FREE Movie Tickets For The Little Red Wagon

December 5, 2012 by 11 Comments

Free tickets to the first 5 commenters below.*

You know you need a break, Mom or Dad.  Short days at school.  Holiday parties for work, school, sports teams and friends.  Shopping, meal planning, Christmas-tree buying, and more and more every day.

What if you could haul your family to the Regency Theater and veg out for an hour or so while your kids watch a movie that will not rot their brains or make them want you to buy the toy that goes with it?  What if it inspired them to help others?  

Lucky for you, The Little Red Wagon is that film, and it’s playing NEXT WEEK right here at the Regency in Agoura Hills, AND I have 5 sets of tickets for my readers!

The Little Red Wagon is the story of Zach Bonner, a 12-year-old boy in Tampa, Florida who started a crusade to help children left homeless after Hurricane Charlie hit the area in 2004.  From getting food and water to very needy families, to walking from Tampa to the White House to raise awareness about homeless children, Bonner’s efforts have helped thousands upon thousands of children.  He now runs The Little Red Wagon as a nonprofit to help underprivileged kids.

The movie was produced by local filmmaker Dr. Michael Guillen, who has been making appearances at elementary schools to help spread the message that Bonner started 8 years ago.

I dare you not to cry during this movie. You’ll probably want to take a nap, but hopefully you will be moved to act, even if it’s just to take a bag of nonperishable groceries to a local food pantry to help our needy neighbors.

The first five people who comment here will win a four-pack of tickets to see the film during its limited local run December 10 – 13 at the Regency Theater in Agoura Hills. Just make sure you enter your email address so I can contact you directly and the tickets will be mailed to via priority overnight mail.

This is a sponsored post. All opinions are my own.

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Take Your Time Back With dotmine Day Planners

October 3, 2012 by 1 Comment

 

I don’t leave home without my planner.

Something funny happened to me early this summer. I was happily – and a bit obliviously – filling out calendars and making notes in my Blue Sky desk planner when I flipped a page and time ended.

Yes. Time simply ended.

Because this was an academic-year planner, and it only went up to the end of June.

Duh.

Previous to that moment I hadn’t realized that an academic planner ended in June.  I didn’t even bother to flip through it, because I had been so enamored of the pretty, pretty paper.  Lots of ideas flew through my brain then:  Could I live without a paper planner until January?  No.  Could I just go get a new planner at the bookstore?  Not likely – it was May.  Could I use a date-non-specific planner, the kind where you write in the dates?  Certainly not.

Then I remembered I had met one of the owners of dotmine, a company that makes day planners, at BlogHer last year.  She was lovely and inspiring and had offered to send me one of their products but I hadn’t taken her up on the offer because I already had a planner.  Dummy.  In my silly state of plannerlessness, I dug up her card and emailed her my predicament and she came to my rescue at once.  Sarah, everybody.  Mother, business owner, superhero.

With Sarah’s help I chose a previous-year design, the Floating Leaves Family_Time.Mine desk planner (pictured above).  It’s as big as a college-ruled spiral notebook and way more functional.  The pages go from August 2011 through December 2012, which is just right to get me to the end of the year.

The Family_Time.Mine style of planner from dotmine is designed for moms who run a household with children in it who have very busy schedules.  There is a master planner for each season of the year, a two-page spread for each month, and a page for each week with large ruled blocks for every weekday and smaller blocks for weekend days.  And room for jotting down lists in the margins.  Bonus:  there are inspirational quotes printed at the bottom of some pages.  This week’s is surprisingly appropriate for my life:

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple. -Dr. Seuss

I like that the Family_Time.Mine is reinforced with a clear plastic cover to protect its innards – my planner gets a lot of abuse so this is very helpful.  I tend to make a ton of lists, so I often fill the day’s blocks up with that day’s tasks and cross them off (all in pencil, since it changes so often) and then if I have to make a longer list I use the margins.

Here are some interior views:

For longer notes, like from a phone conversation or something more detailed, I use a different piece of paper or a notebook, because there’s not much space for notes in this planner, maybe a page or two.  In fact, there is a big section at the back for things like lists for the babysitter, or address book type entries, which I don’t use in paper format anymore at all.  All my contacts are in my phone or my Google account.  I am beyond sitting down and copying names, addresses, and phone numbers once a year into my planner.  So I just used that space for more notes and lists!

For this coming calendar year I will probably pick a different style, because I haven’t used it much so far for the kids’ school information. That stuff I keep haphazardly in a green desk basket on the kitchen counter, or on the corkboard, or in my head.  So obviously, I don’t need to organize it.  Haha.

—

Here is the latest from dotmine Planners:

“Once again, we’re honored to partner with the Young Survival Coalition (YSC), the premier global organization dedicated to the critical issues unique to young women who are diagnosed with breast cancer. YSC offers resources, connections and outreach so women feel supported, empowered and hopeful. More information atwww.youngsurvival.org.

This month, we’ll proudly donate 40% of our profits on all pink planners at www.timemine.com.

And, to help you help us help YSC (did you follow that?), we’ll give you an extra 20% off time.mine Preppy Party Girl, life_time.mine Moor Pink and family_time.mine Elle’s Pick. Use discount code PINK12 at checkout.”

I received a complimentary day planner to facilitate this feature.  In other words, Sarah saved my sanity.

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“Cuss Control” Is Like Spanx For Your Brain

June 24, 2012 by 14 Comments

The rule of thumb is to never swear at a person with the ability to break your thumb.  It’s also unwise to swear at your mother, your employer, the person you sleep with on a regular basis, and anyone who appears to be heavily armed.

The past seven years of being a parent have brought with them an epic struggle for me to stop swearing…or at least, to stop swearing so much.

Blame it on my east coast upbringing, my barely-concealed aggressive nature, or just a character flaw, but I have a pretty serious potty mouth.  It is not surprising, if you know me in person, to hear me drop an f-bomb in casual conversation.  When I worked in the entertainment industry, a foul mouth was practically a job requirement.  I fit right in.

But curses are much less funny and cool when they come out of a child’s mouth, so in an effort to clean up my language so that I could be a better role model as a parent, I actively started swearing less when I first became pregnant back in 2004.  I have had my ups and downs with this project, and I haven’t completely cleaned it up, but I have gotten better.  Still, my 7- and 5-year-old boys have been known to scream out GODDAMMIT from time to time.  I’m a work in progress.

With this effort in mind I recently read “Cuss Control:  The Complete Book on How To Curb Your Cursing.”  It’s a yellow book with the title in bright red letters.  Having this lying around, or reading it in public, led to raised eyebrows on more than one occasion, if not outright pointing and laughing.  (You know who you are.)  The book’s author, James V. O’Connor, is a public relations professional, and an old-school conservative person.  His “guide” consists mainly of reminders that your use of offensive language betrays you as uneducated, uncouth, or unhappy.  Or all three.  And his tips for getting rid of the bad words from your vocabulary boil down to one command:  relax.

Sigh.  If only it were that easy.

Through his anecdotal history of language and interviews with people who talk about swearing, O’Connor seems to simply state that cussing is a bad thing and you should stop it.  There is no bibliography and there are many lists of less-dirty synonyms for  offensive words.  O’Connor doesn’t present expert evidence in favor of or time-tested tricks for how to rid yourself of the knee-jerk swearing you rely on, or the stream of invectives you commonly spew when you are very angry.  His “suggested procedures” are all about changing your attitude and include things like “Think Positively,” “Form a Support Group,” and “Plan Ahead,” which all sound like dieting advice to me.  His tips might work for you, but I just didn’t find them useful in my own life.

I’ll admit it – that’s what I was looking for.  A manual.  A step-by-step brainwashing, in a good way.  I already agree with O’Connor that heavy swearing makes a person, especially in professional or parenting situations, look bad.  (Don’t get me wrong – plenty of my favorite writers use offensive language all the time, and I still do myself, but I have seen a pattern in the things I like to read and in how I edit my writing – swearing in writing is usually only effective if it is used wisely and sparingly.)  So I didn’t need him to convince me that I needed to change.  I just didn’t feel like he gave good enough advice about how to do it.

Still, I have found myself thinking about “Cuss Control” when I hear myself swear in conversation, and indeed when I am writing and the f-bombs pop up organically, so that I quickly move to the backspace key and take them out unless they really help to make my point.  I have noticed that when I am in public and talking to a friend, I cringe ever so slightly (or obviously) when that friend swears loudly during our conversation.  I regret it when I let a spontaneous curse word slip if I am surprised, in pain, or suddenly angry.  All of those things mean I’m moving in the right direction.  After all, the first step towards improvement is recognizing that I have a problem, right?

So maybe that is how Cuss Control really has helped.  Without effective steps I could take to solve my problem, it insinuated its judgement of my character into my subconscious, so that O’Connor has become like the angel on my shoulder, shaking his head every time I swear.  I suppose that’s better than nothing.

I received a free copy of this book to facilitate this review.

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