We got this new campaign from BzzAgent in the mail today. Lucas was SO excited when we opened the box and saw that they had fun character tops for the fruit drinks. Our package came with Thomas, Scooby, and Snow White, but I see on their website there are a TON of characters and are all the really super popular ones. AND they had Hello Kitty, so yeah, I’m totally going to be getting these drinks for me, too. Since there are so many tops, there is a fun collectors aspect to it, too.
The ones we got to try were apple juice and fruit medley. Apple juice is apple juice, but the fruit medley is soo yum! And these are really healthy drinks, too, so I don’t feel at all guilty giving them to them. They come in 4, 6, and 8 oz bottles so you can match the amount your kids typically drink (although in Lucas’s case I would need them to come in gallon size).
You don’t have to buy the character top every time; they’re reusable. You pick out a character top single serve, and then buy refill 6 packs of the juices for the same price and capri suns, etc (but healthier than capri sun).
I used to get the mini apple juice bottles to carry around in the diaper bag, but I’m definitely switching to these!
My latest freebie from BzzAgent, the Fiber one meal bars. I received two boxes: chocolate peanut butter and strawberry greek yogurt. Surprisingly, I liked the strawberry ones best even though I don’t like greek yogurt. These are hearty granola bars and come in at 190 calories which make them a decently filling snack (although I wouldn’t eat them on their own for an actual meal like the title suggests).
I packed mine in my backpack for Disney World and loved having them along to keep me going with all the park walking. I’d give these 4/5 stars for having a good taste, a good size, and healthier than a lot of snack alternatives.
When we were little and Stephanie and I played pretend, I always made her pretend to be a character/part that she didn’t want to be, but I made her anyhow because I was older.
Today, Lucas was forcing Arianna to pretend she was going to school. He was making her put on a backpack and say bye and go to school. Then he made her lie down and take a nap at school. She was really annoyed and wouldn’t cooperate, and he was yelling at her the whole time. “Baby, put your backpack on. Come on baby, you’re going to school.” Then he whapped her with the backpack when she wouldn’t put it on.
Reminded me of when we were kids and played school and I’d be the teacher and she’d be the student. I’d give her assignments… and actually expected her to do them.
Lucas made her take a nap” at school”. She is tucked in (the Target bag is her pretend blanket) with her duckie and the lion is tucked in as well.
I just started watching Young Adult. And chickie (rocking a Hello kitty pj set that she probably got at Target because i think I might have the same ones) is going on a road trip listening to a TAPE over and over again the same song…how does she not have a CD player in her ridiculous little micro Italian car. Wow, this movie is so boring. Ok i had to quit it. –12/31/13
So i spent most of christmas break being sick. First i had the flu, because despite two attempts to get the flu shot, I never actually got one. I was briefly well just in time for my Christmas party and family Xmas Eve dinner. Then christmas day on i was sick with ear and sinus infections. So aside from two doctor visits, i havent been out of the house for a week. I starting to get stir crazy..ive got the motivation and desire to do stuff but not the energy.
Do people really leave their keys in their cars in the visor? People are always stealing cars in movies by using the keys in the visor. Who does that?
My bromfed cough medicine tastes like a cupcake…with a dreadful aftertaste.
–1/4/ 14
“I want to be a meteorologist when I grow up so I can predict the weather.”
This is what Lucas told me last night, so even though I had given up trying to do the at-home preschool activities, I (stupidly…I really don’t have the patience for this stuff) spent the day digging up weather activities for us to do today to learn about the weather. I found some great stuff online (after several hours of pouring over online sites while Lucas asked over and over if I was ready).
Today we kicked off the unit by having him tell me what he already knew about weather (this isn’t the first time we’ve discussed it).
It’s sunny because the sun is bright.
It’s not sunny when it’s [the clouds] blocking the sun from being bright, bright, bright. A cloud is made of rain.
The leaves go swoosh when it’s really windy.
A meteorologist predicts the weather.
Then I asked what he wanted to learn about the weather and he said “I wish I knew about tornadoes. I wish I knew how to tell a tornado was coming so I could tell everyone to be safe.”
We watched a meteorologist report online, read Eric Carle’s Little Cloud book, observed and recorded today’s weather, and started learning a little about clouds.
I’ve been doing the surveys and product testing for two months now. I like the product testing better than the surveys.
Product testing is my favorite. I get missions through Smiley360 and BzzAgent, plus some products through the online surveys. Smiley and Bzz give me the product and I then have different venues to tell people about the product I got. The ones that come through surveys just ask me to take another survey after I’ve used the product. There’s something exciting about getting chosen for a new product campaign even when they are boring things like Mucinex and ass wipes.
Products I’ve received so far:
a super awesome contour foam pillow from sleep number that I am totally loving and is way better than the $20 Target version I had before
a sleep number travel pillow to be used as a toddler pillow
Children’s Mucinex, which we are now on our third bottle of with as sick as they get all the time
Cottonelle flushable wipes (or as I call them, ass wipes) which are actually kinda nice and are totally flushable
Huggies diapers, something we actually would have had to spend money on otherwise
access to watch the Starz Black Sails new pirate show that comes on in January since Starz is a premium channel we don’t already get
The products I do have to bug people about since I’m supposed to post on Facebook, Twitter, and discuss with ten people for each thing. Steph found this clip and it is totally me…unsubtley working product placement into conversations to meet my quotas.
I’m doing several things that are money earners:
– Opinion Outpost gives money for surveys. It takes a lot of survey taking to get a good payout, but it’s not like I’m doing anything else important sitting at my computer all day. They are good at matching surveys to find one relevant to you. This morning Lucas and I took one where he looked at toy ads and then pretended he was shopping for toys for his birthday and picked out which toys he wanted. I got paid $3.50 to sit with Lucas and pick out toys. They also sometimes send me products to try out.
– Tapbooty is the ipad/iphone program that I learned about through Smiley360. I download apps through it and get paid about .10 per app I download. Doesn’t sound like much, but really, how hard is it to tap a button to add an app to your ipad? I do this while I watch tv.
– Pinecone shows me ads for a product and then asks me what I like about the product and the ad for it. These don’t take long to do and I get $3/survey. It implies that they might send me the product as well to try out, but I haven’t received any products from them yet.
A few other sites I have done sorta are iPoll, Crowdology, Tellwut, MyPoints, and RewardTV. These don’t seem to payout very fast so I kinda lost interest in those.
– Secret Shopping I’ve done a few times now where I shop at a store with a list of criteria to look for and then write up a report. I’ve learned that if I am choosey with the stores this is an easy way to make money since they pay $10-15/store and only takes about an hour to complete.
Overall in the past two months doing the above activities I have earned about $101.90. So $50/month isn’t much money, and all this stuff does take a good amount of time compared to say having a part time job where I could make like $7/hour, but it is considerably less effort since it is mostly just doing stuff on the computer while I’m chatting online anyway or watching tv whenever I want, on my own time.
Why do I do this to myself? All I had to do was make a dessert. Steph and I both came to the conclusion that rice krispie treats were the best idea for a preschool party. But i couldnt just leave it at that. Nooo. I had to make cute little turkeys. I found this from Rice Krispies’s Pinterest
Mine ended up looking more like this.
Jenn and I worked on them, and i found it to be a pretty frustrating experience. I was supposed to make 60, but gave up after 20 and just made regular ones for the rest.
Mattress shopping is complicated. I purchased my first (and current) mattress about six years ago by walking into a furniture store, lying on a few, and buying the cushy, plush one I liked. Since then, that cushy pillow top that I thought was so great has formed dips where we lay and a hump in the middle. Where initially you could go bowling on one side of the bed and not notice it on the other, we now feel every little move the other person makes. But since it is a pillow top, it can’t be flipped or re-squished or any simply fix.
Today I had the pleasure of trying out the Sleep Number store at Town Center Mall. It is nothing like what I thought. I’ve heard the advertising for it for decades, been passed that store in the mall a hundred times, but I had some (unfounded) preconceived notion that the sleep number thing was a gimmick that would cost a ton extra. I was astounded by what they offer there.
I met with Marci, who has been with the company for 16 years, and definitely knew what she was doing. First she had me lie on a bed that sensed my body pressure. A thermal image on the ceiling showed me how the mattress formed around my body. She then adjusted the numbers and I could both feel the mattress become softer and see as the pressure of my body against the bed evened out. You set the bed to your comfort level with a bedside remote control. You can adjust the number at any time (I wish I’d had this when I was pregnant and my body had changed so much).
Sleep Number has 9 different beds — both memory foam and pillow top types. And the pillow tops? The top layer is replaceable so you aren’t stuck lying in a gutter in your own bed.
Please click the image to earn me points for this review!
Please click the above image to earn me points for this review.
And it’s not just about the mattress. They have amazing pillows! Marci told me 20% of the comfort is from your pillow. And for them, pillows aren’t just firm versus fluffy. Currently, I have a $20 memory foam pillow from Target…and it makes me sweat! When I first got it this summer I would literally soak my pillow even though I wasn’t overly hot in general. Well, Sleep Number has foam pillows with a gel liner that is supposed to eliminate this problem! Or how about an air pillow? Turn the nozzle one way and you can squish air out to make the pillow thinner. Let it go, and it reinflates itself for a fuller depth. They even had a two-sided pillow — two types of pillows in one depending on which way you flip it. Not to mention the six or so various shaped pillows for different uses (such as maternity pillows or prop-up for reading pillows). And if STILL none of these work for you? You can create your own pillow! Sleep Number also sells all the liners, protectors, and even sheets.
One other product I tried out at the store was the DualTemp layer. This mattress cover heats or cools each side of the bed so that both you and your partner can sleep at just the right temperature. I like to sleep snuggled under blankets because I get cold easily; my husband sleeps with the blanket half off of him. With the DualTemp layer, we both can adjust the temperature of our side of the bed with a remote. This is just a top layer, not part of the mattress, so this could go on any bed, not just a Sleep Number mattress.
As I listened in awe of all the amazing products Marci was showing me, I was mentally imagining the ridiculous price tag this kind of stuff would come with. I mean that is how it works; better stuff costs more. Awesome, cool stuff like this? Gonna be a fortune. Steeling myself for the inevitable sticker shock, Marci handed me the pricing chart. And sticker shock it was. Because these mattresses didn’t cost much more than what I paid for the one I have now. Plus they offer six months lay away, so if there is a Christmas or some other sale on the one you want, you can get it on lay away to lock in that sale price. Plus they offer a 30 day lowest price. And financing.
It seems to me that with the way you can adjust the firmness, replace a pillowtop, etc, that this is a mattress that sets you for life. Or at least longer than six years. When we are ready to make our next mattress purchase, I am 100% coming back here to Sleep Number to get it. And I’m kicking myself for not having checked it out before. (But I was young and stupid; now I’m a little teensy bit older and much, much wiser).
So the next time you are at the mall, go by the Sleep Number store – even if it is just to check it out. Marci was wonderful and there was 0 pressure to buy. They don’t need it — their products are that good.
*I am not employed by Sleep Number and am not being paid for this review. I did get a free toddler pillow for my little girl while we were visiting the store and Smiley360 might send me a free pillow. But nothing was contingent on a good review. It is 100% my opinion based on my visit to the store.
As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I was giving it a go on some product testing sites.
Previously, I have tried some survey sites, but they just annoyed me. I had signed up for an account at testspin.com a long time ago (on my junk email account of course) and messed with it the day I signed up, but it was a pain to use so I never went back to it. I didn’t like that one because it matched you with all kinds of survey sites and trials, but it just linked you their sites, so I was having to answer basic survey questions over and over to see if I qualified for each thing. This is different than the Smiley360 and others Lauren had me sign up that bothers to remember your basic info — such as age — instead of making you tell a/s/l every survey!
Since then I have signed up for House Party, Smiley360 and BzzAgent. The thing about all three of these sites is they want you to do stuff online (message on FB, twitter, etc) to show how much you want to join a “campaign” (product test). “We reward our most active and influential BzzAgents with access to even more campaigns.” So you spend all this time reading about the campaign and trying to talk about it in all these online venues, just to not get selected. On BzzAgent I can see some of the campaigns going on, but I can’t apply to join – just be selected by them. So there is this awesome music player one going on that I can’t say to them “hey that would be PERFECT for my household.” On Smiley360 the only thing I’ve been offered is cold medicine (which okay we are a prime target study for that considering we are sick at least every-other week).
There are still 4 more websites that Lauren posted about for me to try.
I really hope my experience with these sites improves, or I’m going to lose interest in this whole product testing thing pretty quickly. (Altho Lauren said it took her a month to be selected for anything and it’s only been a week…I just don’t have any patience).
I Just Joined Smiley360. And a couple of other sites. The idea is they send you a product (for free!) to try out. Then you use social media and word of mouth the tell people what you think of the product. You don’t have to hype it up if you didn’t like it; it is an honest review of the product. And you don’t have to pay for anything. You just get points for your reviews and get free stuff! Normally I would blow these sites off as basically pointless spam waste of time, but Lauren started them recently and has received a coffee maker and some kind of robot toy that connects to the tv. Cool stuff! I hope I get selected for something soon! I’ll use my blog to review stuff I receive. If you are interested in joining, let me know and I’ll send you a referral invite. There is a button in the right sidebar linking to the website for more info.
ally-cat 