The New Slapjack: Spot It!

May 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Our family recently received a sample of the new card game Spot It! by Blue Orange games.  In fact, the company sent us two – so first I played it with Kid 1 and then we gifted the other set to one of his friends.  It was sort of an accident – he stuck the original one into his backpack when he went to his first ever slumber party, and the kids played it and loved it, so I told the host mom that the boy could keep it.  After all, it was his birthday.

Spot It! is a hit with our small sampling of 7-year-old boys because, I suspect, there are two things the game features that this demographic loves:  racing and smashing.  When you play Spot It!, you race the other players to find a match for your card.  Then when you do, you smash your card down on the pile of other cards.  First person to get rid of all his or her cards wins.

I suppose Blue Orange Games doesn’t condone the whole smashing part of the game.  I mean, it’s easy enough to simply place your card on the top of the pile when you know you have a match.  But come on.  These are 7-year-old boys I’m talking about.

Anyway, the cards are round, come in a fancy tin, and have cute pictures on them.  You have to find a matching picture on your card to any of the pictures on the card that’s on the top of the pile.  You yell out the name of the matching picture and your card becomes the next top card.  That’s it.  It’s so simple that your whole family can play together, and it becomes intense pretty quickly.  We all liked it.

Spot It! is selling for $11.97 on Amazon, and you can also find them on Facebook and Twitter.  Our family received two copies of the game in order to facilitate this feature.

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Toydozer Makes Cleanup Time More Fun

April 17, 2012 by 14 Comments

 

I don’t know about you, but in my house, there are about 1,254,215 tiny pieces of plastic.

My two little boys have amassed quite a LEGO collection over their few years and they all manage to make their way to the floor of our dining-room-turned-toy-room.  All at once.

After a few days of this I get so fed up with asking them to clean up, having them say “But we’re still playing with them!” and NOT cleaning them up that I will just clean them up myself.  That is ending.  I do not have enough time in the day to shoehorn in cleaning up their toys when they are perfectly capable of doing it themselves.

Enter the Toydozer.

It’s not the imaginary LEGO vacuum cleaner that sucks up LEGOs and automatically sorts them into little bins by color, size, and type that I want someone to invent, but it’s a step in the right direction.

There is a scoop and a gatherer, which works like the blade of a bulldozer.  You just scrape the tiny toys into the scoop, dump into your bin, (over and over and OVER in our case) and then cleanup is done!  The boys even have fun with it:

 

 

A very thoughtful and convenient feature of the Toy Dozer is that the scoop and the gatherer are reunited by Velcro attachments so that you can store them together and easily detach for use.  We stuck ours in the corner for the next cleanup time.

My husband the engineer noticed a small design problem that makes the tiniest of the tiny toys sneak by the Toy Dozer’s process:

 

The flat edge of the scoop is curve just the slightest bit – which creates a gap between the scoop and the surface you are trying to clean:

Here he is pointing out that a plastic “rib” such as the one found on the flat edge of the gatherer would be a helpful part of the scoop so that this problem can be avoided.  You’re welcome, Toydozer makers.

The Toy Dozer sells online for $18.99, which is a bit high considering you can do the same thing with a dustpan and hand brush, but this is colorful and fun for the kids – they actually enjoyed cleaning up.  And I will admit it…so did I.

You can get 20% by using the code BLOGGER20.  We received a box of three to facilitate this review.

 

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Another Great Etsy Shop: Captivation

February 10, 2012 by 9 Comments

I don’t wear much jewelry aside from my push present earrings, my watch, and my wedding and engagement rings, which I actually don’t wear everyday because let’s just say my fingers increase in size as the day goes on.

But there is this one necklace that I like to add at the last minute, or sometimes I even build an outfit around it, to boost my confidence as a creative person:

It’s the “SHIFT” key from an old typewriter, set in resin inside a bottle cap from a bottle of Henry Weinhard’s beer.  It came on a long chain, and when I wear it, I feel extra power, both from inside, where I can feel the necklace as an announcement that I AM A WRITER, and from the maker of the necklace, Ellen Rowan, who gave it to me as a gift at an event last summer.  It was part of the gift bag given to all attendees, but still, I feel it personally.  It’s handmade, and whenever I pick it up I can imagine the care that Rowan puts into her creations.  She sells them on Etsy in her shop, reCaptivation.

I recommend. Rowan sells hammered metal pendants and tye-died clothing and accessories.

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