Hope everyone enjoyed their holiday

I hope everyone had a merry Christmas, Happy Festivus or whatever holiday it is that you celebrate. The last few days have been crazy. I've been busy cleaning the house so it was spotless for company and making a big Christmas eve meal. We have my family over on Christmas Eve to open presents, and we usually have DH's family over on Christmas or go see them or both.

My mom spoiled Little Monster rotten. He got so much stuff that we had to go out today to get new storage for his toys. He used to have them in cardboard boxes and a big round tub. Now we have a 9 cube bookcase. He also has several toys around his room that are too big and sit on the floor. Santa also brought him a train table, so he is set on toys for a while. Except he'll be getting toys for Christmas 4 more times and he has a birthday in March. We have 2 friends who have gifts for Little Monster, then we have a Christmas get together this weekend with Mr. Monster's brothers, sister in law and our nieces and nephews. Mr. Monster's dad's side of the family also does a Christmas get together usually in January that we'll be attending.

Little Monster got a couple toys I'm going to do reviews on. The Innotab 2S and Rock Star Mickey, both from Santa Claus. I'll let you know what I expected for a reaction, what he thinks, what I think and if they're hits.

I want to share a picture of the new toy storage we picked up. We still need to get bins for the shelves, our Walmart didn't seem to carry any. I'm hoping we'll be able to find some that fit well at Dollar Tree. They usually have a great selection of buckets and baskets. I decided to put bigger toys that didn't fit as well on top. The drum will probably go in the music cube when we get baskets for them. Ignore the sideways book shelf. His bookshelf also broke and he has 70+ books that are now on the sideways bookshelf or stacked next to the dresser. If you can't tell here is how I dived cubes.

Dress Up, Puzzles and Games, Music

Little People, Blocks and Legos, Mr. Potatohead

Misc., Animals and Dinosaurs, Trucks


I'm off to clean up before Mr. Monster gets home. I'll be posting the reviews later on tonight.

Busy Busy Busy

It seems like at the beginning of the week I was making a cleaning schedule. Now here I am Friday night still having to clean everything before we have family over an Monday. I'm the queen of procrastination. I would also lose my head if it wasn't attached. Yes, I'm one of those people. Oddly enough though I like having plans laid out before we do something. It bugs me to no end to have plans to do something with someone but have no idea what that something is until 5 minutes beforehand. That's difficult to do with a toddler if it's something that requires a babysitter or needs to be scheduled around nap time.

Mr. Monster works second shift, currently 3:30 pm - 12 am. It was 5 pm - 5 am but thankfully that's stopped for now. Little monster goes to bed at 9 pm though. So after Little Monster is in bed for the night, I surf the web and that usually includes entering giveaways. The giveaways usually include a review of a product. I'd like to do more reviews for you guys. What would you be interested in seeing reviews on? I'll try to do reviews for some bigger companies. I also see about maybe giving you guys some of the things I review. Now if you have an Etsy shop or a Facebook shop and maybe you're just starting out of you want more traffic to your site and would like me to review one of your products let me know.

I've been thinking of doing a giveaway for 250 fans on Facebook. Do you prefer entering giveaways on blogs or Facebook? What do you think would be a good prize?

Crayola Color Wonder Marker Review

Little Monster and I have been using his Crayola Color Wonder markers for a few weeks now. I had heard good things about them but I was still skeptical. Would they really leave no marks on anything but the paper? It seemed too good to be true, especially with a toddler in the house.

We dug right in as soon as our package was delivered. And of course I needed to check if they really worked like they said they did. So I decided to color my jeans and the couch cushion. Looking back that was a bad place to start if they didn't work. Thankfully though, they haven't colored on anything but the paper.

When coloring, I've noticed sometimes colors will show up right away as if you were using a regular marker. However, it usually seems to take a minute for the color to show up. Little Monster isn't discouraged by this. He just colors more. They also feature cool backgrounds, borders and designs on the characters that you can't see until you start coloring. They aren't as cheap as basic markers, but they are worth it for no mess. They have so many different options for coloring books including metallic and glitter. They also offer a blank pad of color wonder paper. I love these markers and definitely would recommend them.

These are the sets we have, and Little Monster's Grandma got him the Cars set with markers for Christmas.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002D9M6R6/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00

http://www.amazon.com/Crayola-Color-Wonder-Chuggington-Coloring/dp/B006UBLXQ8/ref=sr_1_27?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1355892881&sr=1-27&keywords=Crayola+Color+Wonder

You can find them at Walmart, Meijer, Target, presumably any big box store. If you'd like to purchase directly from Crayola, here's the link.

http://www.crayola.com/products/#/%2Fproducttypeorbrands%3Acolor%20wonder

Finally a first post

I decided a few weeks ago I was going to start a blog of the day to day with my son (the little monster). It's taken me that long to just sit down and write a post. With the Christmas season coming up, we've been busy. Whether it's the day to day, making crafts or doing fun stuff away from home. Little Monster and I have made a few crafts for the Christmas season. He likes being able to paste and create things, just like mommy. Crafting things gets my brain flowing. I absolutely love it. Little Monster and I color together all the time. Although he is now limited to Crayola Color Wonder markers since he had an incident making a mural on the wall in the hallway. They are great though, I'll be doing a review of them soon for those of you interested. Here are the crafts little monster and I have finished.

Salt Dough Ornaments

Magazine Tree

Toilet Paper roll snowman with baby sock hat (he did have 2 eyes until Little Monster played with him today)

Toilet Paper Roll Reindeer

Thomas Paper Ornament (he was just a paper craft until Mr. Monster suggested making him into an ornament)

Little Monster's Tree (he glued the star, ornaments and snow himself)

Paper Chain (we took this down as it kept falling, it looked nice while it lasted)