I’m so excited to be able to share an awesome new product with you that I love for so many, many reasons!!!

First, you all know how I feel about children’s books. Obsessed is an understatement.

Second, I love supporting small family-owned businesses and Bammco, LLC is owned by Tom & Sue, a husband and wife team.

Third, well, just look…

It’s like a personalized Where’s Waldo? with your child’s face on every single page. See Abby?

Abby was so excited to see her face in an actual book. I was really happy to see that it was a great quality, hard-backed book that will last. Nick and Abby both had fun searching for Abby’s little face and the difficulty level was just right. It took them a while to find her, but it wasn’t too hard so they did not get frustrated with the process.

I’m using our Find Me If You Can book to keep Abby busy while I do Nick’s school work with him.

Guess what?

Tom and Sue have agreed to give away THREE Find Me If You Can books to lucky Binkies and Briefcases readers. These make great holiday gifts!

Enter using the Rafflecopter form below and on Friday, Nov. 2  I will randomly chose THREE winners who will each receive a code for ONE free book. Winners will be contacted by email, so make sure to leave your email in your comments. Good luck!

PLUS Tom and Sue have generously offered a 10% off code for all Binkies and Briefcases readers. Just enter BINKIES  into the coupon field at checkout. The code is good for one week.

a Rafflecopter giveaway
  Don’t forget to leave your email in your comments so I can contact you if you win!

This post is sponsored by Graco. I was compensated for attending this event, but all opinions are my own. 

This afternoon I attended the Graco Snugride Click Connect event at our local Babies R Us. I got a chance to meet local bloggers and see the brand new .

I got a chance to meet Wendy from ABCs and Garden Peas. Wendy was the hostess for the event and I was there as her assistant. Here in Central PA it is rare to get a chance to connect with other bloggers so I was thrilled to meet Wendy and Skye from Real Mom Reviews.   Skye is only 23 and is raising 6 kids!  I was so impressed with both of these ladies.

Our attendance was lower than we expected, but it made for a nice intimate group. We had a little less than 20 people come to our event.

We ate the cookies and candy Wendy brought, played celebrity baby name trivia, and spent a lot of time playing with the Snugride car seat.

I have to say, I honestly was very impressed with this car seat. Now that the recommendations have changed and children are supposed to be rear facing until age 2, we are going to need a new car seat for Penny. I am strongly considering the Snugride.

All of the moms loved the 8 different reclining settings, allowing for plenty of leg room as your baby grows. Abby was a big baby and her legs were always bent and squished against the back of the seat once she got to be about 8 months old until the time she could face forward. This would not have been a problem with the Snugride because of the adjustable settings. The seat slides back and up, so that as baby grows she can sit upright, allowing for more legroom. This car seat is approved for 4 pounds all the way up to 40 pounds, so it is good to go up to age 2 (or maybe longer) without a problem.

We also really liked the retractable foot rest. The seats of your car will stay clean because your toddler’s muddy shoes won’t be kicking them while you are driving. Plus it’s really cute with the little footprints. 🙂

I think my favorite feature was the way the straps adjust. No re-threading! They adjust with just a button in the back of the car seat, so there is no need to re-thread. That is a huge pain for me this time of year with our current car seat, which is an older Graco model. Because of the weather fluctuations, Penny is wearing a heavier sweater one day and a lighter outfit the next and I am constantly having to readjust the straps. The Snugride is soooo much easier.

Also, because it is a Click Connect, this car seat would work with the two Graco strollers (a single and a double) that we already own.

We even got to give away two brand new Snugrides to some lucky ladies.

And the winners are….drum roll…

Emily of Momma Days and Naomi!

Congratulations ladies!

The – the first and only newborn to two-year infant car seat that actually grows with your baby from four pounds all the way up to 40 pounds. The car seat is designed for a parent on the go. The infant car seat can be easily removed from the base and used as a carrier when the infant is small, providing portability and convenience so you can easily move your infant in and out of the car without disturbing them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently made the recommendation to keep all children in rear-facing car seats until the age of 2. Graco set out to make this product so parents can keep infants rear facing longer while still keeping them comfortable.

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Graco. The opinions and text are all mine.

Do you remember the scene in Dude Where’s My Car (What? I’m the only person who has seen that movie?) when they are trying to order fast food and the lady working the drive-thru keeps saying “and then?” to get Ashton Kutcher to order more food?

That is how my day from h-e-double hockey sticks felt.

One thing would happen, and then another, and then another, and I just wanted to scream “NO AND THEN!”

source

First thing this morning I’m nursing Penny in our bed. Immediately after nursing she starts gagging and throws up ALL OVER ME.  Not just baby spit up, actual “uh-oh, the baby might have the flu” vomit. Twice.

Also, our dishwasher was broken. Thankfully Eddie was able to fix it last night, but there is a sink & counter (& okay, stove too) full of 4+ day old dirty dishes to be washed, plus the rest of the house to be cleaned and homeschooling to be done before the showing of our house that is scheduled for the afternoon. I have to cancel Bible Study, preschool, a dentist appointment, and the kids church club tonight.

My older two kids are also sick, but only with bad chest colds. They aren’t throwing up (yet).

Eddie agrees to come home a little early so that he can be there to help with the kids and the dog while we have to be out of the house in the afternoon. Yay!

Also, the baby has a fever. I don’t know how bad the fever is because all of our thermometer batteries are worn out. Yes, all of them. Never in my life has a thermometer battery worn out on me, but today they all decided to quit at the same time. It’s like there was a solar flare or something.  All I know is that she felt really warn & then I gave her Tylenol and now she feels less warm.

Fast forward a few hours. I miraculously have been able to get the house straightened and the dishes done and about 1/2 of Nick’s schoolwork finished. Penny has only thrown up one more time. We have 10 minutes before the Realtor is scheduled to show up with our potential buyers.

My son announces that he has pooped in his pants.

Super awesome. I stick him on the potty, change his clothes, light candles, and spray Febreze everywhere. Unfortunately, it still smells like poop.

Eddie gets home with seconds to spare and we get the kids and  the dog in the minivan and drive around aimlessly. There aren’t many destination options for a family full of sick children and their dog.

We decide that we should probably feed our kids at some point, so we go through the McDonald’s drive thu and decide to take our dinner to the park near our house. We also stop at Target for a new thermometer. The park is empty when we get there, so we don’t feel too guilty about our kids spreading their germs around.

Abby takes 2 bites of a chicken nugget and announces that she “has to poo poo.”  No problem, this park has bathrooms.

This park’s bathrooms are locked. We can’t go home because people are there and everybody knows that you only have about 30 seconds to play with when a preschooler tells you she has to use the potty.

I take my daughter behind an outbuilding and let her poop in the grass. (I’m not proud of it, but it happened, ok?)

We go back to eating our food.

Eddie thinks he might be sick. He doesn’t like Abby’s grass option, so he leaves in search of indoor plumbing. He takes the van. I am trapped with three sick kids and a dog.

In the meantime, a group of six or seven older kids, ranging in ages from about 8-12, has gathered at the playground. They are using very, um, colorful language.

On the way back from letting my daughter poop in the grass I put on my best teacher voice to confront them.

“Do you think it’s a good idea to let the little ones hear you talking like that?”

“No, ma’am, I’m sorry. I won’t do it anymore.”

“That’s what I thought.”

I might let my kids poop on public property, but the b-word is where I draw the line, evidently.

Where were we? Oh yeah, I’m trapped on the playground.

The foul-mouthed kids leave, but three different kids come over to the playground with their dad. If the shaved head, confederate flag tattoo, and various other less appropriate markings were any indication, their dad is a white supremacist. He is also chain-smoking ON the playground. Like, he is walking on the playground equipment smoking cigarettes.

I say nothing to him about this because, while I have proved myself more than capable of standing up to 8-year-old bullies, this dude is scary and I have no escape route.

His six-year-old daughter has taken a liking to my girls and keeps trying to touch my sick baby’s face and get me to give her our phone number. I change the subject and make dumb excuses like, “My hands are full of baby right now so I can’t use a pen.”

Eventually, Eddie returns and we can go home.

Nick’s school work gets finished.

The phone rings.

We have another showing tomorrow. It’s the same Realtor. I guess she likes the smell of poop.

Here we go again.

**P.S. After I wrote this I was thrown up on one more time.

***P.P.S. Make that two more times.

****P.P.P. S. make that three more times.

*****P.P.P.P.S We got this feedback from the realtor the next morning “My clients felt there was a smell to the house. They weren’t sure if it was pets or messy diapers.”  Told you.

Today I am over at Wendy Nielsen.com in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month telling the story about the lump I found at age 25:

I do know how it feels though, to discover the lump.  

I found mine a few years ago in a most unglamorous way; one day I was scratching my left armpit. It makes me giggle a little, but that really is how I found it. It felt like a tiny, hard little pebble at the top of my breast. I kept picturing the scene in Finding Nemo when they clog the filter with aquarium gravel.