Photo Book Tip: Create an adventurous travel photo album at Shutterfly.com.
You can get a free photo book now if you are new to Shutterfly! I've ordered from them several times before and I'm always very happy with their products! The photo books are my favorite! This one is from our vacation this summer!
Do you love getting free magazines? Here's one for Working Mothers! Value Mags is offering up a free subscription to Working Mother magazine. It's a 6 month subscription, no strings attached!! Click HERE to get started!
Confession time. What do you do while you sit in car rider line?? I used to chat with my little man waiting for the big kids. Now I'm bored! I need to find a new car rider line hobby. What do you do?
And seriously! What do people do that sit in line for two hours before pickup time?!? I did two loads of laundry, answered email, and updated my Facebook profile pic. I'd call that more productive than sitting in line for two hours! Good grief! What's your car rider line confession?
Wondering what to do with those cute First Day of School pictures? How about a FREE 8X10 Photo Collage from Walgreens? Use the code GETONEFREE to score a free 8 X 10 collage! Create it. Add it to your cart. Apply the code. Choose to pick up in store and it's all FREE!! I already made mine! Too cute!!
I created the one below using Power Point. You could also do that and print it out in an 8X10 format or whatever size you want, but the free Collage from Walgreens lets you build it on the site and it's FREE!!!!!!!!
Thanks to House Party, I was able to host a party for Lego Duplo. They sent out a kit that contained some of their new Read and Build products. I was very impressed with the kits!
We are huge Lego fans at our house! In fact, my kids have had Legos since the time they were in the womb! That's right, I'm pretty sure I bought some before they were born! We started off with Duplos and have also upgraded a huge part of our collection to the smaller, classic Legos as they got older. We decided to turn their old train table into a Lego table before the party! We had been planning on painting it for a while, but this gave us some motivation!
This kit was really fun for the guests. They loved the hands on activities of actually getting to build the little animals that go along with the book. The youngest ones chewed on them, the middle aged ones played with them and snuggled up to listen to the book, and the older ones enjoyed building the animals and looking through the books! It was fun for all ages from infants to Toddlers to Pre-schoolers. My older kids even enjoyed building them for the younger ones. It was cute to see them reading the books to the smaller kids.
The new kits are definitely geared more toward the younger crowd, but my preschooler still enjoyed playing with the animals. It's also a little pricy just to pick up several of them. They are priced about $13.00 in most places I have seen. I might pick one up as a gift, but I probably wouldn't have tons of them around the house. Great product, though, and I would highly recommend it!! This product was provided free to me from House Party, but the review and opinions stated above are my own.
I had the chance recently to host a sample and share opportunity from Crowdtap! They sent out samples of Woolite Extra Dark for me to share with friends. Now, I could have just handed them out to all of my friends and that would be the end. Well, that just wasn't good enough for me. Where's the fun in that?
Disclaimer: I did receive the samples free, but all opinions below are my own...
I decided to have a tie dye party! Oh, yeah! I wanted my friends to have a fun reason to try out the new samples and to show that Woolite Extra Dark really does protect the colors in your clothes. We invited tons of friends over and told them to bring their kids and something to tie dye with them. I bought some basic inexpensive tie dye kits at Walmart and we used them to tie dye everything. Most of the kids did tee shirts. My girls did PJs and we did a onesie for my baby nephew! So much fun!
My kids were so excited, they wanted to tie dye all week. They started by tie dying some coffee filter butterflies at the local library during story time. We also bought dyed flowers for the event. My sister in law even brought tie dye cupcakes over that week! It was a fun week! The tie dye actually went pretty well. I did manage to end up with purple thumbs, but the dye came off eventually. Thanks Crowdtap and Woolite for providing a fun afternoon with my friends and a great way to experience your product. We were pleased with the results of the tie dye and it actually did a really good job of protecting the colors in the dye. If I were to do it again, I would let the dye sit longer on the material. I think I washed mine too soon. A few of the colors faded, but I honestly believe it was because of the dye and NOT the detergent. If it had been the detergent, they all would have faded. In this case, only a couple of colors faded. We'll call that operator error. I'm very happy with my samples and my friends were, too. They all had great results! Some used it on jeans and loved the results that it gave. It held the color and didn't fade them at all. Another used it on work clothes and she was very pleased with the results. It kept her black slacks looking fresh and sharp. Most of my guests used it to wash their tie dye and test the results of the colors fading. They were very pleased with the results. The guest that left the color on for a couple of days had the best results. The colors barely faded at all! If you price Woolite Extra Dark in the stores, it is a bit expensive, but in my opinion, it's worth the few extra dollars to protect colors on clothes that are more delicate!
Have you signed up for Smiley360 yet? If not, you really should check it out! I just signed up for a new mission and I'm pretty excited about it. It's a Tony Robbins audio file and a workbook. I'm interested in hearing what he has to say.
But, I've also received free samples from various companies to try out their products and they are almost always full sized samples!! A few of the samples I've received from Smiley 360 so far are:
Woolite
All Laundry Packs
5 Hour Energy
Just for Men
Children's Advil
Knorr Homestyle Stock
Neosporin Eczema Essentials
Arm and Hammer Detergent
ALL of these have been full sized products!! They are yours to keep and you just have to review it and give your opinion about it! Seriously... if you aren't signed up yet, go now!
Well, I have to say, I wasn't sure what to think after watching the premier for Totally Biased. I knew it wasn't going to be a kid friendly show when it started, so we rounded up the crew for a viewing without them. There were parts that were pretty funny, but I honestly thought some of it was kind of slow. Sorry, Crowdtap and Totally Biased, but I'm not sure it's going to be a show that we watch all the time. I was doing pretty well with most of the humor. It was fairly clean for a while. The segment about the Sheik and Sikh and Shaq and Shakes seemed to go on and on forever... not that funny to me. However, the segment about the people getting frisked had us laughing hysterically!! We knew we wanted to create a youtube video to go along with it and this gave us the perfect subject!
We're on vacation this week and have had a lot of fun hanging out with friends and family. We piled all the grownups and the big kids into the bedroom to watch the premier! The girls had all been out shopping, so we had to rush in to get ready for the show! Of course, we had to eat first, so there was food, then we watched the preview clips and the youtube videos. After that, we all piled onto the bed to watch. We put the little guys to bed upstairs so we wouldn't wake them up! You have to watch this video first!!
I even left the "big kids" outside for a little while to make sure that it was appropriate. It wasn't too bad. I didn't mind them being in here and we continued to watch until the cursing started and they had to bleep it a million times in a row. The part that bothered me about that was that it was all done in front of the lady's daughter!! I think it makes you sound ignorant when you can't think of anything to say except a curse word and to do it repeated in front of your children just gets on my nerves! I guess I'm a little "BIASED" about that! That was about the time we quit watching the show and decided to make our own videos instead. We completely entertained ourselves! OK, now that you've seen our goofiness in the first video, you have to watch the second video!!
So, I guess to sum it up... it wasn't that bad. It wasn't the funniest show I've ever seen and I might possibly watch it again if I'm flipping through channels. It's not one that I would set my DVR to record or make sure I'm up late watching it. It did allow us to have some great laughs and spend some quality time together! (Everyone piling on to one bed to watch the show will do that to ya!) It was a fun night with friends and I'm thankful that Crowdtap allowed us to be a part of it!
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the GetGlue app. I had never heard of this app until the party kit arrived, but now that I have it, I will definitely check it out again. It's a great new social way to talk about what you're watching and listening to and share it with friends. I have enjoyed being on there today and hope to learn more about it as I play around with it! Here's the link if you're interested.
If you are interested in learning more about all of these parties that I'm having, you should check out Crowdtap. It's an awesome site and I know you will love it! They give you lots of opportunities to interact with different brands and you get rewarded! Sometimes by freebies, other times you can cash in your points for Amazon Cards. It's awesome and I love it! Go here to check it out!
So, the grownups are piled in the bed checking out the show first making sure it's appropriate for kids! We're ready for the laughs to start!! Check it out!!! Our funniest part so far was the part about the frisking! I'll post the video soon! Crowdtap sent out a crazy fun digital kit that made the party fun! We've had fun with the setup, and we're still deciding about the show! What are you thoughts? Funny? Slow? Hilarious?
We
had a blast today!! After yesterday's injuries, we decided to take a
break from the water. We headed into Mobile and decided to make a day
trip out of it. We took the kids to the Exploreum. It's a Discovery
type Science center. Tons of fun and hands on exhibits!! If you're
ever near the Mobile area, I highly recommend it. And, if you have a
pass to the Springfield Discovery Center, you can get in free to this
one and vice versa.
Emma showing Christian how it's done!
There were all kinds of events for sight and sound. There was a body exhibit where you could find out all about your body and what it can do. You get a card at the beginning and it keeps track of your stats at every station then gives you a printout at the end. That part was just the beginning...
Matt and Emma making music
The other room upstairs was full of the sight and sound stuff. The kids got to play instruments, experiment with magnifying glasses and microscopes and try out all kinds of light experiments.
Alex at the ball pit!
Matthew is giving Caleb a boost
Bubble Time
Downstairs was by far the most fun for the kids. They loved pulling themselves up in the chairs using pulleys and pumping the different types of liquids to make bubbles. It was just a fun time!
Caleb decided to get a ride up with Daddy
Vicky is showing off her muscles!
Nicole's turn!
Another one of our favorite exhibits was downstairs near the kids' stuff. It had shadow walls and glow in the dark white writing boards. It also had a color changing wall! It's so cool!! Think about mood rings and how they change color when you put them on. Now picture a whole wall covered with that same stuff!! Awesome! Team Stephens had fun with this one! Matthew found the building table and kept himself entertained while we tried to get a pic with the crazy wall!
I think Matt was bored!
Team Stephens
I have no words to explain this one...
Still trying to get a shot...
Duane had dropped everyone off at the door, so when we all walked the couple of blocks back to the car, we noticed we were parked right across from Duane's favorite fort! He was being a good sport and didn't make us go through it, but we did manage to stop by our favorite cannon for a photo op. If it looks familiar, that's because we took our picture by the same cannon last year! It took a couple of tries to get the perfect shot, but we had fun practicing! :) I love my crazy family! I'm so blessed to have time to spend with them this week on vacation. Some much needed time together away from the house!
Why is it that my children always seem to get hurt when we are miles away from any medical care?!? Really?
First, we had to go all the way to Mobile to get an infected spider bite checked out on Alex. There was nothing open on the island. It's a type of staph infection they think from an infected insect or spider bite. We finally got home late and Caleb decided to run up the stairs. He slipped and hit his head on the floor. I'm now nursing one nasty looking knot on his head. He's in my bed for now. Kind of scary.
I can't get mad. I did the same thing when I was a kid and broke my big toe!! I guess I'd rather take care of a bump than a broken toe, but still! This poor kiddo has taken more tumbles than any kid I know. Gonna be a long vacation if we keep this up. Prayers would be appreciated.
I got a free sample of 5 hour energy from Smiley360!! Eleven hours in the car, 5 kids under 10, leaving at 5 AM! I am needing this pick me up!
If you haven't signed up yet, do it now! Tons of free full sized samples.
Here's the link. I can't hyperlink from my phone. You may have to copy and paste.
