Category: Reviews, promotions and giveaways

More free stuff!

Okay, so I know it’s been ages since I’ve given you any real good reason, content-wise, to keep coming back here. Once we get into a new routine next month, I’m sure things will improve. Well, that and once we get over all these viruses. Oh yeah, and when birthday season is done (all three boys in the next six weeks), then I’ll be back in top form. Yeah, I’m sure that will work out!

Anyway, ahem, as long as I keep throwing you bribes, you promise to keep waiting for me?

Last summer, I raved about the Barenaked Ladies new kids’ CD, Snacktime. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a second copy in the mail not long after I purchased tickets for their Ottawa holiday show, along with an autographed picture of the band. (A nice touch, I thought.) And I suppose the third copy I received last week, also with a return address of BNL’s label, Nettwerk, was some sort of apology for the last-minute postponement of the concert due to the death of one of the Ladies’ mothers, although I can’t be sure because it arrived in an envelope with no note of explanation. Regardless, when we received the second copy I was content to keep one in the car and one for backup, but in the age of digital music I really don’t need a third copy.

All this to say (sheesh, no wonder I don’t blog anymore, it takes me bloody forever to get to the point!) I have a free, factory-sealed copy of the Barenaked Ladies’ Snacktime CD for kids and it’s yours for the asking. Just leave a comment and tell me why you want it, and I’ll do a random draw on Saturday, January 31.

CanadaHelps gift card winner!

Congratulations to Holly of Humpty Dumpty House, the big winner of the $25 gift certificate from CanadaHelps.org. Sometimes it pays to be number two!

(And this time, I double checked to make sure I had the right commenter. Twice!)

Thanks to CanadaHelps.org for sponsoring this contest, and thanks to all of you who shared comments of people who made a difference in your day, or in your life. Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to turn around someone’s day with a simple act of kindness?

A gift to make the world a better place

I’ve got a couple of posts to share with you, neither of which is quite ready for public consumption. But I got an email last night about another great giveaway for me to share with you, and I wanted to post about it right away.

Let me tell you about CanadaHelps.org, a registered Canadian charity that helps other Canadian charities by acting as a portal website, fostering giving by making it easy for donors to find Canadian charities and make a donation online.

They are the first and only registered charity that makes giving to your favourite charities easy with secure tools for donating via credit card, gift card or even stocks and mutual funds. With CanadaHelps, it’s easy to find a cause you’re passionate about by searching the 83,000 Canadian charities. Here’s some information from their website:

For donors, CanadaHelps.org simplifies the donating process, making it easy, quick and secure. On any pages where you share personal information or perform financial transactions, CanadaHelps.org encrypts your data using Secure Socket Layers (SSL), allowing you to send and receive information without the worry of having it intercepted. Put simply, donors go online, select as many charities as they wish, make their donation and receive a tax receipt for each donation immediately.

For charities, CanadaHelps.org provides a cost effective alternative to setting up their own online donations facilities: there is no set up fee, no annual charges and charities receive immediate notification when a donation is received. Charities are only charged when a donation is actually made, thereby ensuring a charity is not paying for a service that is not being used.

Recognizing the benefits of online giving to both donors and charities, CanadaHelps launched its first website in 2000. Today, more than five years later, CanadaHelps facilitates over $10 million in donations to Canadian charities annually.

I wish I’d known about this before Christmas. This year, instead of teacher gifts we donated a backpack full of school supplies to a Canadian child in need in the name of each of the boys’ teachers through WorldVision. A gift card from CanadaHelps would have been another excellent way to share the gift of giving.

And now, thanks to CanadaHelps.org, I have a $25 charitable gift card to share with you. Leave me a comment telling me about a time someone made a difference in your life — big or small — and I’ll enter your name in a random draw for the $25 gift card. You’ll be able to use the gift card on the CanadaHelps.org site to make a donation to a Canadian charity of your choice. They were kind enough to offer a CanadaHelps gift card for me, too. Isn’t that great? They give to us, I give to you, and we each give to our favourite charities through CanadaHelps.org. Contest closes end of day on Monday, December 29. FYI, the deadline for making a donation that will be deductible on your 2008 income tax return is December 31 of this year. You can get more information about donations and tax deductions on the Canada Revenue Agency website.

Note: If you win, I’ll need your full name and e-mail address, which will be given to CanadaHelps.org solely for the purposes of sending you the gift card.

iTunes winner!

Hooray! We have a winner for the iTunes gift card!

Congratulations to the tenth commenter on the original post, Madeleine!!! (Bonus points for her 80s reference, and for the cost-saving tip that you can buy gift cards at Costco for less than their face value. I had no idea!!)

Thanks to iTunes Canada and their PR agency for the freebie, and special thanks to all of you for your music suggestions. I’ll spend far more than the value of my own gift card loading my iPod with cool new tunes!

Edited to add: because I am so pathetic that I could not properly count to 10, I have decided to give away both gift cards, one to Madeleine, who was in fact #9, and one to Andrea. Oops!

Brain, Child winner!

Congratulations to Karen of Virtually There, winner of the one year subscription to Brain, Child magazine! Karen was chosen completely at random with the assistance of a sleepy Tristan, who picked the number six because “I’m almost not six anymore.”

There’s still a couple of days left to enter the contest for an iTunes Canada gift card, though!

Thanks to Stephanie and the folks at Brain, Child for the freebie.

Another gift for you!!

Who loves ya, baby? I do!! And, as my mother always says, “If you love me, buy me things!”

Well, in this case, I’ll give you things. The nice people at iTunes Canada would like you to know that you can now buy iTunes gift cards at Sobeys, Mac’s, A&P, Safeway, Save-on Foods and Coop. To help get the word out, they’re sending me an iTunes gift card for me to share with you! (Disclosure: they’re also giving one to me. Hooray for sharing!)

*cue Don Pardo-esque announcer voice*

Busy moms can simply pick one up while grocery shopping and give the gift of instant entertainment.

Entertaining and need to set the mood quickly? Simply download your choice of music to your computer, burn it to a CD and play it all night long.

Or maybe you have a music lover on your gift list, but you don’t know what kind of music to buy. Give the gift of downloadable joy!

/announcer voice

(Hey, if you want free stuff, you gotta put up with the pitches every now and then, right?)

We don’t have a lot of time, so I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to get this to you before Christmas. But if you are Canadian, and you would like a $25 iTunes Canada gift card, leave a comment below. As always, though, it’s not just any comment. This time, I want you to tell me one song I must download and add to my iPod and why. Contest closes end of day this Thursday, December 18.

Kids, books, and a love of reading: Part Two of two

In part one of this mini-series on helping your kids to fall in love with books, I talked about a new website full of book suggestions. This post is about a great set of new books that I was offered for review in mid-November. Not just any books, but graphic novels comic books for beginning readers.

I might have mentioned before, we come by a love of comic books honestly in our home. Beloved studied illustration formally before moving on to an animation program, and our basement is crammed to the rafters (literally!) with the paltry remains of his once-legendary comic book collection, largely skewed to the 1980s superhero genre. And at the tender age of six, Tristan is already creating his own comic books. So when the nice people from TOON Books sent me a pitch offering me a couple of free high-end hardcover comic books for beginning readers, I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough.

Here’s the pitch that hooked me:

Since the early days of comics, parents and teachers have experienced a challenge: Kids, even reluctant readers, love comics, but are comics good for them?

With TOON Books, the solution has arrived. Authored by illustrious cartoonists and children book artists, edited with the highest literary standards, and thoughtfully making use of a controlled vocabulary, the new books are perfect for emerging readers ages four and up. The series, developed by Francoise Mouly (Art Editor of The New Yorker) with Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman (MAUS) as Advisor, builds on a tradition of excellence in children’s literature: young readers will fall in love with these books and return to them over and over again. The luxuriously produced hardcovers are gifts that they’ll treasure for years to come.

They sent us three books: Jack and the Box, Mo and Jo, and Stinky. The very first night, Tristan read the entire Jack and the Box book from cover to cover out loud to Beloved and Simon. That’s 30-odd pages, and he’s only in Grade One. I was so impressed! And it’s not an overly simplistic book either. That’s what I liked about these books, that they’re accessible without being condescending. Beloved and Tristan took turns reading the next two books out loud over the subsequent nights.

The same week we received and devoured our TOON books, Art Spiegelman was interviewed on my favourite radio program, CBC’s Q. There’s an article about the books, and you can listen to his interview from the CBC site. (Gah, the link to the interview from the CBC article doesn’t work. If you’re determined, and it is worth it, go to http://www.cbc.ca/q/pastepisodes.html and scroll down to December 2 to download the podcast of the episode.) It’s really quite fascinating, the philosophy behind reclaiming the comic book genre for beginning readers. I was particularly intrigued by the discussion about how Jack and the Box is even a bit on the scary side, from a child’s point of view, and how they attributed kids with a level of sophistication and cognizance that a lot of beginning-reader books simply do not. They also talk about how comic books add a nuance in expression and interaction that regular picture books do not. Even if you don’t get the books, which I highly recommend, the interview makes for some thoughtful discussion.

Am I raving a bit? It’s genuine. I honestly love these books, and can’t wait to go out and add some more to our collection.

Kids, books and a love reading: Part One of two

I’d originally planned this as one post, but time and my own loquaciousness have deemed that they be separated into parts one and two of a theme: I love reading and by all things holy, my kids shall love to read as well. Lucky for us, I’ve got two great new tools to help with that goal.

The first is a new website designed to help you find books that one celebrity author thinks your kids will love, courtesy of a Mother-Talk blog tour.

James Patterson, one of our generation’s most prolific authors, has taken to heart the cause of getting kids of all ages to love reading. To that end, he recently launched a new website, ReadKiddoRead.com, filled with recommendations to truly great books for kids. From the Mother-Talk pitch I received:

Whether you are still enjoying picture books with your baby or have an older child reading at an advanced level, ReadKiddoRead acts as a resource for finding the best books. Each featured book, hand-selected by Patterson, includes a synopsis, related themes, quotes from critics, links to find the book in any number of locations (including local libraries), and even similar suggested reads. In addition, the website provides resources for finding book discounts and promotions, features interviews and contributions from authors and celebrities.

I signed up for this blog tour because it’s a topic close to my heart, but I was genuinely impressed by the ReadKiddoRead website. It starts with an overview of various age groups and book types. Click on one of them and it will bring you to a list of book ideas in that category with truncated reviews of each one. Click one more time, and you get a full review of the book, including where to buy it, a US library finder (too bad there’s no Canadian equivalent!), a few words from the critics, and a list of a dozen or more “if you like this book, you’ll love this one” suggestions.

They’ve set up a Ning community (you’ll know Ning if you signed up for TwitterMoms or Nablopomo, among others) to discuss ReadKiddoRead and other book ideas for kids.

Just in time for the holidays, if you’re looking for a new book or ten for your favourite kiddies, this is a great place to start. A lot of my board books have been drooled to death, so I might just use the 0 – 2 category for a few suggestions to fill Lucas’s stocking this year!

Coming up next, a set of amazing new books for beginning readers…

Disclosure: I received a $20 amazon gift certificate for participating in this Mother-Talk blog book tour.

My Christmas gift to you

Hooray, more free stuff!

A while ago, I got an e-mail from Stephanie of Brain, Child magazine. She asked me if I’d be interested in getting to know Brain, Child a little better with a back issue, and would I like to give away a one-year subscription to one of my readers. Hell yes!!

I’d heard of Brain, Child before, and had been meaning to check it out. They call themselves “The Magazine for Thinking Mothers.” I really, really enjoyed the issue they sent me. There were, to my great relief, no articles offering 20 quick lunch ideas under 300 calories, nor were there any articles on how to decorate your nursery using ridiculously over-priced swag from Pottery Barn Kids. Not a single lipstick review! It was, in short, unlike 99% of the glossy magazines aimed at my demographic.

It was smart, it was witty, it was occasionally wrenching, and it was a really good read. The backbone of the magazine seems to be personal essays, rounded out by a selection of shorter pieces, fiction, features and reviews. I gobbled it all up and can’t wait to go back for more — but I’ll have to wait at least a little while, because they only publish four times per year.

If you’d like to be entered in a draw to win the one-year subscription to Brain, Child magazine, just leave me a comment before December 14, 2008 and tell me one thing you’re wishing for this holiday season.

Bloggy business: new ad, new gig

Got a few items of bloggy business to take care of today.

First, thanks to all of you who chimed in to let me know the reasonable rates for a live-out nanny. Got a few interviews scheduled but most importantly, signed up for an account with CanadianNanny.ca. It’s lousy with nannies in the neighbourhood; hoping none of them are lousy. Sheesh, why didn’t I do this three months ago? Thank you thank you thank you!!

Second, you might notice that I’ve added an ad to the sidebar over there. I wasn’t actively looking for advertisers when the owner of Evymama — a Toronto maternity and breastfeeding boutique with a new online store — contacted me. I took a look at her site and her business, and it seemed like a great fit. I wouldn’t put up an ad for just anybody, but a Canadian owned and operated site for new mothers? I’m all over that. (And heck, the money does come in handy!) Welcome, Evymama, to the Postcards from the Mothership community!

Third, I’ve been stepping out on you again. A couple of months ago, I was asked to contribute a weekly column to a new online bloggy magazine about living with technology called TechLifePost. My column, which appears every Thursday, is loosely focused on technologies and families. It’s called Digital, Baby! It’s been driving me crazy to be writing in a commentless vacuum, so feel free to wander over there and chat up the place. It’s been fun writing in a new forum, but surprisingly stressful because I’m writing as part of a team and not just on my own whim and whimsey. I’m always scrambling for ideas, though, so I’d welcome your input.

Phew, I’ve been meaning to get around to posting some of this stuff for weeks. Feels good to finally get it out of my head!!