sprout

RIT Sun Guard

I'm eagerly awaiting my order of this new RIT Sun Guard for my little girl's clothes. It makes their normal clothes to have a UPF rating of 30 (vs the normal 5) for 20 washes. Though it's not quite as protective as some of the clothing you can buy, it's a lot cheaper (and more fashionable) to do it this way.

Favors for 2 year olds

Time really flies when you have a mini. One minute you're worrying about the finer points of your birth plan and the next, you're trying to convince your toddler to use their Quiet Voice at a restaurant and living on far too little sleep. But it's that time again - birthday time - and with it the never ending search for fun and affordable party favors. Some ideas:

• sidewalk chalk
• crayons (check out these cool rainbow ones)
• small cans of playdoh
• stickers
• bubbles
• slinkies
• sand toys
• animal crackers
• cheap-o sunglasses
• twisty straws made of thick plastic

You'll still probably have to watch your minis with some of these things depending on their developmental level and interest in putting things in their mouths. Can't wait til next year when they can get anything...

Free 411

I don't like watching or listening to ads in order to get to content (can I tell you how much I love our DVR?), but I think I hate paying Verizon $1.25 to get a number more. So I've now welcomed 800-FREE-411 into my life. Yeah you have to listen to an ad first, but with traffic and the radio, frankly, I don't really notice. And did I mention, it's free?

Kaboodle

Maybe I'm over organized (probably not something you'd say if you saw my house), or maybe it's making sure her many grandparents (one divorced and remarried set of grandparents can really add to the count) all have a shot at getting her something she'd like, but holiday and birthday lists are a must. This is where Kaboodle comes in.

Kaboodle is a cool site that lets you create wishlists by adding links to pages all over the 'net. It's not a store based wishlist but instead let's you add stuff from any site you want and has a feature that lets people "claim" gifts so there's no duplication. Even better, you can make these lists private so that they can only be viewed by people you invite.

Homemade Play Dough

It seemed like the Universe was trying to tell me something: everywhere I turned there were recipes for homemade play dough. So last week, I decided I'd go ahead and make some while Baby Girl napped. What a fucking mess. The recipe in the toddler craft book I bought calls for 5 cups of flour and 2.5 cups of salt. Now for most people, that would be a warning sign - how much homemade play dough do you really need? But not me. No, I was being a Great Mother. Her play dough was going to be lovingly made by her mother the same way it has been done for generations (or something like that). I was reclaiming our right to make simple, old fashioned crafts in an old fashioned way. Instead, I found out that yes, you can botch up play dough. That incident hasn't deterred me, however, and I am committed to making it work. In the meantime, I ran over to Target and bought some Playdoh playdough for $.99.

Wanna try your hand at homemade play dough? Here are some recipes:

About.com
Webmomz
Kids Craft Weekly
A Place of Our Own
Sesame Street Parents

Check in next week to see how this how play dough thing is working out for me.

Upromise

Upromise has always seemed a little cheesy to me. A loyalty marketing program dressed up as a savings vehicle for college, the basic idea is that by purchasing the right brand of toilet paper, pretzels or juice, you'll be saving a few pennies at a time towards your mini's college education. Now that I have a mini, I still think it's cheesy but signed up for it anyway. I figure the $1.36 or so I earn every month will probably buy her a semester's worth of books or maybe some software by the time she gets to college. But what the hell, it's free and outside of steering me towards certain products, there's no hassle.

Thank you Oxiclean

Maybe it has something to do with my laid back parenting style or maybe it has to do with my subpar laundry skills (would it have killed my mother to have taught me the finer points of stain removal?), but either way my kid's clothes are always stained. My usual technique is Plausible Deniability. Does that stain look like it could have happened on the way to playdate or will it get lost in all the new stains that are going to happen once we get there? But in an effort to be a Great Mother, I've really been trying to master this whole laundry thing. Recently, I found another tool in the never-ending struggle for clean clothes: Oxiclean Baby.

Now I don't know if Oxiclean Baby is really any different from Oxiclean. I don't even really know what it is, but lame informercials aside, this stuff really does seem to work. Just this weekend Baby Girl got some chocolate ice cream on her tshirt. Now in my neighborhood, giving refined sugar or ice cream to a child her age is just not done - I had to get rid of the evidence if she was ever going to wear that shirt in public again. Put it in the Oxiclean Baby for a couple of hours and voila, no stain. We have a clean shirt and our little secret is safe.

Health

I haven't posted in a couple weeks. One of my parents is sick and I've been busy with other things.

Finding out that one of my parents has cancer has made me think about a lot of things including how I can improve my health - I'm not 21 anymore. Though it seems like a hassle when you're (fairly) young and healthy, everyone should have regular check-ups. Here are the government health screening guidelines for women and men.

Keeping Things Regular

Does your child suffer from bouts of irregularity? Mine does. These are foods that have helped:

• prune juice
• black bean vegetable soup
• bran flax muffins (minus the nuts and raisins)
• pear sauce
• drinking extra water

Online Errands

In an effort to make my life easier and not drag my mini on all kinds of boring errands, I've been looking for alternatives: namely online shopping and drive-thrus. So far I've had much better luck with online shopping than drive-thrus. Besides cards and diapers, I've found these:

Office supplies. If you join Staples Rewards (it's free), anything you order from their web site has free shipping.

Stamps. For a $1 delivery fee, you can order stamps from the US Postal Service online.

Pet meds. I can't tell you how much I love ordering from 1800petmeds.com vs going to the vet just to get flea medicine.

Pharmacy. You can get prescription refills and anything else you need sent to your home from Drugstore.com or Walgreen's.

Organic produce. Organic Express will deliver organic produce to your door.

Movies. I'm sure I was the last person to subscribe to Netflix.com, but they now have a variety of plans to suit every lifestyle.