by Lori Cunningham

You might recall a couple of months ago I told you about MomSelect.com, a website that brings together moms and manufacturers to stimulate mom’s conversations based on products they like.  Recently, MomSelect.com offered an opportunity to try out a new inexpensive toy for kids called  Marble Racers.  I knew right away, anything that lights up would bring lots of excitement in my household.  So I signed up to review the Marble Racers.   The very next day I was alerted that I was chosen to participate in the program.  Interestingly enough, within an hour of being notified, I had a package  at my door!  Boy, was that quick!  Apparently, the manufacturer of Marble Racers is only 20 minutes away from my house.  Cool.  I hid away the box until Friday of that week  for our family fun night.  MomSelect.com sent me six cars to try out.

 ”Craft Project”

On family fun night, I unveiled the cars to my kids.  Their eyes widened as I hit the car with my hand and they lit up.  My daughter was particularly  thrilled as she saw that you can put the stickers on the car to decorate them yourself – a craft project!  She also noticed that at least two of the designs were meant for girls.  My son was excited because one car could be decorated as a police car, one as a fireman car, and one with cool flames down the side.

We went to work right away on peeling off the decals and applying them to the cars.  To my surprise, my four year old son was able to put on most of the stickers on his cars himself.  It took us about 5 minutes per car to put the stickers on.  My kids were very intent on creating their car and didn’t even “test driving” the car until they were done decaling (rather than detailing) all their cars.

Off to the Races!

Now with the cars completed, it was time for the races!  We have a long hallway which we used to set up the cars.  We turned off the lights and sailed the cars down the hallway.  Due to the weight of the marble, the cars flew down the hallway.  The cars light up when they crash into things, or when my kids hit the cars first before sending them down the long corridor.

We had one kid at each end of the hallway so we could race them back and forth.  Then we tried racing the cars back in forth with one of the kids in the middle, trying to grab our cars.  We all had a good time.  One car would be fun, two cars more fun, but six cars was just crazy!  We always had plenty of cars to roll back and forth and we had names for each one.

Where to Buy

Marble Racers can be purchased online here  for $7.99 each.  Or better yet, if you live in California, Arizona, or Nevada, you can pick them up at a nearby CVS Pharmacy for $4.99 or $29.94 for all 6 cars.  For a limited time, the company that makes Marble Racers, Skullduggery (a kids educational toy maker), if offering a Buy One Get One Free special on all six models of Marble Racers when you guy them at CVS in California, Arizona, or Nevada.  To take advantage of this special offer:

Mail or email a copy of your CVS receipt with your Light Up Marble Racer purchase to the following address:

Skullduggery
5433 E La Palma Ave
Anaheim, CA 92807
skorders@skullduggery.com

Include the following information:  

• Your name and address (No PO Boxes).
• The name of the Light Up Marble Racer you would like sent to you for free (Fire, Police, Confetti, Cat’s Eye, Volcano or Cyclone).

Please note that this offer expires May 21, 2010. Sales slips must have a date of May 21, 2010 or earlier. This offer is limited to CVS purchases in ARIZONA, CALIFORNIA & NEVADA only.  Offer limited to the first 1000 entries.

A Mom’s Perspective

I have to admit, these are fun racer cars that can go pretty fast and relatively straight.  My daughter loved being able to create her own as a “craft” and my son loves smashing them against walls to light them up.  For my daughter, her cars are a”work of art.”  For my son, they are a demolition derby delight.  For me, they are a fun activity to do with the kids.  They are small and portable and fun to use.  They are sure to catch everyone’s attention if you give some as a part of a birthday present to your child’s friend.  I’d also recommend taking advantage of the Buy One Get One free offer now.

Well, gotta go, my Confetti Marble Racers is ready to try to win another race down the hallway strip!

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Are you shopping at the grocery store with a basketful of groceries, only to realize you are supposed to pick up your child from school across town in 5 minutes?  Have you found yourself watching your child’s school play wondering where your husband is and if he remembered it was tonight?  Do you find yourself nagging  reminding your children a lot about different things such as chores, remembering to call you when they get home or to a friend’s house, or remembering to go to dance practice right after school? 

If you said yes to any of these questions – or could think of other scenarios like it, you will be interested in a new website called CasaBlast.com.  CasaBlast.com just launched and they are hoping to help you and your family to “stay organized and in touch virtually…..anywhere.”  They do this through the use of a personalized CasaBlast phone number, your computer, and your family’s cell phones.  When you go to CasaBlast.com you can sign up for a free account and add everyone in your family who has a cellphone into your family profile. 

Features

Now you are ready to begin communicating more easily with your cellphone toting family.  Here are some of the features of CasaBlast.com:

Family Blast

Once you have your family members and their cellphones assigned, you can begin “blasting” everyone at once with important messages.  Let everyone know you’re running late and want them to start making dinner.  (hey, I can dream, right?)  Let the family know that you’re having a special guest come for dinner and you need them to be on their best behavior.  Alert them that you are tied up and won’t be able to pick the kids up until 20 minutes later.  Lost at an amusement park?  Blast everyone to find out their whereabouts.  The list goes on and on.  I found that as soon as I sent out the blast, my two cellphones immediately received the message – so it works fast.

Calendar

Everyone can add their personal calendar events so you can keep track of important dates and meetings.  You can set reminders to send alerts to everyone to remind them of the event automatically.  Phew, do you see how you can dramatically cut down on your nagging time?    You are not able to upload your calendar, however, you if you use Outlook or a similar program, you can “invite” your CasaBlast.com account by sending your calendar event invite to invite@casablast.com.  I tried this and the event was added very quickly and visible on our calendar at CasaBlast.com.   Unfortunately, it does not automatically text everyone in the family that the event has been added — so they can add it to their personal calendars.  Hopefully this will be an option in a future upgrade of CasaBlast.com.  You can, however, edit the event in your CasaBlast.com calendar to set a reminder to go out via a blast to family members.

Group Blast

I really like this feature too.  You can upload your contacts if they are in Google or Plaxo.  If not, you can manually add in your contacts (though I don’t like manual labor!) and then create groups so you can send a blast message out to various groups.  For example, I created a Group for a group of our friends that we all like to get together every so often.  Luckily, they all like texting.  So now I can blast a message to them all at once about the next gathering we have at our house.  Nice.  Casablast also does a nice job of tracking all outgoing and incoming messages that come in so you can keep track of them.

To Do Lists

You can keep lists within your profile at CasaBlast.com.  These lists can be used for your personal use or you can create a list to send out to your husband or child.   After creating a new Task List (on the left) and entering in my list items (on the right), you have the option of sending the list to one family member or all family members.  Send your child a To Do list so s/he always has it right at hand. 

Grocery List

OK, I like the Grocery List better than the To Do Lists.  When I sent a list of 12 things to my cell to buy at the grocery, it arrived on my cell nicely formatted with each item listed separately in a vertical list.  Nice and easy to follow.  I had the option of sending the list to one family member or all family members.  I like this feature but the downfall is that you need  be near your computer and have your CasaBlast account running to enter your grocery list.  Sometimes the old fashioned written list works better.  However, if you need to send a list to your husband, this would work out well.

Voicemail

Once you sign up you will receive a free CasaBlast phone number.  This number is used to give you the ability to send text messages out to everyone all at once.  A family member then has the choice to text back everyone or leave a voice-mail by calling the CasaBlast number.  The voice-mail will be sent to your CasaBlast.com account and you will be notified by e-mail or text that a voice-mail is waiting to be heard.  This options works well for children – who may not have texting on their phone.

A Mom’s Perspective

All in all, I love the idea of being able to blast everyone at once with reminders or important news.  If you have a family of teenagers, this will come in handy as they tend to view text messages as soon as they come in.  Finally, you’ve got their attention! 

The calendaring feature would be powerful once they progress further on the ability for everyone to have the option to upload their calendars to CasaBlast.  However, to import your calendars and keep them sync’d up would be a challenge. 

If you have a soccer team you coach, the PTA Leadership you need to stay in contact with, a girl scout troop where you need to be in constant contact with your girls’ parents, then CasaBlast would be extremely helpful for communicating out and managing incoming text messages.

To be totally effective, you need to ensure you can easily sign-in and use your CasaBlast.com account.  Commitment to making it one of your main communication systems will allow you to reap the benefits.  I believe the beefed up calendaring section with syncing would be the crux that would make this tool indispensable in your life. 

Unfortunately, if you have young kids, without cell phones, CasaBlast.com won’t help you communicate with them.  However, I’ve been told that adding your kid’s nanny or grandparent to the family blast is a great way to keep them in communication on family events.

For those of you with an iPhone or BlackBerry, I asked CasaBlast.com if they will be coming out with a program button for your phones.  The answer is yes!  I believe this will make it easier for you to update your account and send out text messages in the future.

Go to CasaBlast.com and sign-up for your free account now and tell me what you think.  There are a lot of innovative ideas you can come up with in using CasaBlast.com.  But wait!  Here’s more good news – CasaBlast.com will donate $10,000 to help Haiti if they can obtain 10,000 subscribers by March 31st.  So go check it out and support a good cause at the same time.

The concept is great and the price is right!  CasaBlast.com is offering their service for free for the first 10,000 families who join.  Go have a blast with it! 

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I found this great site called MomSelect, that is designed to be a liaison between companies and moms/mom bloggers.  Marketers have realized that if a mom loves their product, they are most likely to share their experiences about the product with other moms.  MomSelect.com provides moms an opportunity to try product samples, take surveys, put on in-home parties, and participate in school and teacher programs.  For mom bloggers, they provide local mom blogger events, opportunities to participate in online media campaigns and other programs. 

Recently I received an e-mail from MomSelect about Hallmark’s re-introduction of Rainbow Brite.  Do you remember Rainbow Brite from the 80′s?  She was a cute little blond girl with rainbow colors all over her clothes.  I signed up to receive the Rainbow Brite Adventure Pack CD right away thinking it would be a great chance to catch up with Rainbow while at the same  time introducing this sweet little character to my six-year old daughter.

When the Rainbow Brite CD arrived, I found Rainbow’s older sister.  Hmmm, wait, no, it was Rainbow Brite herself.  She has grown up on me.  She is no longer the sweet little chubby girl she once was.  She is now a beautiful slender girl, probably in her early teens.  She has a lot more myticness (is that a word?) around her too.  Rainbow Brite and her friends are all beautiful with full wavy hair, make-up, and coordinated outfits, sprites (type of little animal), and ponies.  Although the characters are very cute, I can’t help but wonder about the higher standards of beauty our little girls look up to now in their dolls, cartoons, and TV shows compared to our childhood.  Cartoons and dolls are more sophisticated.  It used to be just Barbie that held our girls to high beauty standards, now it’s becoming nearly every cartoon character/young celebrity they watch.

Nonetheless, I digress.  The Rainbow Brite Adventure Pack CD included Rainbow Brite’s theme song, and a short video explaining what’s happened to Rainbow Brite all these years (she went back to Earth and became a normal girl and her memory of her galactic past had been erased).  The CD also had games, pictures to print and color, puzzles to solve, etc.  Pretty much all of the activities are available at RainbowBrite.com. 

OK, despite what I felt about how Rainbow Brite has grown up, the real test came to when my 6 year old daughter got to meet her.  And what do you think one of my daughter’s first comments was?  “She’s pretty.”  Great, just what I wanted to hear.  Nonetheless, my daughter had a lot of fun playing the games, playing the theme song, and learning about Rainbow and her friends. 

I did some searching on Google to see what other moms think about the new Rainbow Brite.  As you can imagine, there is a lot of controversy.  

A Mom’s Perspective

Many times companies bring back toys from mom’s childhoods to help them reminisce about their favorite toys and all the fond memories.  Of course, their goal is to entice moms to want the same experience for their own children.  Obviously, times have changed from generation to generation, so companies want to make changes characters that appeal to both.

Fortunately, Rainbow Brite continues to emphasize friendship, helping others, brightening another’s day, etc.  Nonetheless, judging from mom’s reactions, perhaps Hallmark went to far in modernizing sweet little Rainbow Brite.  Their desired effect of moms buying Rainbow Brite dolls for their little girls is likely to be reduced.

Interested in reading more about what others think of the new Rainbow Brite?  Join the Rainbow Brite FaceBook Fan site .  Need more updates throughout the day, join become friends with Rainbow Brite on Twitter.  Rainbow Brite is very social these days on the Internet with numerous fan clubs, YouTube videos, and discussions about the old and new Rainbow Brite.  Even though she’s been off the scene for 25 years, her fans have never stopped talking about her.

Write a comment to tell us about your memories of Rainbow Brite or your thoughts of the new Rainbow Brite.

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by Lori Cunningham

For those of you new to The WellConnectedMom.com, WELCOME!  And a woot out to my friends from TwitterMoms! 

TwitterMoms.com has chosen The WellConnectedMom.com as the Blog of the Week!

Blog of the Week
Check out wellconnectedmom.com, a blog that helps make technology simpler for moms and points out products and product features that help make a mom’s communication and household more effective. Lori Cunningham, mom of two, writes about different ways to make technology work for you without spending hours researching and learning how to do it on your own. Connect with Lori on TwitterMoms and on Twitter @wellconnectdmom

Already I have been receiving Twitter requests and new Facebook friends as a result – thank you everyone – I have been enjoying checking out your blogs too!

Feel free to leave comments about technology or gadgets you’re interested in and we’ll research them for you.  Or perhaps you have a nagging issue - we might know of a gadget out there to make things easier for you.  For example, if you’re like me, sleep is always an issue.  I found the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach and love it.  Check out my initial review for the Zeo.

Other articles we’d like to point out that will interest Moms:

Our reports from the largest Consumer Electronics Show in January:

My FAV Mom Gadgets from CES 2010

Top 6 Tech Product Trends from CES 2010

iPhone Users: 

15 Reasons the iPhone Will Make You Smile 

Turn Your Voice to Text

Misc.

Kids Online eBooks:  Don’t Overlook Their Importance

Windows 7 Useful Features 

Front Loading Washer & Dryers:  Is It Time to Upgrade?

Thank you, TwitterMoms!  And for those of you who are regulars, thanks for your continued support!

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by Lori Cunningham

Love is in the air!  Can you believe Valentines 2010 is already upon us?  My daughter finished addressing her Valentines for her 1st grade friends last week.  Thank goodness for kids – they’re great at creating excitement around holidays and making them last a little bit longer.

While at the Consumer Electronics Show, I stumbled upon a few fun accessories that I thought I’d share with you.  Gadgets are great, but sometimes you just need to dress them up a little and show off your personality. 

Hard Candy Cases

The folks over at Hard Candy Cases are great.  I loved meeting them and loved their enthusiasm for their products.  I also loved their product.  They snapped on a great bright pink Hard Candy Case on my netbook and o la la, my boring black netbook never looked so good.

The case fits on securely and snugly – there is no wiggle room, it’s on tight.  It is designed with open slots so the venting slots on the computer can breathe.  The cover not only looks cool but it is made out of a Polycarbonate shell that protects your netbook from bumps & scratches.  Hard Candy Cases are available for various Asus, Acer, 13″ Macbooks, HP netbooks.  Prices for Hard Candy Cases range from $29.99 to $49.99 with new designs on their way.  Hard Candy Cases can be purchased at http://hardcandycases.com.

Maxell Kids Safe Headphones & M&M’s Sweet Sounds Headphones

Love them!  Maxell makes several kid oriented headphones that are fun, colorful, and offer volume level protection.  Knowing I had young kids, Maxell sent me a set of headphones.  My four year old tried the Kids Safe Headphones and my daughter claimed the M&M’s Sweet Sounds headphones.

The Kids Safe Headphones come in black with gray.  However, they can be customized with either pink or blue disks to make the headphones more fun.  My son asked for the blue disks right away to match his own style. 

I’ll be the first to admit that I have never bought kid headphones before.  My poor kids just suffered with adult headphones.  Adult headphones were always slipping off because they were too big or too heavy.  Ear buds never worked well either.

My kids were delighted to have fun, brightly colored headphones that fit their heads well, were lightweight, and customizable.  For me, there was less work because I didn’t have to constantly readjust the headphones to their small little heads.  In addition, I had some peace of mind knowing that both sets of headphones had volume levels that are kid safe – meaning that if they can’t turn the volume up too high so that it would damage their ears.  If you haven’t purchased kid-sized headphones, they’re worth the money.  The M&M’s Sweet Sounds Headphones retail for $14.99.  The Maxell Kids Safe Headphones retail for $12.99 and  and can be purchased from Maxell.com.

Otter Box Cases for Your Phone

At last!  A phone accessory manufacturer that understands me.  Otterbox began making their boxes for people like me.  Their website states ”Our cases are dedicated to all the klutzy, spontaneous, chaotic, graceless individuals who have broken a device or valuable due to their active lifestyle and like our customers, we’ve been there too!”  So profoundly said.  Sign me up!

Otterbox carries four series of defense for your phone: Impact, Tandem, Commuter, and Defender.  All four series offer protection and style — though it ranges from lighter materials all the way up to “practically indestructible.” 

I arranged with Otterbox to try out a couple of the cases.  I ordered the “slim and tough” Commuter series case in black for my husband and the “practically indestructible” rugged case for myself — in pink of course!

I have dropped every cell phone I have ever owned.  My first cell phone I had to actually smack it first in order to hear the caller – a result of dropping the phone a few too many times.  My current phone – who knows what I did.  It only works on speakerphone.  So if you wonder why a woman is annoyingly talking on her cell using her speakerphone, introduce yourself.  It’s probably me!

Could the Otterbox hold up to my relentless dropping and fumble-handedness?  Well, I think so.  I say that because I’m afraid to drop my phone on purpose.  It has to happen naturally.  But I will say that they case is the strongest I’ve ever used and I feel very confident it will hold up to the test…when that day comes (and it will!).

Otterbox cases start at $19.95 and can be purchased directly at Otterbox.com.

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