We here at Soapbox Mom are excited about the latest addition to the site - a podcast! We’re calling it Soapbox Radio. It’s a show for moms, dads, men, women, and kids about anything and everything. I’m kicking off the show by highlighting bloggers, particularly those whom I know relatively well and think are just so amazing that I want the world to hear about them (or at least the handful of people who will listen to the show!). I’ll have shownotes and links after the shows as well as previews about upcoming shows right here on Soapbox Mom and also on my Soapbox Radio site.
I’m especially excited to say that on Tuesday, May 13 at 1:00 pm (ET) I’ll be joined by my first guest, BD (or Jim) author of the Busy Dad Blogand BusyDad Tales - the comic (illustrated by Jim’s childhood friend, Jeff Day). Jim is a tremendously talented guy with an adorable young son, whom he fondly refers to as Fury. You can see Jim and Fury in the entertaining videos on his site and read all about them on both sites.
Soapbox Radio is recorded live each week on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm (ET). Just follow this link and click on “click to listen.” You can call in and ask questions (or tell Jim how much you enjoy his blog and comic!) at 347.326.9613. If you miss the show, you’ll be able to download it and play it right on this website.
Before the first show, though, I’m asking for your help. I need a tagline for the show.
Here are some of the ideas suggested so far:
Soapbox Radio -
1. … - bringing out your inner soap.
2. … - bringing the box to you.
3. … - getting to the heart of the matter.
4. … - where the blog is the box.
5. … - the podcast that brings the soapbox to you.
6. … - bringing out the soap inside you.
7. … - gettin’ soapy wit it.
8. … - the platform for people to be real and be heard!
9. … - [open to something completely different!]
What do you think? My daughter and I like #4, my hubby likes #1, and my son loves (and came up with) #6. Feel free to write in your own!
But even more importantly, please tune in on Tuesday!
I’m thrilled to say that my tween daughter and I were selected to be guest post writers (and photographers!) by Pete over at My GPS Camera Phone.
Pete has an amazing, unique blog in which he inspires people to use their camera phones creatively and freely without hesitation or intimidation. Those teeny cameras within your cell phones can make better pictures than you might think. Click here to see one of my favorites. Spend some time on Pete’s blog and you’ll find video tutorials along with plenty of beautiful examples.
After following his blog for a while, I was inspired to look at my phone in a whole new way. Now I snap pictures whenever I see something that strikes me in an interesting way, whatever it may be, even just a basketball net:
Pete will show you how to manipulate and improve the photos after you get them out of your camera. Just look at what Pete does with his then go out and make some beauties of your own.
Do you subscribe to your favorite websites? Do you know that some people believe that subscriptions in readers may be things of the past? One of the stars of the web, Guy Kawasaki , has come up with a compelling way to more efficiently scan the top headlines from the top blogs, categorized by topic. It’s another of his many innovative websites and it’s called Alltop . What’s up with the name? Well, in Kawasaki’s words, Alltop compiles all the top stories from around the web in about 50 of the most sought after categories (e.g., moms, dads, politics).
You’ll easily stay current and know what everyone’s talking about in whatever topics you find most interesting or relevant to your life.
The home page looks refreshingly clean, with eight main topic headings (work , living , people , interests , culture , geekery , good , and news ). So the site is great for experienced surfers as well as casual novices.
As of today, you can see the Alltop badge over there on the right because I’m honored to find this humble blog among the many mom blogs . Visit Alltop . Browse through the many categories and I’d be surprised if you’re not hooked with that first click.
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UPDATE (4.11.08): For more info about Alltop from the top of Alltop , read Jarrett Martineau’s interview with Guy Kawasaki here .
If you like Epicurious, you’re going to love an amazing new feature provided by their partner, Tastebook.
If you aren’t yet familiar with either one, here’s the deal. Epicurious is a comprehensive site for cooks, filled with recipes from Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines.
The site includes a terrific search tool that can be used many ways. For example, you could enter the title of a recipe that you saw in Bon Appetit. Or you could enter a few items you have on hand and it will spit out pages of recipes with those ingredients.
So, let’s say that one day you’re wondering what to make for dinner and you have plenty of, say, carrots, onions and chicken on hand. You’d enter those ingredients and find 440 recipes, like these:
Pot Roast with Caramelized Onions and Roasted Carrots
Curried Chicken Soup with Carrots
Poulet a la Farmiere (Gratineed Chicken in Cream Sauce)
Or, if you want to make a dessert and you have chocolate, sugar, eggs and cream. Enter those words and you’d get 757 recipes on 76 pages with things like this:
Chocolate Pots de Creme with White Chocolate Whipped Cream
(I’ve made that one — it’s fabulous and really easy!!)
But, maybe you don’t have white chocolate…so try a different, yet similar recipe like this one:
You can also search for recipes to find situation-specific recipes. For example, if you want to make baked french toast that you prepare the night before then put in the oven in the morning (say, for Christmas morning or New Year’s Day), you could make something like this:
I found that recipe by going to the advanced search tool, then selecting “Breakfast“ in the “meal/course” category, then clicking “submit” to get 813 results. Then I narrowed the search results by entering “cranberries” and “french toast” in the box on the left that says “search within results.”
Well, you get the idea…
If you want to rely on member reviews, you can prioritize your findings by fork rating (the rating system used by members), which I find to be helpful and fairly reliable. Member reviews give you a sense of how well the recipe really works and usually include helpful suggestions. You can also select specific reviews that you find particularly helpful and print them (along with the recipe) for your files.
Those are just a few of the features of Epicurious. If you’re more of a weekly meal planner, you can browse the gazillion recipes on the site, then save your favorites to your recipe box (which you get just by registering on the site). And, yes, they have a category under “Recipes & Menus” called “quick & easy.”
Here’s where it starts to get really good…
After you have recipes saved in your recipe box, you can then use this new service from their partner site called Tastebook and print up to 100 recipes in a beautiful, hardcover cookbook.
Yes, you’re going to pay for the cookbook, but you’ll get a personalized, custom made cookbook AND you can include some of your own favorite recipes. So, if you have a family recipe handed down from Aunt Sue, you can type it in, add a photo (hey, while you’re at it, include a picture of your kids eating Aunt Sue’s Ambrosia!), and voila! right next to La Bette Noire, you’ll see Aunt Sue’s Ambrosia!!
I am so excited about the possibilities of Tastebook. I could make a personalized cookbook to give to my best friend (who loves to cook and is quite proud of many of her recipes but also loves many of the Epicurious recipes). You could give it to your daughter as she goes off to college so that she’ll have the recipe for your amazing chili (and a picture of her eating it). These books would also be amazing gifts for newlyweds or new parents, filled with easy to make recipes or kid-friendly treats.
You select from 40 gorgeous covers and customize it with your choice of title. Here’s an example of one of the cover choices:
It says “Stealthy Healthy” right now, but you can customize that cover to make it say whatever you want. You can keep trying different covers until you find the one you like. Stealthy Healthy is one of the many cookbooks that Tastebook has created (that particular book includes 50 recipes). You can select any (or all!) of those 50 recipes to include in your customized cookbook. Other cookbooks you can select recipes from include some created by online bloggers (!), like 101 Cookbooks and Simply Recipes.
You don’t have to select all 100 right away, you can do some now and add more later. The book functions like a binder, so you can snap it open and remove or add pages. That feature is helpful for cooking, too.
It’s really amazing! If you like to cook (or know someone who does) you just have to check out the website to get a better sense of the possibilities.
Personally, I can’t wait to create my first custom cookbook!
I love kitchens. I don’t know what it is about them, but I love great kitchens. It’s not because I’m some wunder-chef (far from it!). I just love the ambience of a good kitchen. Whenever you go to a party in someone’s home, isn’t that where people congregate? Or just on a daily basis, think about how much time we spend in our kitchens.
But there’s one thing in particular that I really appreciate within a kitchen and that’s the faucet. I have this thing with faucets. Here’s my favorite:
It’s made by a company called Dornbracht . You just have to feel this faucet in your hands. It’s extraordinary. Someone once told me that they’re the company that all the other faucet companies copy. This one (pictured above), the Tara Classic, won a couple of awards for design and quality excellence.
They also do faucets for bathrooms.
Speaking of bathrooms, I have the same attraction to faucets in bathrooms, particularly in restaurants. If the bathrooms have a great faucet, I’ll leave with a smile on my face. They can be so cool, you know? Sometimes substantial and strong, stylish and gorgeous.
I’m so excited about a website our friends told us about last night.
It’s called Free Rice and it looks like this:
It’s great for your (older) kids, but don’t be surprised if you join in and try it, too. But be warned: it might be hard to stop.
Here’s how it works:
They give you a word and four other words beneath it. Then, you choose which of the four words most accurately defines or describes the first word. The site tracks each right answer and increases the degree of difficulty to keep you (or your kids) at the right level.
But here’s the best part: for each right answer, they’ll* donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.
Wanna try it?
Just click the picture (below) or go to freerice.com.
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*The rice is paid for by adverstisers/sponsors of the Free Rice website. So you don’t have to contribute a cent. It’s fun! Give it a try! And I’m not getting anything for telling you about it either. I just think it’s cool and worth a look!
Today, I was out and about, running errands and browsing through some of my favorite shops when I found these great little, sleek, chic wallet clutches made by Lodis:
They’re sturdy and get the job done in a whimsical, stylish way. It’s bubble printed, patent leather and snaps open with a push of your thumb. Inside, you’ll find 14 credit card slots and a zippered coin compartment. Nordstrom sells them, but if you go to their website, you can enter in your location and they’ll tell you where to buy one.
It’s a great find!
And I hope you do, too! Cre8Buzz has been nominated for a Mashable Open Web Award in the category, “Best Niche or Miscellaneous Social Network.” So, please support this wonderful community by clicking on this button, scrolling down until you see that category and voting for cre8Buzz. It’s that easy!
If you haven’t heard about cre8Buzz yet, it’s a community of interesting people who are not primarily young folks in college. It includes moms & dads, political pundits, talented writers, photographers, hobbyists and so much more.
Cre8Buzz has opened up a whole new world to me as a blogger. It’s a world of supportive, funny, interesting people who are interested in the substance of my blogs and who will tell me what they think (good or bad) about what I have to say. I can count on the members of that community to comment on my posts, listen to my radio show and just ask me how I’m doing on any particular day.
I’ve seen nothing like it on the web. I’m so grateful to have become a part of cre8Buzz and would love to show my support in any way I can. If you have something to share, check it out and see what you think. If you’d like to join, let me know and I can hook you up with an invitation. Or, if you don’t want to join but you like what you see, please vote (just click on that button!).
Holiday shopping often leaves me wondering whether kids have too many toys. The answer is always, “YES!” I would really rather see books on their wish lists. Then I start thinking, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be great if some of their favorite characters could be in books that seem like toys?” Then I could feel good buying this sort of book/toy, knowing that they would actually spend a lot of time with it, look forward to using it and really enjoy it.
Well, take a look at this great electronic book, called the Disney Princess Talking Dictionary.
If your child loves the Disney Princesses, she’ll love this electronic book (and so will you!). Look at that electronic keypad on the right side of the book — it is so fun and inviting, the kids will go right to those buttons and push and push. You know how they always do that with these types of books? But this one will give them much more than a beeping car, it will let them spell out English words, tell them what they’ve just spelled (along with its definition) and if they push the “Spanish” button, it will also tell them the Spanish equivalent of the English word. Who knew an English/Spanish dictionary could be so fun!!?
But there’s more — the book part of this electronic book! The pages of the Talking Dictionary (just to the left of the keypad) are filled with four, five or six definitions on each page. Color illustrations accompany each definition, as well as a contextual sentence and then the same sentence in Spanish. I especially loved that last feature. With it, a child sees the word used in both an English and a Spanish sentence. So the book is great for English speaking kids who are learning Spanish as well as Spanish speaking children for whom English is a second language.
Each word, by the way, is presented in clear, black uppercase letters on a tastefully designed pink (or blue) ribbon, with a light blue (or pink) oval near it that spells out its Spanish equivalent in lower case print.
It’s a great way to interact with your child (while she views her favorite characters and has fun with those buttons). As I mentioned earlier, this book will really appeal to kids who are right at that age when they can’t get enough responsive buttons. So your child will be happy to play with it, and you’ll be happy that she’s actually learning something rather than just hearing a car zooming or a cymbal clashing.
Here’s an example: press “B” “E” “D” and you’ll hear each letter after each push. Then, a gentle push of the purple “Spanish” button would give you this: “In English, we say ‘bed.’ In Spanish, we say, ‘cama‘ ” while your child follows along in the book. Push the blue “Definition” button and you’ll hear “Bed — furniture made especially for resting and sleeping,” followed by a brief and pleasant lullaby jingle. The speakers of the electronic keypad have an average sound-quality for books of this type. So don’t expect hi-def sound with that jingle, but the words, letters and sentences are clearly spoken and audible.
Now remember, this is not just an electronic toy. As she holds it in her lap, your child will see a picture of a bed, a blue ribbon with the word “BED” and a pink oval with the word “cama” next to it. Underneath the ribbon, you’ll see the definition, “Furniture made especially for resting and sleeping” then an English contextual sentence, “Each Dwarf has a tiny bed” and its Spanish equivalent, “Cada Enanito tiene una cama muy pequena.”
This book will feel like a book to you, but to your child it will be an exciting, interactive toy. We consider this a must have for any family with a child who loves the Disney princesses. It’s a great way to introduce another language or to support an already established learning program. Why settle for a basic princess book or a doll when you can have so much more with this product?!
Oh, and we wanted to mention that we especially love the Mulan definiton, “Mulan: a heroic woman who saves her country.” My kids have watched that movie so many times! They would love to hear that definition when they push the button, followed by my reading the next sentence, “The Emperor praises Mulan for defeating Shan-Yu.”
We’re excited about this book!! It provides so much interactive fun for you to share with your child and, for those times when you have to tend to other mom duties, your child will enjoy exploring it independently. It’s quite a find!
Speaking of finding it, you can often find these electronic books in your local Target, Wal-mart, Toys R Us, Costco, Sam’s Club or BJs, but if they’re sold out, you can also buy them online.
When I went to their site (click on “Shop Now” in the lower right corner of the home page), I was delighted to find that they publish these electronic books with far more characters than just the Disney Princesses. In fact they showed 79 titles in the category they call, “Electronic Books.” Just look for that heading and you’ll see familiar names, like Dora, Diego, Elmo, The Wiggles, Scooby Doo, Sesame Street, Little Einstein and Thomas the Tank Engine. And it’s not just bilingual dictionaries.
Look at this Sponge Bob book, ideal for older kids (K-Grade 2)!
Sponge Bob’s Sea Sale
We also recommend the book called, Learn to Write with Disney Friends because it is another well made, fun interactive electronic book. With this book, your child holds a large yellow stylus (or writing instrument) as she hears spoken letters, a variety of sound effects, words, and instructions.
For example, when she presses the “Aa” key, your child will hear ” ‘A’ [whistles] ‘A’ is the first letter of apple
[crunching sound of person biting into apple is heard three times, then...]. Write the letter ‘A’ on the pad.” The voice is clear and easy to understand.
While she hears that voice, your child looks into the screen in the upper right corner of the book (or the top of the giant pencil) and sees the letter being written, followed by an animated picture of an apple. Then, as she hears the crunching sounds, the apple appears to actually have a couple of bites taken out of it, then it slides to the left and another apple slides in, gets bitten, and another until a whole apple remains briefly on the screen. You (or your child) can select either “CAPITAL” or “small” letters to be drawn on the screen.
We found it very clever that the animation takes place in what is really the eraser part of the giant pencil/electronic control board and that the pencil tip acts as the eraser tool for the writing board at the bottom (the tablet area below the pencil tip). This is really a fun, educational book that’s well designed and ready to go right when the child opens it. Great gift!
Last of all, we reviewed a Disney Sing-Along book that would be great for any young child who loves to hear short electronic tunes and loves to push buttons.
We believe this book will be best when an adult can play along with a youngster. The way it works is that you have a simple key pad in the lower right corner of the book, with only nine buttons. Your child can choose from forty tunes, each of which has a corresponding code. So, for example, to hear (and sing along with) “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” you enter the code C34 and with each push you hear a young princess-type voice responding to your touch. In the three mirrored stars above the buttons, you’ll see Ariel, Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) and Cinderella, alternatively. When no song plays, the stars are just mirrors, but when the song plays, the pictures of the princesses light up within the stars. Kids will love this magical feature!!
At the bottom of the keypad, on either side of the speaker, you’ll find a star button with clapping hands inside it (pushing it yields an applause sound) and a star button filled with a fireworks graphic (with majestic princessy music that sounds as if you’re about to introduce a star performer).
We recommend this book for younger hams in the family, whose little fingers would love to grab the easy to manage plastic microphone. Preschool or younger for this one.
All in all, our bottom line is that you can’t go wrong with these electronic books from PI kids. Look for them today (or buy them by clicking here) and mark one more thing off your list!
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Note: We found Sponge Bob’s Sea Sale in a local book shop. The Disney Princess Talking Dictionary (publications international, ltd.) was sent to us for our review along with the Disney Princess Sing-Along and Learn to Write with Disney Friends. We give the highest recommendation to the Talking Dictionaries.
