Any parent will tell you what a pain in the neck (and lower) it can be to read the same children’s books over and over and over again.
I fully recognize that kids learn through repetition, but after reading Goodnight Moon and Guess How Much I Love You and The Very Hungry Caterpillar eleventy million times, [...]

Despite the recent recall of one of their parts, I’m here to preach the “Gospel According To GeoTrax.”
GeoTrax, if you aren’t familiar, is possibly the BEST train set ever made in the history of the world. Okay, I may be exaggerating just a tad but it really is cool.
GeoTrax is manufactured by Mattel, and [...]

I didn’t let my daughter watch Disney Channel’s made for TV movie High School for a long, long time. The name made me think that it was more appropriate for older kids than my 7 year old, and I was concerned about influences of inappropriate behavior.
After a lot of lobbying by my daughter, I agreed [...]

Since our son was born just over 5 years ago we have visited JCPenney’s portrait studio almost yearly. It has served our needs well by providing nice portraits for a very reasonable price.
Now, when I make an appointment for something I understand “sh*t happens” and people don’t always run on time. I expect this at [...]

I had ordered a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from Amazon.com, but then decided I couldn’t possibly wait four days after release to read it, so I went out to my local Borders and grabbed a copy. I dug in right away, and then life interfered, and it took forever for me [...]

As promised last week in our review last week, Props and Pans is giving away a brand new copy of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: Friendship Edition on DVD.
What do you have to do to win? Just leave a comment telling us who you hope to win the DVD for — yourself, your [...]

Of all the character-driven shows and movies I’ve enjoyed (or in some cases endured) with my seven year old daughter over the years, my favorite has always been Winnie the Pooh. There’s just something about Pooh Bear and his friends that always makes me feel happy and if you pay attention, you might note that [...]

The folks at Wateroos recently sent me some samples of their products to review. When I first read their pitch, I didn’t even respond to the email because I thought “I have stainless steel sippy cups that I can fill with my own water. No chemicals. No waste. No problem.”
When they sent [...]

I’ve been previewing the upcoming series Word World and I must tell you that I’ve finally found a show on TV (well, soon to be on TV anyway) that I’d actually let my kids watch.
It’s an incredibly innovative addition to the preschoolers TV lineup that’s coming to PBS Kids in the fall of this year. [...]

My husband says that I’m “vocabularious” so I suppose it’s only natural I would gravitate towards SATees, which are these terribly clever shirts (and onesies) for babies and children with very sophisticated adjectives printed on them.
The idea is that you pick an adjective that describes YOUR child so of course, I had no choice but [...]

My kids typically have 2 or 3 pairs of shoes at any given time. Since they grow out of them so quickly, we don’t like to buy them more than that, even if they are inexpensive.
Typically we will take a trip to the Stride Rite outlet store a couple of times a year and just [...]

Saw a commercial for this new fruit-plus-vegetable juice and figured it might be a good buy for our vegetable-hating son. But would he drink it? Am I the lamest mother ever for trying to sneak in grape-flavored carrots?
Who cares!? He liked it!
We tried the grape flavor. Tasted just like strong purple grape juice to me, [...]

A few weeks ago we purchased a Spiderman 3 Web Slinger Water Slide for our son at Meijer. We were out of town at the time and do not have that store anywhere close to us, making a regrettable purchase also not returnable.
We had issues with this product from Toy Quest from the beginning. After [...]

The Good Night Our World series of board books is a great idea in principle: a series of books that introduces little people to various places in our world.
Each book proceeds from “Good Morning” to “Good Night” and visits the city or place the book is about through all four seasons. There are more than [...]

One of the things I struggle with fairly regularly is finding my 7 year old daughter clothes that don’t make her look like a “prostitot.” While there are an abundance of low-slung pants and crop tops with spaghetti straps to get my jaw outta whack, nothing gets me grinding my teeth faster than the bathing [...]