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Winners!
Two giveaways have ended and I guess that means I should pick some winners.
The winner of The Help giveaway is……..
#73 Heather Stamper!
The winner of the Dr. Smith’s gift basket isssssssss…….
#6 Katie Klein
Thanks to all that entered! The winners have 24 hours to respond.
No Couch Potato’s Here
For a good bit now we have all been moving towards leading a healthy lifestyle at our house. I had been a little overweight for the majority of my life and continued to over eat on a daily basis. I noticed that my bad habits in my eating rituals had started to rub off on my children’s food choices. We started to see them getting a little bit pudgier than they had been before and I knew that we all had to make a change.
We started eating a whole heckuva lot better. We cut out quick solutions to meals and really started watching what we ate and what ingredients went into our meals. We stopped snacking just because we were bored or just liked the thought of eating something and when we did notice that we wanted a snack we chose wisely.
We have been a good bit more active not only around the house but we have getting outside more. We live in Texas and right now an immense drought is going on and really makes time outside in the heat really unbearable. So, we head outside and go fast and furious in running, playing catch with various round things, and even doing some free weights. We even get our dog involved and just get outside and run around like crazy to get our heart pumping.
As autumn is slowly creeping up on us we are hoping that the kids will take an interest in maybe some sort of organized team sports. Taylor used to play soccer but didn’t care for it much. Hopefully maybe they can all latch on to something like baseball or softball that way they can all have a sport in common and play at home as well. I think that this will teach them something that they desperately need….how to work as a team towards a common goal. My children can never work together at home. Maybe this will be a way for them to see it in action and then hopefully incorporate it into their home life.
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This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of SUBWAY® Baseball DeSIGNS. The opinions and text are all mine. The $500 Gift Certificate Giveaway Contest runs from August 19 – 28, 2011. A random winner will be announced by September 1, 2011. Official Contest Rules.
ABCMouse.com Review
I know that I have been talking a good bit about my son Rylan starting school this year. I talked about how worried I was in him starting and being able to keep up and even grasp the topics and lessons that they would be covering. My fears were really put at ease when my friends over at ABCmouse.com contacted me and wanted to set me up with a trial account.
I was very hesitant at first because my kids generally don’t have the attention span to visit online games or communities that are structured on lessons, continued play or return visits. As Rylan delved in he was really hooked by all of the things that he could do. He also like that he could play around for 10 minutes or stay and explore for hours. I really like the way that it was structured to where he completes each lesson, he is guided to the next one and is motivated to continue learning by ABCmouse.com’s Tickets and Rewards System. Tickets can be used to “purchase” virtual items on the site, such as new fish for the classroom fish tank or avatar accessories. He does more and more lessons to try to get to the rewards section just so he can buy a suit of armour or a new pet for his virtual bedroom.
The lessons of the Step-by-Step Learning Path consist of books, puzzles, games, songs, art activities, and/or printables that relate to a specific topic. Each lesson offers children several different ways to learn, in accordance with the recommendations of early childhood experts. It is still very structured like real school but lets him choose things and makes his path to learning unique to him.
Rylan actually asks us everyday to play. Not only to play online but to work on some of the activities and worksheets that you can print out from ABCmouse.com and take learning out of the virtual world. I plan on setting Peyton (3) up very soon to get his leaning on!
The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely that of the blog owners. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider. I have been given a product free of charge, but that does not impact my views or opinions in any freakin’ way.
Fading Memories and Saving New Ones
I have come to some sort of resolution that I need to combat this memory loss or this inability to retain this information by capturing it more often. I think that I am going to start shooting a bit more video of me and my family. I will then have files that I can then save onto my computer and rewatch them anytime. I know that I run the risk in my computer one day dying a horrible death and my memories would be gone forever. I did a ton of figuring out what the best thing to do in the long run would be and I knew that I would want to be able to send big files over to a portable hard drive for safe keeping. So, that’s what I am going to do. Capture a bit more of my daily life in video form, throw it onto a hard drive, store that somewhere safe, and then have them forever even to show my grand-kids one day. I’m on the ball now! Did I say that already? I can’t remember…
The Ramp Up to Back to School
This year we will have two kiddos in school! Taylor will be going to the third grade and Rylan will be making his maiden voyage into the magical land of Kindergarten. Taylor has been the best student in the past couple of years. She has made straight A’s and hasn’t faultered or had a major meltdown so far. Now as for our meltdowns, that is a different story in and of itself.
I’m going to really honest here. I am really worried about my son starting school. He has not been in any sort of off-site daycare or had any sort of preschool that taught him the basics. He does however get along with other children (besides his siblings) in a public setting such as church or play dates. I am a little worried that he is going to bust out a “your not the boss of me” or “my daddy will beat you up” comment to the teacher or another esteemed member of the education system. His speech has not always been the best but has really gotten better over the years as he grows and his vocabulary grows as well. I know some parents who have said that they had had an issue with their children’s hearing had affected their speech. I ran into some ways that I could improve phonological awareness in him but I think that he should maybe actually start school first.
When thinking about the points and worries in this post and the times that my mind had wandered to think about it in the past I have come to the conclusion to just shut off my brain. He is a child. Taylor has turned out great and we worried the same way that we worry with Rylan. He will get it and we will be there to watch him climb to new heights…I just hope he doesn’t drag a teacher to that height and throw them off of it.
Preserving Our Digital Life is Hard Work
Every once in awhile when I go over to my mom’s house she breaks out the huge photo albums and we sit there and reminisce about the good ol’ days. Today we all try to shoot as many photos as we can day in and day out. Then we take our extremely powerful cameras with ten times the photos that were in all my mom’s albums and put them all on a small memory card about the size of a stamp. Then what do we do? Well if you are like me, you end up sitting in front of the computer and edit pictures all day. I have literally spent hours in front of my laptop just messing around with one or two photos.
There are some great programs today that have made this a whole heckuva lot easier. Programs like Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro have made it easier though over the years. I am always worried though that what if all of my family’s history disappers in the form of a fire, flood, or my laptop getting stolen? I do backup every once in awhile but I don’t always do it regularly. I think what I am going to start doing is not spend so much time getting the perfect shot or touching up photos because the light was bad or there were pimples on someone’s face. In the past people took pictures on whatever they had and cherished them no matter how they turned out. I mean I have a picture of me and Spiderman and the original General Lee on old Polaroid pictures. I think that I’m going to just shoot life and let it be from now on. Spend less time editing life and spend more living it.
Marriage is Easy When it’s not Hard!
My marriage is great. We are the best of friends and the ones we confide in the most. Crystal and I have been together for a little over ten years and have been married for almost nine years now. I think that between us in the relationship area I am the one who tries to do the most to work things out. I mean I am no Mort Fertel but I do my best to see where I went wrong and try to remedy it as soon as possible. You do notice I said where “I” went wrong?
In every marriage there will be arguments. In my non-professional (but time tested and mother approved) opinion, if a married couple does not have a spat, incident, or argument at all…something else is wrong or going on behind the scenes. There are things out there that are like marriage “fitness” classes like Marriage Max that teaches you how to neutralize your problems and put into practice a system of relationship habits that will shift the momentum of your marriage. Then there are more known things like marriage “counseling” where the process of counseling a couple in a relationship in an effort to recognize and to better manage or reconcile troublesome differences and repeating patterns of distress in their past and present.
To be honest there have been no knock-down drag out throw-downs at our house…or even in public. We have children, responsibilities, and we took a vow to keep this marriage together no matter what. We are finally getting to the point of extinguishing the small fire before it becomes a roaring blaze. Communicate, apologize, make-up! That’s it! Doesn’t that sound simple? Just remember that when you start to act like a raging lunatic.
Uh… What broke?
I came home the other day from work and everything was going on as normal. Kids were driving Crystal crazy, the dog was on the couch as he was not supposed to be, and the smell of dinner was lingering in the airmosphere. After food and playtime I noticed that it was really warm in the house. When I wandered over to the thermostat it read 85 degrees! I was like “what the crap…what do I do now?” We don’t have any sort of home protection plan that covers this and I don’t know how to fix it.
My father-in-law came over and took a look at it and said either the fan motor or a small electrical transistor went out. I asked him if he knew how to fix it but that turned out to be a “no”. He did know a guy that works on them and said that it shouldn’t take too long to fix. I called and a couple of days later he came out and fixed me right up. Turns out it was a small itty-bitty little electrical component. I’m not saying how much that little thing and the visit cost me. Since then I have looked into some ways to safeguard me against little things that go out and break on me. Home warranties like what American Home Shield has to offer look really appealing. I just know that the I need to look into something before I spend all my free time on the phone trying to find someone to fix the junk when it breaks and then go broke trying to pay them.
Game On! Redbox Giveaway
They have finally done it. Redbox has entered the game rental market. The geniuses over at Redbox have amazed us for years with the deals that they have for movie watchers everywhere. Redbox game rentals are going nationwide in 21,000 locations this Friday, June 17. In conjunction with Father’s Day this Sunday, the fine folks over at Redbox wanted me to give away some FREE game rentals!
Giveaway
One (1) winner will receive:
- 15 promo codes (worth $2 each) for game rentals .
How to Enter
Tell me your preferred video gaming system.
Extra Entries Available
After you have completed the first entry, you are eligible for additional entries. Make sure you leave a separate comment for EACH entry. Each counts as one extra entry unless noted otherwise.
- Vote for Daddy Digest in the Camp Dirt Contest. You can vote once a day till July 8th. (2 ENTRIES)
- Subscribe to Daddy Digest by reader or email.
- Like me on my Facebook Fan Page.
- Follow Daddy Digest on Twitter AND Tweet about the giveaway. Leave the URL to the Tweet in your comment. You can tweet once a day, but remember to leave the URL to each tweet.
This giveaway will end on June 28th at 10:00 PM Central time. Winner will be chosen via a random number generator. Giveaway is open to US entries. The winner must contact me in 24 hours to claim their prize. Good luck to everyone!
The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely that of the blog owners. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.
The Carpet Dilemma
As some of you may know we are desperately trying to get our house ready sell. It has been on the market for around five months now. The house is becoming a little more than a shell of it’s former self with most of our family photos taken down and half of our belongings boxed up. While making little improvements like touching up the paint on the base boards, keeping the yard imaculate, and repainting the entire house there is still one dilemma we don’t know the best way to handle. The carpet in the boys room.
This room has tons of stains on the carpet from Kool-Aid to baby powder explosions. We have tried everything from spot treating to using two different carpet cleaners . We have even thought about getting a carpet cleaning service to come out and take care of it. We aren’t sure what we are going to do yet and don’t want it to be an eyesore. We were thinking about just replacing the entire room with new carpet but then we didn’t know what the best style or color would be. The realtor said we could do one thing and that would be go to our local home improvement store and pick out several different types of carpet we would be comfortable with and get samples to let the potential buyers pick out which one they like the best and have it installed as soon as we move all of the stuff out of the boy’s room.
Whichever way we go with at least the next family that buys our house will have great carpet!
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