We’ve been having a pretty great December so far. Somehow we’ve managed to pack a bunch of fun stuff in while also keeping it pretty low-key. I’m not sure how things are working out like that, but I’ll take it. A lot of the stuff we’ve been doing are activities from the advent calendar but it’s been spread out with just a little bit happening each day, which is nice.

I also bought a new Hipstapack (the Foodie SnapPak) for the Hipstamatic app on my phone and I finally took 5 minutes to get my Instagram account set up (my user name is wendolonia if you want to follow me). So now I’m in another grungy photo phase and have been taking tons of pictures with my phone instead of the good camera. Be forewarned.

So here are a few of the things we’ve been up to:

Snowman Pancakes! I saw this idea from A Little Loveliness on Pinterest a few weeks ago and couldn’t wait to make them for the kids. That jaunty bacon scarf! It kills me every time I look at it. So last Saturday I decided to surprise the kids with these pancakes. After I started making the pancakes, they turned into terrible little brats — bickering, hitting each other, screaming, getting into things they’re not supposed to touch, making enormous messes — and they did not deserve cute snowman pancakes, but I wanted to make them so I plowed ahead. When I served breakfast their response was underwhelming. One complained that his brother’s piece of bacon was bigger and whined because he doesn’t like chocolate chips. The other only ate his chocolate chips and bacon and threw his marshmallows on the floor. I found myself hissing, “Eat your snowman pancakes!” through clenched teeth.

Yay. Fun breakfast treat.

Our Christmas tree has been a much bigger success. We bought a too big tree from our local grocery store and had a bit of trouble getting it set up in the stand so it didn’t fall over. We also had to remove multiple pieces of furniture from our teeny, tiny living room to get it to fit.

But the kids were so excited about it and were super enthusiastic about decorating it. They even agreed to pose for a nice photo in front of the tree!

Last year Santa put these crazy glasses that make the lights look like cool shapesin our stockings and we have all been loving them. The boys and I spent over an hour trading glasses, doubling them up and running around the house looking at all our lights with them. I put the Santa pair over the lens of my camera and got a pretty good representation of what you see.

The fireworks pair was even more spectacular! We’ve decided we need to bring them along the next time we drive around looking at holiday light displays.

I’ve been drinking my tea out of our Santa mugs every morning, which just makes me happy.

Augie and I also spent an afternoon cutting snowflakes out of paper. He’s a talented three-year-old, don’t you think?

OK, OK — those are mine. Just curiously, would anyone be interested in a snowflake cutting tutorial? There are a lot out there already, so I’m not sure the world needs another.

On Monday, I took the boys to a favorite bakery after school for a surprise cookie and hot chocolate date. Augie was super cranky about the whole thing.

But Wyatt was into it and managed to turn Augie’s mood around. I love these occasional instances of fantastic-ness in their relationship. They’re relationship is a see-saw and it feels like it can go either way at any moment.

We made our favorite cream cheese spritz cookies. The boys helped at all stages which was great fun though the sprinkle stage got a little out of hand at one point. I’m still finding green sugar in various nooks and crannies of our kitchen days later.

And yesterday we took a little time to make some cards for our friends who moved away last summer. I just plopped some stickers, scissors and Christmas-themed paper on the table and let them go at it. The kids were unusually excited to craft and their cards were terrific and funny and creative.

And while they worked on their projects, I made this scrapbook page using the photos you see in this post!

What have you been doing this December?

I feel like I’ve been trying to get people to play games with me since I was a little kid. I really love board games. When I was growing up, I had the standards — Trouble, Candyland, Sorry, Battleship, Clue. I would have played any and all of these board games every day, but finding someone to play with me was not always easy. My brother would sometimes join me, but he was a bit older than me so he usually preferred to do something else. My parents were hard to pin down too. Though they would occasionally play a few rounds with me, they were busy and couldn’t always drop everything to play games. (Though there is an old family story about the epic afternoon our family spent hours and hours playing Hi Ho Cherry-O so that I could win one single game.) I loved to play board games with friends too, but even they couldn’t satiate my desire for board games.

My husband will humor me with a board game now and then, but he’s not really so into them so now that I have kids I’m starting in on them. Thankfully, they’re usually pretty happy to play with me. Finally!

Because my kids are still young we’re limited in what games we can play but we’re getting to the point where our options are opening up a little. Their four year age difference also complicated matters. What’s fun for three-year-old Augie is boring to the big kid. And when we play a game the seven-year-old likes he gets really frustrated when his little brother bends the rules. Both boys are also learning about cheating (bad!), good sportsmanship (good!) and talking smack without being too mean (really, isn’t that what makes games fun?). Still, we all like playing games together and it’s (mostly) fun for everyone.

The best games for us are interesting and silly and encourage bending the rules to fit the abilities of the people in our family. We particularly love LEGO Creationary for this because the game allows each player to work exactly where their building skills are. Augie mostly just messes around with the bricks and pays no attention to whether or not it’s his turn, while Wyatt builds clever little structures. And my husband and I go to town with our creations. Another game we love is Cat in the Hat I Can Do That! because there are many tasks that my husband and I can’t do but the kids can which really levels the playing field.

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One of the activities I put on our advent list this year was an idea that came from Family Fun magazine: create a snowscape with shaving cream. My kids had no idea what that meant when they pulled the little card out of the box but they were pretty excited once they figured it out.

I put out a cookie sheet for each kid, gave them each a selection of Imaginext guys, and made them take off their shirts. (That last one was a good move.) Then I sprayed a pretty good size layer of cheap shaving cream all over Augie’s tray. Once the kids saw what I was doing, they each wanted a turn with the can.

The idea with the toys was that they could make the guys ice skate, or sled or just generally play in the snow.

I’d even taken extra care to pull a Bat-snowmobile out of the toy box…

And penguins! But neither of the kids ended up using the shaving cream as snow.

It was interesting to watch them because I could tell they knew this was supposed to be fun, but they were also kind of baffled about what they should do.

And at first, they did not like getting the shaving cream on their hands. Wyatt probably got up to wash his hands three times in the first five minutes. Augie just wiped them on his tummy which he didn’t mind for some reason. I guess one’s feelings about shaving cream touching them aren’t always logical.

I gave them some rubber spatulas to play with and that’s what got the ball rolling. They swiped and wiped and squooshed the cream up into big mountains. They buried their toys and dug them out again.

And pretty soon they overcame their distaste for having shaving cream on their hands!

They were busy with this for about an hour or so but I’m not going to lie — clean-up was a total pain. Shaving cream sticks to everything and doesn’t easily rinse out of the tiny nooks and crannies on little toys. And despite the cookie sheets, quite a bit of the cream made it onto the table. There was a sizeable amount on tummies and jeans too. I let Augie wash the toys for a bit which he just thought of as a new variation on the game and Wyatt only complained a little about wiping the table off four times. So despite the hefty clean-up time we all thought this was a big, fun success!

Does your family play with shaving cream? Any tips to minimize the mess?

In the last few years, it’s become apparent that I’m a little bit crazy for advent calendars. So far this year, I have three lined up! I say “so far” because sometimes one of the kids’ grandmas or someone will send them an advent calendar too. I say: Bring ‘em on!

Advent calendars weren’t a fixture of my childhood, but they did make an occasional appearance. I always like the ones with chocolate, of course, but my favorite advent calendar of all time was a paper one from Germany with beautifully drawn pictures behind each door.

This year, like last year, I bought Wyatt LEGO advent calendar. We all thought last year’s was awesome so when I heard they were releasing a Star Wars version it was a given that one would be coming into our house. Augie is still a bit young for the LEGO calendars so I bought him an Imaginext advent calendar that’s a little more his speed. These toy-based calendars come out of the budget for the kids’ gifts and they’re one of my favorite things to give them because they get almost a full month of play and happiness from them.

My favorite advent calendar is our activity advent calendar. I tried this for the first time last year and it was great for a few reasons. First off, it helped us all focus on the fun of doing things rather than getting things. It also helped me pace myself a bit. I’m occasionally prone to going crazy and trying to jam a whole bunch of fun into a short period of time. By selecting just one Christmas-y activity per day, I kept myself from going overboard and getting burned out on holiday fun well before Christmas day.

Here is my list of activities for this year:

1. Assemble paper Christmas train.
2. Assemble paper Christmas village.
3. Bake Christmas cookies and decorate them.
4. Build Christmas sculptures with Legos.
5. Create a snowscape with shaving cream and action figures.
6. Cut snowflakes out of paper.
7. Decorate the Christmas tree.
8. Decorate the gingerbread house
9. Do some Christmas Mad Libs.
10. Donate to the school food drive.
11. Draw pictures of fun Christmas activities we’ve done.
12. Eat dinner by candlelight.
13. Go out to look at Christmas lights after dark.
14. Go outside with blankets to look at the stars.
15. Have a bubble bath
16. Have a family dance party
17. Have breakfast for dinner (I’ll make Snowman Pancakes. So freaking cute!)
18. Have hot chocolate with all the fixings
19. Make a card for a loved one and send it in the mail.
20. Make gifts for teachers.
21. Make ornaments for the tree (I’m thinking salt dough ornaments.)
22. Purchase a present for Toys for Tots.
23. Read a Christmas book together.
24. Recycle some toys to share with others.
25. Set up the Christmas tree.
26. Sing Christmas songs while dad plays the guitar.
27. Tell everyone in our family why you think they’re cool at dinner.
28. Watch a Christmas movie before bed.
29. Write a letter to Santa.
30. Write a list of 5 things you are thankful for this year.

A lot of these activities are things we do every year  and some are ideas I’ve collected online (sources: Kiddley, Kid’s Craft Weekly, Family Fun and Ali Edwards). I repeated a lot of the activities from the list I came up with last year, but I’ve added a few more and removed some of the ones that just didn’t work for us. I don’t really schedule the activities in advance and I’ve put more than 24 activities on the list so I have the flexibility to choose things that fit with our schedule from day to day. I also anticipate adding fun ideas and events in as I hear about them. For example, last year a local organization trucked snow into a parking lot and I quickly added playing there as our activity on the day I heard about it.

We use this little advent house thingy that I got on sale at Target a few years ago for our advent calendar. Last year, I just wrote the activities on little pieces of paper but since we’re repeating so many this year, I decided to make something I could print out year after year! And while I was at it, I decided to make it cute. And since I did all that work anyway, I thought I’d share them with you so you can download them and print them out for your advent calendars if you like.

Page 1:

Download Advent Activities Page 1

Page 2:

Download Advent Activities Page 2

(These were made with the Echo Park Holly Jolly Christmas Elements #1 pack purchased from JessicaSprague.com)

Just print these out (they look great on photo paper) and then cut the squares apart with scissors or a paper cutter. Not every activity will appeal to every family, of course, so I’ve included five blank spaces on each sheet so you can write in your own activities. I’ll be using these for impromptu activities myself.

Is your family going to have an advent calendar this year? Are you planning anything fun?

I’m all riled up!

You see my friend Lisa, one of the founders of Help a Mother Out has been working hard to get the word out about The DIAPER Act. If you’ve been reading my blog for the last couple years, you may have read a post or two that I’ve written about Help a Mother Out (HAMO) whose mission is to provide diapers (disposable or cloth) to babies in need. This is an issue I feel strongly about and I’ve spent time fundraising for HAMO, hosting diaper drives, and contributing in other small ways to help with this cause.

The reason organizations like HAMO and local diaper banks around the country are necessary is that there currently are no safety net programs for families — WIC, food stamps, etc. — that cover diapers. The DIAPER Act would help to solve this problem by giving eligible child care centers the flexibility and choice to provide diapers (disposable or cloth) to their neediest clients. This Act asks for NO additional federal funding to accomplish this change. Sounds pretty good, right? I called my Congressman and Senators, put a badge on my blog (look over there in the far right hand column), signed the petition and went on my merry way.

Then, my friend Whitney sent me this link and my head almost exploded. It’s a transcript of Rush Limbaugh talking about The DIAPER Act on his radio program. He makes a lot of irrational, false and baseless statements in the piece, but the upshot is that he doesn’t think women should be working outside the home and that the purpose of public daycare is “so we can corrupt ‘em and pollute ‘em and propagandize ‘em, indoctrinate ‘em.” Cripes! I can’t just ignore this ridiculousness.

So here’s what I’m asking:

• Please take a few minutes to read a little bit about the DIAPER Act. (There are links to the actual wording of the legislation at the bottom of that page.)
• If you feel like The DIAPER Act is something you can get behind (Heh! See what I did there?) sign the petition encouraging Congress to support this bill.

And that’s it! That’s all I’m asking. Read a little, take a second to sign. If you want to do even more spread the word about the Diaper Act and consider making a donation to HAMO to help them with their important work.

Thanks!

A couple of weeks ago, the Halloween decorations started to come out in our neighborhood. This is our first Halloween in this house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect but it became apparent pretty quickly that the bar is pretty high — at least in the little cluster of houses we live in. At our old place, most people on our block put a pumpkin on their porches, but that was about it. Now we live among some decorators! They’re not converting their front yards to full-on haunted houses or anything too over-the-top but they are definitely having a little fun. Our neighbors to the left, have a carefully selected assortment of fall foliage, pumpkins and a decorative flag, while the neighbors to the right are super spooky with skeletons, gravestones and a giant spider climbing up the side of their house.

I decided we’d better step it up!

Lucky for me, Augie has started bringing Halloween art projects home from preschool: a ghost windsock, a giant pumpkin and a smaller, freaky pumpkin man.

Wyatt decided that Augie’s art wasn’t scary enough, so he made a series of signs and hung them up. One of my favorites was this sign alerting visitors to the lava pit and the ghosts and zombies with blasters that are lurking behind our front door.

I also love this “Aliens!” sign. How cool is that cow getting sucked up into the flying saucer.

My contribution was a selection of pumpkins for the steps. This has provided me with endless amusement because the boys have very specific opinions about how they should be arranged.

Augie prefers a symmetrical arrangement with all the big pumpkins on one side and the little pumpkins on the other.

On the other hand, Wyatt likes them to be evenly mixed with the big and little pumpkins zig-zagging back and forth.

Every day when the kids come home from school (at different times) they look at the pumpkins, throw up their hands in exasperation and undo what the other brother did when they weren’t looking. Wyatt is always baffled, putting his hands on his hips, shaking his head and asking “How did these get messed up? I just fixed them yesterday!” While Augie is enraged, “No! No! No! Big punkins on dis side!” I finally explained to each of them what’s going on and now they are having good fun with it, switching them back and forth when the other has his back turned.

How are you decorating for Halloween? Do you go spooky, Martha Stewart-y, or do you focus on kids art like we do?

Wyatt turned seven years old yesterday and we had a Star Wars birthday party for him on Saturday to celebrate. This was the first time he’s had a “friends” party at our house and it went really well. I think the kids (and I!) all had a really good time! Here are some of the details:

Invitations

I made the invitations myself and I was super happy with how they turned out. In fact, this might have been my favorite thing I made for the party. The Clone Trooper was from an official Clone Wars desktop wallpaper that I downloaded (unfortunately, I can’t find the original source, but I’m pretty sure it was from lucasarts.com). I cut him out, flipped him and resized him to fit the card. I used a free font called Star Jedi for the Star Wars-y looking headers.

I’d love to make this available as a download, but because I used a copyrighted character, I’m pretty sure it’s not legal to do so. From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s OK to do something like this for personal use, but not OK to distribute it.

Activities

I planned three main activities for the party. The first was a craft project where the boys assembled paper Star Wars characters. I printed and cut the figures out before the party to save time and then coached the boys through the process of folding and taping the figures. It was a little tricky for some of them but we managed to make it work. The figures we used can be found here:

• Yoda
• C3PO
• Boba Fett
• Storm Trooper
• Darth Vadar

The highlight of the party for the boys were these homemade light sabers. I saw a lot of suggestions online to use pool noodles but they are almost impossible to find in late September so I had to search out a substitute. I finally found the brilliant suggestion to use pipe insulation on the fowlerfam blog. I bought six 6-foot tubes at Home Depot for about a dollar a piece and cut them down to a manageable length. Then I decorated the ends with duct tape and colored electrical tape.

I had planned to bring these out in the last hour or so of the party but Wyatt announced that we had light sabers in the first five minutes so I handed them out right at the beginning. The boys loved them and immediately started wailing on each other. In fact, they were hitting each other so hard that I felt like I needed to double-check that the light sabers weren’t hurting the kids. They assured me that they didn’t hurt at all though so I let them carry on.

I had also planned to have the kids play a couple games of tag but they were having so much fun with the light sabers that I couldn’t tear them away. The first tag game I had planned was Star Wars Tag, a variation on TV tag where you can prevent the person who is It from tagging you by yelling out the name of a Star Wars character and touching the ground. The other game was Dark Side Tag. In this game, one person is selected to be Darth Vadar. When Darth tags someone, that person has to “join the Dark Side” by linking arms with the person who tagged him. As more people are tagged, the blob of kids who are It gets bigger and bigger. I thought they would be fun, but alas! — it wasn’t meant to be.

Cake

The idea for Wyatt’s light saber cake came from Make and Takes. I baked a batch of cupcakes, then frosted some with grey frosting and others with green frosting and arranged them in a line.

Wyatt wanted red velvet cupcakes, so I baked up a batch with Martha’s recipe. While I was putting them together, he asked if I could make them green instead, so I swapped in green food coloring for the red called for in the recipe.

They stayed really green even after baking, which looked pretty cool. The boys labeled them “Yoda cupcakes” and made a number of jokes about Yoda’s butt being an ingredient. Not to surprising coming from a group of 7 and 8 year olds.

We also served “Milenneum Falcon” pizzas (just regular pizzas with a silly name) and “Yoda Sodas”. The Yoda Sodas were lime sherbet and Sprite floats. The kids were doubtful at first but once they tasted them, they were won over.

My big takeaways from this party:

1. Star Wars parties are really easy to put together because there are so many fantastic ideas out there on the internet already. The hardest part is picking your favorites.
2. If you give 10 little boys foam light sabers they will whack each other with them for 2 hours straight and will only stop to eat if you make them.

How about you? Have your thrown a Star Wars party? What fun stuff did you do for it?

In the last fews months, our family has picked up two new hobbies: geocaching and letterboxing! Wyatt and I tried letterboxing once a few years ago and though we had fun we didn’t manage to make it a habit. I was determined to try it again this summer as part of our summer fun list. While I was getting my act together to go on a letterboxing excursion, some good friends of ours started geocaching and their enthusiasm inspired us to try that too. While these two activities are similar — hunting for boxes hidden around our community — there are a couple of small differences.

Geocaching

Geocaching seems to be the more common of the two hobbies. To get started, we joined an online geocaching community and Zach and I each bought geocaching apps for our phones. We were reluctant to pay for the apps at first because they were priced fairly high for phone apps, but when we realized that the cost for both of them was less than what we’d pay to take our whole family to the movies, we decided it was well worth the money. Fun, active, whole-family activity that we can do for years vs. one movie and junky food? Sold!

Geocaches range dramatically in size from micro-caches the size of a film canister, to huge caches that hold books and other large objects. Most of the ones we’ve found are about the size of a food storage container. To find a cache we log into the the geocaching website and look for caches in our neighborhood or an area we would like to explore. Or if we are already out and about, we look for something nearby using our phones. There are geocaches just about everywhere in the world and one thing we are really excited to try is looking for caches when we travel.

Usually the listing for the cache will get us pretty close to the cache site by specifying a park or an intersection or something along those lines. Once we arrive at the big landmark, we pull out our phones and start trying to pinpoint the location of the box using the GPS and compasses in the geocaching apps. So far I’m not particularly thrilled with the accuracy of the GPS on my phone. It will get me to the general vicinity of the cache but when we are within a few feet it goes all wonky and it’s pretty much useless. I’ve also had problems with the phone’s connectivity cutting out because of dense trees or bad signals. When that happens it’s almost impossible to find a cache without some pretty good clues. If we keep going with this I think we’re probably going to invest in a dedicated handheld GPS unit.

While you’re looking for the cache, you’re supposed to play it cool so that people who aren’t in on the secret don’t find the cache and remove it or damage it. I am really bad at this! I start off all sly, but after about five minutes of looking I get distracted and start shouting, “Did you find it? ANY LUCK?” to my companions. Even Wyatt and Augie are more subtle than I am!

When you find a cache, it has a log book for you to sign and it often has a few trinkets inside too. If you take something out of the cache it’s good form to put something in to replace it. This is probably the kids’ favorite part.

My favorite part is all of the cool places we visit when we’re geocaching. Since we’ve started we’ve found areas of our neighborhood we didn’t know about. For example there was a cache very close to this neat rope swing high up on a hill with amazing views of the San Francisco Bay and the hills of the east bay.

Letterboxing

Letterboxing is similar to geocaching in that you search for boxes, but the approach is pretty different. Again, you look up boxes to find on a website — the two main ones are atlasquest.com and letterboxing.org — but instead of using technology to find the boxes, you follow clues of the sort that you’d find on a treasure map or in an adventure comic. Stuff like: “Walk to the end of the fence and look in the hollow of the ivy covered tree.”

I like that adventuring quality, but the coolest thing about letterboxing is the rubber stamps! Each letterbox has its own stamp and each letterboxer or letterboxing team has a signature stamp as well. Once you find the box there is a little booklet inside along with the box’s stamp. You stamp the letterbox stamp in your notebook and write down any notes about your experience. Then you stamp your signature stamp in the booklet in the box. A lot of people use purchased rubber stamps, but a fun part of the hobby is that most of the stamps are hand-carved.

When my parents were visiting us this summer, my dad and I were talking about letterboxing and he has since taken it up with great enthusiasm.  A few weeks ago, he offered to carve a stamp for each member of our family since we hadn’t gotten around to making or purchasing stamps for ourselves. I was thrilled to take him up on the offer because as you can see by looking at our stamps (pictured above), my dad kicks butt at this sort of thing.  They are related to our trail names which are:

• Bentolonia (me) — the stamp is based on one of my all time favorite bento boxes
• Augie Bear (Augie) — our nickname for Augie
• MegaMegaCraft (Wyatt) — this is related to a game he likes to play called Minecraft
• Mr. Salad (Zach) — Zach really likes salad

I really like that my dad carved these for us, because we think of him every time we stamp them and it’s kind of like he’s right there letterboxing with us. As a crafty lady I feel a little bit dumb because I didn’t carve them myself, but I’m looking forward to carving some of my own when we get to the point where we start planting boxes.

Again, exploring cool spots is a big part of the fun. For example, we found this “fairy tunnel” (Wyatt’s description) while looking for a box. The branches across the path were low enough that Wyatt could jump up and swing on them. We’ve also been enjoying the boxes that some friends of ours have planted.

One downside of both letterboxing and geocaching is that we don’t always find what we’re looking for. We currently find about half of the boxes we set out to find. This is frustrating for all of us, but I do try to remind myself (and the kids) that most of the adventure is in the search.

What about you? Have you tried geocaching or letterboxing?

Our family loooves robots. My children ask for robot birthday parties and robot beds. One of Augie’s first words was “robot” (pronounced “rommer”, but close enough). We enjoy heading out to robot fights for a little family fun.

So despite the fact that I feel like this blog has been a little too heavy on reviews and giveaways lately, when I was presented with the opportunity to review a new Mechatar robot aimed at 6-12-year-olds, I couldn’t help but say, “Heck yeah! Bring it on!”

We received Wrexx, the red robot. He’s really cool looking with black and silver accents and wheel-like “legs”. Wyatt, my six-year-old, was able to figure out how to remove him from the box on his own, turn the robot on and play with it a little while I looked over the instructions. The robot moves by rolling it’s wheels and it works well on both linoleum and carpet which is awesome. What is not so awesome is that he only moves forward and turns in one direction. Without a reverse, it’s almost impossible to remotely free the robot when he bonks into a wall or a piece of furniture without physically lifting him up and turning him in another direction. Annoying.

The robot uses a loud, deep, semi-mechanical voice to give you instructions. He also let’s you know when he finds the remote which is nice because you aren’t left guessing about wether or not the two pieces are communicating with each other. It also lets you know when he’s lost the signal for the remote which happened frequently. We found that turning the remote off and on fixed the problem but it was annoying for me and frustrating for the kids. A few days into playing with it, I hit on the idea of changing out the batteries and that seems to have helped a lot.

One note about batteries: the remote takes 3 AAA’s and the robot itself takes 4 AAA’s, for a grand total of 7 batteries! Yow! When Wyatt accidentally left both on overnight, that completely drained them. We have switched almost entirely to rechargeable batteries in our house so it wasn’t too painful but finding seven rechargeables that weren’t being used was a challenge.

The cool feature of this robot is that there is a corresponding online game for kids to play. Connecting the robot to the computer to play the games was a little difficult. When we connected the Mechatar to the computer using the included USB cord for the first time, it didn’t automatically install the client software as it said it would. After searching the instruction manual and the web site, I still couldn’t figure out how to install the client. Finally in a fit of frustration, I jammed the USB cable as hard as I could into the toy and it sunk in another 1/4 inch. That did the trick! The computer recognized the Mechatar and I was prompted to install the client.

The game is really slick and it was definitely Wyatt’s favorite part of this toy. It involves “battle practice” which is less about fighting and more about strategy. The graphics show that robots fighting with each other, but the game is primarily about figuring out which weapon in your arsenal will beat the weapons of the robot you’re fighting. Players accumulate points for accomplishing tasks and then they can use those points to buy more weapons, upgrades for their robot, or missions that they can download and complete with their toy offline. You have to “buy” all the offline missions, which I didn’t particularly like. The toy comes with a code that gives you fifty points, but even with those freebies it took quite a while to accumulate enough points to buy an offline mission. As a parent, I think the cool thing about this toy is how it blends that online and toy components, so I don’t understand why they make it hard to do that part.

The toy is definitely the weakest part of this package which is unfortunate because it has the potential to be really cool. When I asked him about it, Wyatt told me he liked the game way more than the robot toy.  When I asked him if he would like the robot if it didn’t come with the game, he said “No. The remote control never lasts long enough. I can’t even get it across the whole living room!”

For $39.99 the robot/game deliver an OK value as long as you incorporate the online component, but I think it could be great if they fixed some of these problems.

The Giveaway!

Good news! In addition to sending me a robot to review, the folks at I Love Robots have offered one up for me to give away to a Wendolonia reader. If you have or know a child who would like a Mechatar as a holiday gift, enter to win it! Or, if you’d like to buy one now use the coupon code “MECHMOM” for a 10% discount at iloverobots.com (valid until 11/30/11).

To enter, visit http://www.Mechatars.com to see the full line up of interactive robots. You will need to click on “play now” button, and then the “register” button but you do not need to submit any information. Tell me which Mechatar you’d like to win in the comments below. We’ll select one commenter at random on Friday, September 30 to receive the prize.

I was selected to participate in this sponsored post series by Clever Girls Collective. I received a Mechatar robot to test and I was compensated for hosting this giveaway, but I am expressing my own honest opinion about this product!

Augie started preschool a few weeks ago and now it’s official: my littlest kid is now a big kid! He’s been going to day care a few days per week for a few years now, of course, so it’s not his first time out in the world without us, but this still feels like a really big step to me.  Because — hey now! — it’s SCHOOL!

We didn’t have to search for a preschool for Augie because we knew we wanted him to go to the same school Wyatt went to. While that was a big load off our minds, starting preschool was not without its stresses. For one thing, Augie needed to be toilet trained before he started so we had to kick that into gear over the summer even though I don’t think he was quite ready for it. We also were planning to transition him to more days per week. And finally, he really loved his day care and it wasn’t easy for him to say good-bye to the people there — especially because he didn’t fully understand why he wasn’t seeing his beloved teachers and friends any more.

Since he didn’t really understand what was coming, we prepared him as much as we possibly could for this new experience. Here are some of the things we did to get him ready for preschool:

• Start teaching your kids when they’re young. Augie (and Wyatt before him) entered preschool with a lot of skills already. Zach and I never implemented a formal teaching program, but we used every day activities as teaching opportunities — identifying colors, counting with them and reading to them every single day from the time they were babies. I also got ideas from books, websites, other parents and our children’s day care providers who have a million great ideas.
• Visit the school in advance. We visited Augie’s preschool many times before he started going on his own to ease him into his new environment. I know that this isn’t an option at every preschool, but it’s encouraged at our school and we took advantage of it. By the time I started leaving him for the full morning, he felt really comfortable with the teachers and he already had a few friends.
• Talk it up. When we weren’t visiting his preschool, everyone in the family was talking to Augie about how awesome preschool is. It helped a lot that Wyatt attended the same school and could tell Augie about his favorite toys and activities and what to expect on a day to day basis. Zach and I also knew the teachers well and could talk about how nice they are.
• Practice the skills he’ll need in advance. Preschool comes with new expectations and it helps to practice some of the new skills he’ll be expected to learn. For example, Augie’s day care provider used to open his lunch box and water bottle for him and give him a fork to use. But at preschool, he is expected to carry his own lunch bag to the table, open his bento box and start eating by himself, so we had a couple of practice sessions at home before he started school.  We also practiced a few other skills like getting his own jacket on and off, putting his backpack in his cubby and — of course — toilet training.

So far, Augie is doing really well at his new school. He’s made friends with lots of kids, he hasn’t cried once and — the best sign — he doesn’t ever want to leave when I come to pick him up.

I’m curious to know: What advice do you have for moms prepping for preschool? KinderCare will choose one lucky participant and make donation in their name to the Reach Out And Read chapter of their choice!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of KinderCare. The opinions and text are all mine. Official Contest Rules.