno Facebook Fan Page

Winner! (Hershey)

2010-01-03T12:11:00.002-05:00

The winner of the Hershey $100 Sweepstakes Giveaway is Marie Green! Congratulations, Marie!

Winner! (Nikoart)

2009-12-23T11:59:00.002-05:00

The winner of the Nikoart giveaway is Amy! Yay, Amy! Email me (swistle at gmail) and I'll connect you to Nikoart.

Secret Santa, Part Two

2009-12-19T08:23:00.002-05:00

My TJ Maxx Secret Santa gift arrived!

Oh the prettiness! That's a mug, a package of coffee, a package of cookies, a tin of hot cocoa mix, and two fabric-covered journals! Thank you, Zippy of The Review Broads, and TJ Maxx of course! This was so much fun to do!

Secret Santa, Part One

2009-12-18T12:51:00.006-05:00

I am kind of excited about the mail, because I'm participating in a T.J. Maxx/Marshalls Secret Santa thingie, and my Secret Santa's present to me could be arriving any day now. Each participant got a $25 gift card to either T.J. Maxx or to Marshalls to use for the Secret Santa gift (my card was to T.J. Maxx), plus we each got an additional gift card to buy ourselves something in case we got Gift Envy while shopping.

I love shopping. Er, as you know. And it was surprisingly fun to be buying a gift for someone I knew nothing about and who wouldn't be expecting me to hit the mark exactly: I could browse around the store and consider ANYTHING. I started out taking photos of all the gifts I was considering, but then the very polite security guard told me I wasn't allowed to do that so we will just have to use our imaginations.

There were a lot of good holiday decorations in the right price range: a very pretty Christmas tree I wanted for myself, a really nice wreath, a menorah my mom wanted to convert to Judaism for.

I also considered holiday dishes, like maybe a Spode serving dish (I love the Spode Christmas pattern), or they had these cute little candy/nut dishes shaped like Christmas trees, and they had a four-pack of dessert plates shaped like ornaments. I came close to choosing a two-pack of Norman Rockwell Christmas mugs, maybe with a bag of coffee.

There were Yankee Candle's jarred candles and I love the green/pine scents, and there was a long strip of votive candles that seemed striking and also practical. And pretty candle holders, too.

I would have considered a holiday tablecloth if I'd known the recipient's table size. I very nearly chose some holiday cloth napkins with some reindeer napkin holders. Or Christmas towels, or Christmas handtowels.

Oh, and they had super-pretty ornaments and ornament sets.

They had a whole bunch of fingerless gloves, and I spent half of my own gift card on a pair of those for myself. Steve Madden! And striped! And $12.99!

I looked carefully at the gourmet food. They had Lindt truffles in a golden tin or in a bag, and they had Jelly Belly jellybean boxes (the kind where each flavor is in its own little compartment), and they had fancy cocoa mixes, and they had fancy jam (I like the Favorit cherry), and they had fancy coffee, and they had a ton of Harry & David stuff, and they had dried fruit and nut assortments, and they had the Dilettante chocolate-covered dried fruit I like. There were also a lot of good SETS, like a set containing a bunch of Starbucks stuff, and another containing a bunch of Ghirardelli stuff.

I thought about doing a journal and some stationery. Or maybe a pile of reusable shopping bags. Or maybe some jewelry. Or maybe some bath stuff. Or maybe some knee socks. Or a nice snuggly throw blanket. And this is where my mom reminded me that we really did need to decide at SOME point.

I can't tell you what I chose, because we're supposed to keep the Secret part intact for awhile. There are two points to this post:

1. I do hope you come away with the impression that there were a HOLY HECKLOAD of good gift options there, because there WERE. One reason I keep doing these T.J. Maxx/Marshalls dealies is that I shop at both places ANYWAY about once a week, so it's super-easy for me to say nice things about places I DO IN FACT LIKE. And, in this particular instance, it was an excellent place to shop for a gift for someone I didn't know but wanted to please---and so it would also be a good place to shop for someone you didn't know WELL but wanted to please: a boss, a co-worker, the in-law whose name you drew, a friend who lives far away, a teacher.

2. I told them there was NOT ENOUGH BOOZE IN THE UNITED STATES for me to participate, but they are also doing a Carol-oke program: you sing a carol, you post it on YouTube, and you're entered to win a five! thousand! dollar! shopping trip, or one of 15 hundred-dollar trips. Here's where to find more info: The Carol-oke Program. And hurry, because there are only 2 days left to get a video in!

Etsy Love: Nikoart (With a Giveaway!)

2009-12-15T06:00:00.001-05:00

Nikoart sells rubber stamps. Oh, they are SO cute. I will copy some of her photos so you can see:

Who DOESN'T want a narwhal stamp?

Nicole is going to give away one of her cute stamps! To enter, leave a comment on this post saying which stamp you like best (you won't be held to that choice if you win---I say this in case this kind of thing makes you a little stressed, the way it makes me when I have to choose and I'm all "Fox! No, wait, but the cardinal in a scarf would be so nice for Christmas cards...... besides, my favorite might be the hedgehog. I mean the owl. No, final choice this time: squirrel. ...Wait...), and I'll choose a random winner on Saturday, December 19th.

Nikoart on Etsy---go see!

Etsy Love: Mel's Bells Cloche Hats

2009-12-14T13:34:00.004-05:00

Mel's Bells Cloche Hats sells...oh, you already know? That's right: cloche hats. I will make copies of some of her photos so you can see them. (The mannequin, I know: she reminds me of The Other Mother in Coraline, too---but she really does make it easier to see what the hats look like.)

Baby hats too!

Mel's Bells on Etsy---go see!

Winner! (Relic)

2009-12-11T22:04:00.001-05:00

The winner of the Relic giveaway is Gina! Yay, Gina!

Etsy Love: Polkadotshop

2009-12-10T15:39:00.000-05:00

Polkadotshop makes handmade STITCHED cards---like, with FABRIC. I love them so much I hesitated before doing a post on them, because WHAT IF YOU BUY THEM ALL AND THERE ARE NONE LEFT FOR MEEEEEEEEEEE???

Look at these sweeties (all photos are snitched from her site, of course....because it would be really creepy if I'd sneaked into her studio to take the photos myself):

And if you have anyone on your list you love enough to send these to, she also has Christmas cards:

Polkadotshop on Etsy---go see!

Winner! (Small Grapes)

2009-12-10T15:34:00.002-05:00

The winner of the Small Grapes Giveaway is Kristi! Yay, Kristi! I'll email you!

Winner! (Haworth Handmade)

2009-12-08T15:47:00.001-05:00

The winner of the haworth handmade giveaway is St. Yay! Email me (swistle at gmail dot com) and I'll connect you to to Melissa!

Hershey Kisses: Recipes and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway

2009-12-04T07:33:00.002-05:00

(This is a compensated review from BlogHer and Hershey's.)

Here was my assignment: go to the Hershey Kiss Baking site, choose three recipes to try, and then eat the results. OH, MY LIFE IS SO HARD! HOW I SUFFER FOR MY ART!

Choosing which three recipes to try was challenging (WOE! WOE IS ME!). Kisses Peanut Butter Pie? Kisses Caramel Flan? Double Kisses Chocolate Cupcakes? Rainbow Rocky Road Brownies? Chocolate Fluted Kisses Cups? I wish I could have searched by kind of Kisses, because in searching through all the recipes for a recipe that would go with the Kisses I had on hand, I had to drool a LOT into my keyboard.

I went with trying three different version of those little round cookies with a Kiss in the middle that I believe are on every single holiday cookie plate ever born and with good reason: cute AND delicious.

The kids and I like to bake assortment plates for their teachers at the holidays: it's a good way to show the teachers we put some effort into their gifts in addition to signing the credit slip for their gift cards, and it's something the kids can do a lot of the work on themselves. A charmingly kid-misshapen cookie tastes just as good as a perfect one but means more.

We also like to bake for far-away family. We mail a box of gifts to my brother and his family across the country, and I like to add some holiday baking in there too, to make it more...holiday-ish. Like I'm not just sending a box of presents, I'm sending a box of HOLIDAY.

I have one older relative who's on her own now and doesn't bake for just herself, so a little treat box with one or two of each kind of cookie is just the thing: it's not hard for us to do when we're doing a bunch of other platters, but it's a way to show we're thinking of her, and it takes away the mental picture I have of her sitting in her "no sense decorating it for just me" house, not having any holiday treats because there's "no sense baking for just me." It's the kind of thing I hope someone does for me if I'm an older lady on my own someday (take notes, children).

I've read people who knit or sew saying that when they make something as a gift for someone else, they think of that person the whole time they're doing the project: they, if you'll pardon the slightly gaggy sentiment, "put love in every stitch" (sorry, I did warn you). Though such a sentiment wouldn't be my style to say, I DO feel that way when I bake for someone else: I think of that person while I'm measuring and mixing and baking, and it makes it more than just "a plate of cookies"---it's like I'm giving them my work, and my thoughts, and....fine, I guess I am the sort of person who says that sort of sentiment. I BAKE LOVE INTO EVERY BITE, ARE YOU HAPPY NOW??

So ANYWAY, this was an excellent opportunity to audition some new ~~sentiments~~ cookie contestants. I set my assistants to work unwrapping Kisses:

Unwrapping, unwrapping, oops

The first recipe I tried was Kisses Chocolate Chip Cookies. You make what is basically a small batch of eggless, leavening-less chocolate-chip cookie dough, and you wrap lumps of it around Hershey Kisses and bake them. And oh, they are sooooo good. The cookie part is crisp and buttery like shortbread, and then there is a big happy surprise of chocolate in the middle.

These reminded me so much of a care package my cousin Lee sent me after the twins were born. She included a big bag of cookies very similar to these, and they just about killed me dead with love and butter. Of all the gifts we got, those cookies are what I remember best. (It was the love! baked into every bite!)

Baker's notes:

I had a little trouble getting the knack of drizzling and eventually settled for something more like dolloping.
As an experiment I made some of the cookies with Meltaway Kisses---and I preferred them. The Meltaway Kiss flattened out a little more in the oven and also had a softer texture even when the cookie was completely cool.
This recipe is even easier if you have this Oxo Good Grips cookie scoop in size small: the recipe uses "scant tablespoons" of dough, and this little dealie measures---wait for it---in scant tablespoons! So I went scoop scoop scoop and measured all the dough lumps at once. This was also the right size scoop for each of the other two recipes.

Scooping all the scant tablespoons ahead of time

The second recipe I tried was Kisses Cocoa Cookies. They are similar to the Kisses Chocolate Chip cookies in their crispness and shortbreadiness, but they are CHOCOLATE and PECAN. Some baker's notes:

I thought they needed just a little more cocoa--maybe another tablespoon or two.
The recipe says to roll the cookies in powdered sugar when they're cool, but I preferred them without the powdered sugar, both in flavor and appearance (things rolled in powdered sugar seem grandmothery to me, and also they get powder on everything else in the assortment).

The recipe says to let the dough chill until firm enough to handle, but the dough I made was firm enough to handle already, so I went ahead and used it right away.

I made some of these with regular Kisses and some with Meltaway Kisses, and again I preferred the ones with Meltaway Kisses.

Then I did an additional experiment: I set aside about...1/6th?...of the dough, and I added another couple of tablespoons of Hershey's Cocoa to it, to make it super extra dark chocolate. Then I used CANDY CANE Kisses instead of chocolate Kisses. It wasn't perfect (the extra cocoa made the dough a little dry---next time I might try decreasing the flour a little, or adding a bit of milk---and the pecans were odd with the mint so I'd leave those out if I were making them all Candy Cane), but it was a very promising experiment and worth tinkering more. I lovvvvve chocolate and mint together.

Kisses Cocoa Cookie with powdered sugar outside and a Candy Cane Kiss inside

The third recipe I tried was Chocolate Thumbprint Cookies. These were the most trouble and completely worth it. It's like a chocolate brownie rolled in pecans, with white frosting and a Hershey Kiss on top. Baker's notes:

The recipe says to let the cookies cool 5 minutes before putting the frosting on, but I recommend waiting longer: the frosting melted off mine and dripped onto the counter.
The recipe calls for a half-cup of powdered sugar and I'd make that a nice rounded half-cup to make the frosting a little thicker.
My thumb might have been too long and rectangular for me to make thumbprint cookies successfully, because I got more of a shallow ditch than a nice round circle imprint. Next time I might use a soda bottle top to make the impressions, to help the frosting stay in better and look prettier.

So...mine were not as pretty as the ones on the recipe. But NOBODY CARED. They were so scrumptious, and they looked fine if you didn't have the original photo to compare them to (*stuffs photo deep into trash*). And next time they will be prettier: the first time with a new recipe is always a practice run.

(This is after I scraped the frosting off the counter and put it back on the cookies. So, you know, next time I'll let them cool a little longer before frosting them, is what I'm saying. And looking at them now makes me want to make another batch right this minute.)

All three of these definitely passed their auditions for this year's cookie platters, and I'm really happy to have some new recipes in my arsenal. I predict the Chocolate Thumbprint Cookies will be the most electrifying (they're the ones I'd grab first, if presented with an assortment), but I think the other two are just as delicious and will TRAVEL well---a very important feature for our annual tradition of mailing treats around.

There is a giveaway here, for a $100 Visa gift card. To enter, leave a comment below answering this question: What treat says "HOLIDAYS!" to you? For me it's a chocolate-crusted pumpkin cheesecake at Thanksgiving and a Lindt chocolate Santa at Christmas.

The rules:

Sweepstakes open to individuals who, at the time of entry deadline, are legal residents of the United States and are 18 years or older.
If you put a link to the giveaway on Twitter, you get an additional entry and can leave another comment saying so and linking to your tweet.
If you blog about the giveaway, you get an additional entry and can leave another comment saying so and linking to your post.
You also have SEVEN other chances to win: visit the BlogHer.com special offers page to get links to the other Hershey posts; you can leave entries on those posts, too.
The giveaway begins December 4, 2009, and ends December 31, 2009. I'll use a random number generator to choose the winner. Make sure the email address with your comment is correct---that's what I'll use to contact you if you're the winner (after 48 hours, I have to choose a new winner).
For the full official rules, see here: Official Rules of the Hershey's Sweepstakes

For more information: Hershey's Holiday website

Etsy Love: Relic (With a Giveaway)

2009-12-04T06:20:00.000-05:00

Relic sells jewelry made of upcycled coins and keys and things, including olllllld coins like ancient Roman stuff even. I'll go steal copies of some of her photos to show you.

Here are two of my favorites of her gypsy bracelets:

And some of my favorites of her earrings:

And some of my favorites of her necklaces:

Beautiful and distinctive. And you can win your own beautiful and distinctive piece, or something beautiful and distinctive to give as a gift! Holly is giving away any coin bracelet OR any pair of coin earrings to ONE winner. To be that winner, I think you'd better leave a comment on this post. I'll choose a random winner on Friday, December 11th.

Relic on Etsy---go see!

Etsy Love: Small Grapes (With a Giveaway)

2009-12-03T08:45:00.001-05:00

Small Grapes sells fabric.

Anna Maria Horner fabric!

Amy Butler fabric!

Riley Blake fabric!

Joel Dewberry fabric!

Vintage fabric!

I want to buy some of everything and put it on a shelf in tidy stacks and go in and pet it sometimes.

You can WIN some pretty fabric of your own to pet! I took this description of the prize (along with all the photos in this post) from Shannon's site:

"...a fat quarter (18"x22") assortment (1.5 yard total) from the Wildwood Collection by Erin McMorris.

You will receive:
fat quarter - Checked Floral in Grey
fat quarter - Sophie's Garden in Green
fat quarter - Sprout in Green
fat quarter - Buttons in Gold
fat quarter - Forest in Lime
fat quarter - Pressed Leaves in Green

Details:
44/45" wide
100% cotton"

OMGPET!!

Leave a comment on this post, and I'll choose a random winner on Thursday, December 10th.

Small Grapes on Etsy---go see!

Etsy Love: William Dohman

2009-12-02T09:22:00.006-05:00

Wooden toys:

Photographs:

Word signs:

And, er. Graphic signs:

William Dohman on Etsy (all photos in this post are his)---go see!

Etsy Love: Haworth Handmade (With a Giveaway)

2009-12-01T09:47:00.006-05:00

Please feast your eyes on the awesomeness that is haworth handmade:

I don't remember how long ago I started reading Melissa's blog Under Construction, but I know it's at least been since September of 2007: that's when she blew out my circuits by making children's blocks out of her cherry tree, with a storage bag that had a picture of a cherry tree sewn onto it.

Her Etsy shop shows the same creativity: buttons made of wood, "make your own clothespin doll" ornament kits, fabric television covers, embroidered wood ornaments/jewelry, embroidered felt rocks. Do you see the rings made of a slice of wood embroidered with a jewel?? How are your circuits NOW? Blown?

You can win an ornament or embroidered felt rock of your choice. Leave a comment on this post, and I'll choose a random winner on Tuesday, December 8th.

haworth handmade on Etsy---go see!

Winner! (SugarChills)

2009-11-26T21:42:00.002-05:00

The winner of the Etsy Love: SugarChills contest is Bunnyslippers!

Etsy Love: WirlyGrrl

2009-11-20T09:01:00.008-05:00

Do you remember awhile back when the artist Rachael Rossman did a giveaway? She gave away one of her custom name paintings, remember, and Erin won for her son Colin, and you can see Colin's painting here. Oh, it was such a fun giveaway! *drifts into reverie*

This time Rachael Rossman did a painting for ME:

RIGHT??? Let's take a few closer looks:

S: Wearing the Niestle skirt from my icon!
W: A brown paper care package tied up with string! And that's Mr. Pickles perched on there!
I: A Postcrossing postcard!

S: Computer mouse! Because I am on the computer!
T: Stack of muffins!
L: Spatula for removing brownies from pan!
E: My boyfriend Target's symbol!

These paintings are so inexpensive ($5 per letter with a $20 minimum) and would be SO PERFECT as kid gifts, especially if you're thinking, "Oh, dude, I CANNOT bring any more TOYS into this HOUSE."

Wouldn't one of these also be amazing as a new-baby gift??? AAAAAAAAA!! And if you have parents who are super hard to buy for, you could have their surname done.

You'll want to order really soon, since it's custom work and there are only five (5) weeks until Christmas and she is only one (1) person.

WirlyGrrl on Etsy---go see!

(Hey! Do you have an Etsy shop? EMAIL ME ABOUT IT! Swistle! at! gmail! dot! com!)

Etsy Love: SugarChills (With a Giveaway)

2009-11-18T07:06:00.002-05:00

SugarChills is an Etsy shop that sells all-natural body care stuff for your hair, face, skin, and feeties. Laura says you can safely EAT the products if you're so inclined.

She sent me a 3-sample Gift Package and also a full-sized Skin Sludge to try. The Gift Package came in a very pretty bag with ribbon, and if you're a container junkie like me you'll be interested to know that you end up with LITTLE TINY WEE screw-top containers OMG TEH SWEET! I'll steal a photo off SugarChills site so you can see:

See? Wee containers! They each hold a TEASPOON! Adorable!

She sent me samples of Hair Goop #1 (nourishing yogurt hair mask), Face Slime #1 (smoothing cocoa face mask), and Face Slime #4 (balancing almond face mask). Hair Goop #1 gets mixed with a couple of tablespoons of yogurt, and it is so fun to use. I am sorry, but "so fun" is going to be repeated so often you will wish I had an editor. But it WAS fun! I mixed it in a little dish and brought it into the shower with me, and there I was putting YOGURT in my HAIR! Furthermore, I felt like I made a magic potion when I stirred the little (wee container!) of powder in there.

I used Face Slime #1 when I had to clean the bathroom, which I like to do before I take a shower. So I put the mask on my face and let it work while I cleaned, then rinsed it off when I showered. It smells so yummy, like chocolate-mint brownie batter. It looks like brownie batter, too, so you perhaps won't want anyone to see you like that. I rinsed it off and my face felt GREAT. (Also, I got a tiny bit on my lips and it tasted yum.)

Face Slime #4 is like putting a delicious breakfast on your face: while Face Slime #1 is smooth and a little sticky, Face Slime #4 is like ground up oatmeal with almonds and cinnamon. I rubbed it on and let it sit, and then rubbed it around again (for exfoliation) before rinsing. Then I went and had breakfast because the smell made me hungry.

There are a variety of Gift Packages to choose from, and they would indeed make terrific gifts---I would want any one of them. I think what I might do is tell Laura the skin/hair type of the recipient and let her choose the best samples---well, or it might be too fun to do the choosing myself, I'm not sure.

My Skin Sludge was the Cappuccino Body Scrub, made with actual coffee and sugar and milk. It's a powder and you mix it with a little water. I used as much as I wanted in the shower and I still had tons left in the container. (Also, and this is not something I set out to review, but I managed to drop the container in the shower FOUR TIMES and the container did not break or pop open.) I'll snitch another photo from Laura:

This is what it would have looked like if it had broken/spilled when I dropped it. But it didn't.

I thought it was a lot of fun to use (coffee grounds! exfoliating my skin!) AND it really worked AND my skin and bathroom have the very faint scent of coffee shop. I used it even on my face (oooooo, smoooooooth), and when I got a teeny bit of it in my mouth by accident AS PER USUAL, it was so refreshing to NOT feel like I needed to rinse and hack and spit to get the taste/chemicals out.

Because you are very, very lucky, Laura is going to let one of you try a Face Slime of your choosing. To enter, leave a comment on this post saying what you'd most like to try, or what you'd like to give to someone else. We'll select a random winner in a week, on Wednesday the 25th.

SugarChills on Etsy! Go see!

(Hey, peeperoos! Have an Etsy shop? Email me about it! Swistle! at! gmail! dot! com!)

Winner! (Philips Sonicare)

2009-11-16T10:06:00.001-05:00

The winner of the Philips Sonicare For Kids $100 Visa gift card is Snarky Lady! Yay, Snarky Lady!

Philips Sonicare For Kids

2009-10-27T13:09:00.004-04:00

(This is a compensated review from BlogHer and Sonicare for Kids. )

Take a look at our family's toothbrush situation:

No, really, take a good long look, because I'd thought I could just go in and do a quick snapshot of our toothbrushes, but then I realized the countertop was pretty dirty and so I ended up washing it with a wad of wettened toilet paper, and now I'm not even two sentences into this review and I have already had to DO CHORES. So please appreciate the shiny whiteness before moving on to the next paragraph.

As a reminder, there are seven people in my family: Paul, me, and our five children. There are seven toothbrushes on the counter. As you can see, I'm a fan of electric toothbrushes for children, if not for myself (they TICKLE). Children's teeth are about as easy to brush as cats' teeth, so I like that I can get in the general vicinity of the teeth and know the toothbrush will be moving around on the teeth even if the child's lips have clamped down around it.

The quicker among you will have guessed that this is going to be a review of an electric toothbrush. The toothbrush is the Philips Sonicare For Kids.

Normally I would have Paul set up something like this for me, because he likes to and I don't, but for a review I ~~like~~ want to do it myself so I can review how easy/difficult it is to do. It was pretty easy. I took it out of the wrappings and I put it together. I couldn't get the decorative faceplate on (there are three to choose from, or the toothbrush looks nice as-is, too), but my 10-year-old figured it out immediately (the solution: peel wrapper off decorative faceplate first).

You're supposed to let it charge 24 hours before you use it, but pfffff, I was ready to TRY this puppy. The toothbrush comes with two brush heads, one for age 4+ and one for age 7+, so I could choose TWO children to experiment on. I summoned a child.

I brush my kids' teeth for them at bedtime, and I have them lie down because it's way easier ~~to keep drool from flopping everywhere~~ to keep their heads still and to get to the backs of the teefies. So Elizabeth, age 4, lay down on the bed as usual, and I took out the brush.

The first thing I noticed was the sound, which was like a metal mosquito. I got unpleasant chills between my shoulder blades and some dentist-office flashbacks. Elizabeth, who has never felt the "DZZZT" vibration of a drill bonking into her dental nerves, was unfazed.

The toothbrush comes with the option to build up slowly to the full 2-minute brushing session, but I was on a deadline so I started with it already at a full-length session. We both liked the way the toothbrush made a little musical sound to let us know when to change quadrants (30 seconds each on upper outer, upper inner, lower outer, lower inner). Elizabeth gagged and flinched after a few seconds of the inner quadrants, and I suspect it was because I don't usually get those as thoroughly---and that's probably the reason for the "build up slowly" feature.

Otherwise, it was very similar to our usual brushing session except that I felt like I was Doing It Right. I think it's good to have the timer, rather than basing the brushing time on the imagined passage of time, which of course is hard to gauge when every minute feels like half an hour of GO TO BED GO TO BED OMG WHEN IS IT TIME FOR BED??

When I'd finished Elizabeth's teeth, I rinsed the brush head, put on the brush head for ages 7+, and summoned a second child. You might think a 10-year-old would be brushing his own teeth, but his orthodontist gently suggested he might need "help," and showed me what looked like BEESWAX on his back teeth. So. Rob, age 10, reported for toothbrush testing. Again, we both liked the quadrant timer, and he didn't think it felt too tickly or have trouble with gagging. "It felt kind of like when my foot falls asleep, only in a good way. It also feels SOFT, kind of, but not fuzzy like HAIRS in your mouth---NICE soft." Also: "I really like the interchangeable plates, because they're kind of like robot panels." If you're looking for more, um, OFFICIAL information than that, you can find it at the official site.

I rinsed the second brush head and set everything up on the little charging station: the handle goes on one little stump and the two brushes fit on two other little stumps. Tidy.

Now. May we get down to brass tacks? This is a SEVENTY DOLLAR toothbrush. The replacement brush heads cost $11 each, and you're supposed to change the head every 3 months---$44 of brush heads per year. Per child.

I started doing the math: $70 times 5 children is an initial $350 outlay, plus $44 times 5 children per year in replacement brush heads---$220 per year. PER YEAR. In CHILDREN'S TOOTHBRUSHES. Paul pointed out that we could get just one $70 toothbrush and then each child could have his/her own toothbrush head---but presumably the handle would then wear out proportionately more quickly, and also there wouldn't be a storage post for all five brush heads. Besides, even using one-handle figures, it's still $220 per year.

For comparison, I've been paying less than $5 each for children's electric toothbrushes, so that would be a big financial jump for me to make. In replacement brush head costs alone, I could buy 44 new $5 electric toothbrushes a year.

Well, but most of you don't have five children, right? If you have, say, TWO children, the little charging station is perfect: each child can have his/her own brush head stump, and you only need one handle. The cost is still $88 per year in brush head replacement. And perhaps you are not exactly writing Brush Head Replacement Day on the calendar, so it could be even less than that in actual practice. This starts to sound more and more reasonable.

Now, there is a PRIZE involved here, and if you were to win it, you could use it to buy the toothbrush plus two refills. OR you could buy a new battery for your car, or 25 coffee-and-two-doughnuts breakfasts, or 30 tubes of toothpaste, or Halloween costumes, or whatevs. This is the beauty and glory of the Visa gift card. You have a total of 10 chances to win a $100 Visa gift card from BlogHer Reviewers, plus the chance to win a Sonicare prize pack on the BlogHer.com special offers page.

To enter, leave me a comment below and tell me: How do you handle your kids' dental hygiene? Kissing up to Sonicare ("Well, Swistle, I and my children have always relied on the fine products of Sonicare for all our dental needs!") will not improve your chances of winning. The contest will begin at 5:00 p.m. (PST) 10/26/2009 and will end 5:00 p.m. (PST) 11/15/2009. Make sure you leave an email address I can use to contact you if you are teh winnah.

Rules:

No duplicate comments (except in the situations described below in items 2 and 3) or you are a Cheater McCheatypants and no one will want to play with you.
You may receive an additional entry by linking on Twitter and leaving a link in the comments saying you did so.
You may receive an additional entry by blogging about this contest and leaving a link in the comments saying you did so.
This giveaway is open to U.S. residents 18 years of age or older.
Winners will be selected via random number generator, and will notified by e-mail.
You have 48 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected and you will cry and cry.

You can go visit the Official Rules for more information.

Marshalls $25 Shopping Trip

2009-10-12T10:10:00.006-04:00

Marshalls sent me a $25 gift card to spend however I wanted and then post what I bought. Mwah, Marshalls! We can do this whenever you want, Marshalls!

Do you remember long, long ago, when I was wondering if I should have bought this handbag? I'm so glad I didn't, because here is what I used my gift card to buy:

Do you LOVVVVVVVE them?? I love them. The purse was $19.99 and the wallet was $9.99. I've been ~~licking~~ admiring them ever since I bought them.

I also found two bras, the $32.00 store price tags still on them, for $5.99 each. I think I won't post a photo of those.

Marshalls is the kind of store where sometimes I go and I find nothing I would ever be interested in owning, and the combination of "picked-over miscellany" inventory and "popular music from my high school years playing over the loudspeakers in such a context" gives the store a "shopping at the department store of depression" feel.

And other times I go and I find tons! of! awesome! stuff! Like super-cute Carter's baby clothes. And pretty dishes. And cloth napkins. And stationery. And a purse, when I thought I'd never find a purse I could commit to. And bras!

I'm not saying she's smarter than you...but in a way, she is smarter than you. In that one way.

Other Kinds of Reviews: What I Get

2009-10-06T06:29:00.002-04:00

My mother-in-law is visiting. She doesn't know I blog, so all my blogging has to be done secretly. I am going crazy: a Milk and Cookies post due tomorrow, the baby name questions keep pouring in (seriously, I got caught up through October 19th due dates, and since then TEN MORE QUESTIONS have come in for due dates before October 19th), wanting to tell you how the mother-in-law visit is going. And what am I doing? Writing a totally unnecessary disclosure post. Well, you know, THE MUSE.

So! Will ALL of the writing here be paid with checks for the work itself, as the BlogHer Ad Reviews will be? Sadly (for me), no. But! Generally I'll still get a sample of the product to review and keep, so that's happy (for me). And what I like to do is also negotiate a second sample as a giveaway for you guys. Your happiness is payment enough for me. *bluebirds sing*

Compensated BlogHer Ad Reviews: What I Get

2009-09-27T10:10:00.002-04:00

Oh, hello! This is the first time I've done compensated reviews, and many (I hope) of the compensated reviews I do will be BlogHer Ad reviews, and so I thought I'd tell those of you unfamiliar with the BlogHer Ad review process (like me, as of five minutes ago) how this works. This is generally referred to as "disclosure," and is intended as a way for the reader to know what the reviewer's STAKE in this is. Nobody wants to read a review by someone who, for example, works for the company, or by someone who sells the product, or by someone who is dating the inventor, or by someone who is being paid to talk up the product. So here's what my set-up is:

The advertiser will send me a product, for free, which I will get to keep (I don't know why they don't want their used toothbrushes and lipsticks back, but WHATEVS). I will review the product however I want, saying whatever I want: I can say it's terrible, I can tell you to boycott the whole brand, I can tell you it is the second coming of Albert Einstein---whatever. My plan is to go with the truth, first of all because that is the quickest and I have a lot of seasons of One Tree Hill to catch up on, and secondly because if I say something is awesome and you buy it and think it sucks, you will be slanting your eyes at me and my free product, and I will get all nervous and queasy.

Where was I? Oh, yes: so I will post my review and go back to watching One Tree Hill, and whether my review is positive or negative, BlogHer will send me a little checky-poo in exchange for the writing work. BlogHer will also get to deal with the phone calls from the advertiser who would like to know why I referred to their product as "a scourge upon this world and the next" and included a sketch of their product stoking the fires of the damned.

New Blog

2009-09-20T13:07:00.000-04:00

Wish I'd started this when they were reviewing the premium M&Ms.