867-5309

I’m so excited about this review! Mainly because of the tim­ing… Last Novem­ber, EZ Sox asked if I would like to review their prod­uct. I checked them out and quickly said, “Yes!” because I had ulte­rior motives in mind.

Unfor­tu­nately the death of my Grand­mother and other ail­ments has made it impos­si­ble for me to post about this give­away until now. Frus­trat­ing, but I’m glad it worked out that way, because they have grown their prod­ucts and that’s exactly what my only wish was when I orig­i­nally checked out the socks.

They sent me the cutest pair of frog socks. The Kid’s Socks are for ages 2–5 and since my kids are older than that I asked my neigh­bor if she would try them out on her 2 year old son and 5 year old lit­tle girl that has Down Syn­drome. Love her! She doesn’t really have prob­lems with nor­mal socks other than she has to really con­cen­trate to get that open­ing wide enough. To Lil’ Miss. M, she thought it was great fun pulling those EZ Sox on and off. Her mother, who is a occu­pa­tional ther­a­pist said the idea behind them was great! She actu­ally makes loops for pants for her older patients who have prob­lem get­ting dressed. She said they would be great in the rehab world — both for geri­atrics and pediatrics.

And guess what??

They have older kid’s socks now with just reg­u­lar col­ors and this Spring, they’re com­ing out with Adult socks! I’m so excited that EZ Sox sees the need that their prod­uct can fill.

EXTRA COOL FACTOR: They have have a Valentine’s Day Spe­cial going on. Every sock is 40% off! You only have until mid­night, the 14th then the spe­cial is gone.

WAIT…BEFORE YOU HEAD OVER THERE!

Remem­ber, this is a giveaway!

To enter the draw­ing to win 1 pair of kid’s EZ Sox:

• Go over to the EZ Sox site and find your favorite sock, come back over and tell me which want you want.

Extra entries (1 entry for each extra effort):

• Tweet about the giveaway
• Friend EZ Sox on Facebook
• Fol­low EZ Sox on Twitter

This give­away is now closed.

(Dis­clo­sure: I received 1 pair of free socks to review.)

I’ve been home­school­ing Old­man for over a month and I’m still alive! Or rather HE’S STILL ALIVE!!!

It’s actu­ally been quite an adven­ture. The only thing I have tried to enforce is that learn­ing can be fun. I am no way an expert but I’ve researched this and have won­der­ful friends who have done this longer than me and are great sound­ing boards.

My son is 11 years old and his world revolves around Star Wars. He knows the name of every weird alien on every show they’ve had. It’s very weird, but I knew that inte­grat­ing Star Wars into our home­school­ing was going to be a win.

1. Name of School: For Old­man, he needs it struc­tured enough to have a “tan­gi­ble” school — ver­bally and phys­i­cally. To keep the fun in all of this we brain­stormed and came up with Yoda Acad­emy. It’s way more fun learn­ing to be a Jedi vs just a nor­mal 5th grader.

2. Tests: The idea of a test is scary for Oldman…and if it’s timed? Don’t even go there! How­ever, by sim­ply chang­ing the name to ‘Tri­als’ every­thing changed. He actu­ally gets excited about tri­als so he can move closer to being a Padawan.

3. Dis­ci­pline: Just like in par­ent­ing, this needs to be fine-tuned for each kid. For Old­man, we go through a demerit sys­tem. But of course demer­its are so anti-Star Wars, so our demer­its are called Jabba Nuggets. If Old­man gets 3 Jabba Nuggets in a day, he has to write a 1 page essay on any­thing I ask of him. This is cruel and unusual pun­ish­ment for Old­man since writ­ing is so dif­fi­cult for him. But telling him “Old­man, I asked you to stop play­ing with the dog and get that les­son fin­ished up. That’s 1 Jabba Nugget.” he gets the idea, and I get back a smile vs. a whine. SCORE!

This works for us. I know that some peo­ple feel like this  shouldn’t be an option for a home­schooler, but he’s learn­ing, he loves it, and his stress level has gone from 100+ down to 5.

That’s the way learn­ing should be.

Image via Wikipedia

For the past few days I’ve been sur­rounded by snow and ice…like the rest of the US. It’s actu­ally incred­i­bly beau­ti­ful. It encom­passes seren­ity and awe.

Sit­ting on my over­stuffed leather couch
in front of our humon­gous pic­ture win­dow,
sip­ping on home­made chai
my hus­band beside me, rub­bing my feet
How cute is per­fectly groomed Shi-tzu sleep­ing next to me?
The fire­place crack­ling across the room
Hmmmm…
Why am I get­ting cold?
Why is per­fectly groomed GiGi kick­ing me?
MOM!!!!!
Real­ity.…
The space heater in the office is lame
The speed boat sound from the video game is loud
The whim­per from my sick son breaks my heart
The dog fart­ing and whim­per­ing in her sleep is funny
My stuff green pep­per din­ner bombed
This…this is all mine
I won’t trade it for the best chai in the world.

You know I love me some Gussy! Even though she’s WAY too cool for me now…never mind all that nonsense…to me she’s still that stinkin’ cute roomie from Min­nesota; who has a thing for ruf­fles, per­fect eye­lashes (I stab you!) and knows how to strut some seri­ous butt-sass. (It’s not nearly as weird as that sounds…promise.)

Where was I?

This past sum­mer I called Gus up and chat­ted with her about how ugly my iPad cover was. The only cov­ers I could find were bor­ing ones or some­thing that looked like a botched up quilt…scary!  Mag­gie worked her magic and came up with a beau­ti­ful cover for my iToy:

I love it.

Don’t you??

Makes me for­get about the 50 feet of snow outside.

What’s that? You only have a Kin­dle or Nook? HELLO!…it fits! *seri­ous eyes*

Wanna drool? Check out her cov­ers.

Feel­ing light-headed?

THAT’S ‘CAUSE YOU’RE STILL HERE!! SHOO!

{Love, love Mush, Mush}

I want to end this series with some final thoughts that I think you can take away and not only use in your vir­tual life, but your phys­i­cal one as well.

*Thanks for let­ting me share with you in this series…it was a blast!!*

I’m at Bliss­dom and had a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity to hear Brene Brown who was an incred­i­bly inspir­ing per­son as well as funny as all get out! With a room full of mom’s who do it all, she was not only able to relate, but did a fab­u­lous job of bring­ing us to our core.

Bottom-line: you can not be suc­cess­ful online with­out being fully vul­ner­a­ble. Peo­ple are going to be trolls…they are going to step on your toes…you are going to want to pull away.

Brene did her PhD paper on shame. What she learned through that was that peo­ple who refused to be vul­ner­a­ble couldn’t truly grasp: love, joy, peace, etc… I loved how this tied into what I’ve been talk­ing about all month.

It’s not easy…it’s not fun some­days, but in the end YOU are the one that wins. YOU are the one that is free.