My parents didn’t love me, so I never got braces
Oct 31, 2010 Uncategorized
This post was commissioned by the American Association of Orthodontists.
OK, how’s that for a headline? It’s only half true, of course. My parents did (and do) love me very much. And in fact, when I was a kid I was thrilled not to have braces, because everyone I knew who had them hated them. And for whatever reason, I never got braces. But now I’m an adult who absolutely hates her smile. I’m almost glad that I have such a big overbite, because at least it mostly hides my hideous bottom teeth. But my top front teeth are crooked too.
My kids are six and nine, and I’ve been thinking about orthodontia more often lately. Both kids have lost some teeth, but something happened with Fiona’s last lost tooth that really had me wondering if I should take her to an orthodontist: an adult tooth came in almost all the way, far behind the row of bottom teeth, before the loose tooth came out! As far as I know, that’s not supposed to happen. According to the AAO, kids should first see an orthodontist no later than age seven. Oops, sounds like I have to make an appointment for both kids ASAP.
I was dreading putting my kids in braces some day. There was only one option back when I was a kid: big and metal and on the front of the teeth. Until I checked out the AAO site I hadn’t realized how many different kinds there are now. From their site:
Today’s braces may be nearly invisible, made from clear plastic, or unseen, mounted on the back (lingual) side of the teeth.
Plus, I’ve seen teens wearing really bright colored braces too, almost like fashion accessories (remember the mean girls making fun of Miranda’s plain braces on Sex and the City?). I happened to spend the other night with a friend in D.C., and her daughter showed me her braces: she’d had the little rubber bands changed to orange and black for Halloween! In fact she gets them changed for sporting events, holidays, and other special occasions too. She was actually really excited about it. So it seems that getting braces might not be the huge nightmare it was when I was a kid.
Plus, maybe there’s hope for my smile yet: according to the site, one in five orthodontia patients is an adult. :-)
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 13. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
The Rally to Restore Sanity – the signs
Oct 31, 2010 What's Going On
So here I am, waiting for the rally to start on a train back to NYC back home after spending the day at the Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington, D.C. Was sanity restored? That’s a question I’ll tackle when I’ve had more sleep & showered off the rest of the Port-O-Potty. For now, here are the signs that I saw at the rally.
The Comedians
The Satirists
The Optimists
The Enthusiasts
The Stoners
The Thinkers
The Critics
????
And I’ll just leave you with one final thought…
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn,Behind the Screen, and Momtourage.
Tags: Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, The National Mall, Washington D.C.
Win one of ten (!) $25 gifts from Blurb.com, and make your own book!
Oct 26, 2010 Contest/Giveaway
I am one of those people who has a million pictures of my family and never gets around to doing anything with them. I mean, I have plans when I take them. I envision scrapbooks, or photo albums, or even big framed collages. The problem with all of those is that they involve actual, physical pictures, and all of mine are in digital form, spread out over several computers. The last time I sent pictures to my mom was when she literally begged me, telling me how she didn’t have any recent pictures of her grandchildren at all. Oh, the guilt!
Blurb.com is going to change all of that for me. They gave me a $25 gift code to play around with, which is enough to make a hardcover, 20 page book (not including shipping and taxes) – and that’s nowhere near the least expensive option. There are sizes, cover options and page options to fit any budget.
I just uploaded a dozen pictures and put them quickly and easily into an album. I used their new Bookify feature, which works online. This is incredibly handy for several reasons: I don’t have to download yet another program; I can use it from different computers (since my pictures aren’t all on one computer); and my other family members can sign into my book and upload their own pictures. That last one is my favorite feature, especially since I’m going to become an aunt in about six weeks (yay!) and I’m going to leave a couple pages at the end of the book for baby pictures. My sister will be able to upload the pictures easily, and then we’ll be good to go with ordering the book in plenty of time for Christmas!
If you’ve got your pictures on Flickr you’re even able to grab them straight from there (or from something called SmugMug, a paid photo sharing site). You can upload jpgs up to 10 megabytes each. Once they’re uploaded there are a number of ways to make your book: you can practically have the site make it for you, arranging all of your pictures, or you can customize it using very intuitive tools (if you need help there are plenty of tutorials to help you get the most out of the site). You can do simple picture editing on the site (zoom, rotate, etc.). You can even make a custom cover.
When you save your book you give your email address and create a password. I’m going to give that login information to my family members so that they can upload their pictures as well. In the end we’re going to have a thoughtful, easy, very affordable gift for my grandmother, who is 94 years old and just loves looking at family photos. And if we want to give the book to anyone else we can order multiple copies. I still cannot believe how easy this was, and I’ll be sure to share the results with you after I get my first book!
The giveaway
To enter to win one of ten $25 gift codes to use toward a Blurb.com purchase, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post telling me which of these books you would make, or what you would use it for (a gift for your mom, a coffee table book of your favorite photos, etc.).
For a second entry, you may tweet about this contest with a link back to this page. Or, you can copy and tweet the following:
Want to make your own book? @SelfishMom is giving away 10(!) $25 gift codes to use on Blurb.com! Check it out here: http://bit.ly/99WW8I
Make sure to leave a second comment with a link to your tweet, or it won’t count (instructions on how to find and post the url of your tweet can be found here).
So, that’s a maximum of two entries per household please! This contest will close at noon-ish on Friday, October 29th and the winners will be chosen by random.org. Gift codes cannot be combined with any other discount or coupon. Each entrant may only win a maximum of one gift code. Must be at least 18 years of age to enter. See my complete Giveaway Rules page for more information.
But that’s not all: 25% off of a Blurb.com order for everybody!
Besides the great giveaway, Blurb.com is also giving everyone 25% off of an order until November 2nd! (11:59 pm Pacific time to be exact.) Just enter BOOKIFY at checkout to receive 25% off your product total of $12.95 or more. (Maximum discount is US $200.00 off product total. This offer is good for one-time use and cannot be combined with other promotional codes, offers, gift cards, or used for adjustments on previous codes.)
Remember, if you don’t win the giveaway, you’ll still have four days to make a book and check out using the BOOKIFY discount code.
So now you have no excuse: it’s easy, there are a wide range of prices and styles, and your mother will finally stop calling you begging for pictures. :-)
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 10 & 11. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn,Behind the Screen, and Momtourage.
Tags: Blurb, Bookify, custom photo book, Flickr
When kids play with food, Wisk saves the day!
Oct 25, 2010 Uncategorized
The following post was commissioned by Wisk.
Last month I showed you – or rather Jake the scientist showed you – how Wisk tackles grass stains. Once again the folks at Wisk provided me with all the tools I needed to do another laundry experiment. This time out we were playing with carbohydrates, which are not just the white foods I love so much like potatoes and pasta. Many condiments, which are very likely to end up on shirts in our house, are also made from carbohydrates. So, in one of those magic moments my kids live for, I told them to come help me out by painting a shirt with ketchup.
Once the food painting and ketchup licking was finished, their job was done, and after letting the ketchup soak in for a few minutes I poured some Wisk onto the stain and rubbed it in. After five minutes I rinsed the shirt under warm water, and you can see for yourself what happened:
There was just the very very faintest pink left where the stain was, and after putting it in the wash with some Wisk the stain was completely, totally, brand-new-white-shirt gone.
If you’re like me you’ve got clothes that you’ve thrown out because they got a big ugly stain on them that you couldn’t get out. Next time that happens to me I’m going to remember to tackle the stain with Wisk, and hopefully I won’t be losing any more clothes to the heartbreak of drippy French fries.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 2. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Tags: beta blogger, detergent, stains, Wisk
Disney Social Media Moms Celebration – twitter is the key!
Oct 22, 2010 Blog & Social Media Stuff
Last February I attended the first ever Disney Social Media Moms Celebration at Disney World, and I’m sorry to resort to cliche, but it fits: it was a magical experience. For not much more than the cost of an ordinary mom-blogger conference, three nights in a Disney resort were included, as well as resort tickets for my whole family and many meals and activities. We were also given special media passes which allowed us to get instant-access tickets to any of the rides that have the fast-pass option, which was fantastic because it allowed me to go on a lot of rides with my kids in the limited non-session time that I had at the parks. And of course, the sessions themselves were top-notch, from the speakers to the topics. It was all fabulous.
And it was invite-only, so when asked about my favorite conferences I usually don’t even include it, because it was more like a big party, not a conference that’s open to anyone. This year, however, it looks like it’s being opened up to everyone, and that’s a big source of confusion for a lot of people. The dormant #DisneySMMoms hashtag came to life recently with conference hopefuls searching for information about how to get invited to this year’s conference. There wasn’t any concrete, reliable information out there, although enough people were sort-of in the know that some info could be cobbled together that had the whiff of reliability.
Then yesterday, a select few (hundred? thousand?) got a “Save the Date” email from Disney, letting them know the conference dates (March 17-20, 2011) and stating that the conference would be first-registered first-served, and that another email would go out sometime in the future with registration information. What that email didn’t say was whether only people who had these emails would be able to register, or if registration would open instantly to everyone once those emails when out. So if you look over the #DisneySMMoms tweets from yesterday you can see the division between the excited people who got what they thought was a “Golden Ticket” email and the sad people who didn’t.
However, I have it from one of the organizers, Maria Bailey, that registration will be open to everyone. According to Maria, all anyone has to do is follow the conference’s official twitter account, DisneySMMoms, which will tweet out the registration info when the emails go out. This seems to indicate that registration really will be open to absolutely everyone. And this isn’t a secret: Maria said so herself on her own twitter account, which you should also follow if you want reliable information about the conference.
So, who knows if things will change, it’s all still being planned. But to those people who didn’t get on a list or get an email yesterday, it doesn’t seem to matter. Keep watching twitter, which is appropriate when you think about it, since this is a social media conference!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 1. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Ralph Lauren & me
Oct 20, 2010 Product Review
I’m very excited to announce that for the next few months I’ll be participating in a blogger campaign for Ralph Lauren. Yup, fashion. Me. I’m always totally out of my comfort zone when I talk about fashion. I spend most of my days in jeans or sweats and come close to panic when I have to get dressed for a special occasion or event. So, I’m hoping that my participation in the campaign will get me a little closer to fashionable.
Ralph Lauren is one of those companies that used to intimidate me.
Polo matches, galas, big libraries with lots of wood – it’s not my world. But of course, that image is aspirational. I was fortunate enough to attend a reception at the Ralph Lauren offices this summer 
and learned that Ralph Lauren is actually Ralph Lifshitz from the Bronx, and never formally studied fashion. He’s self-made. That’s really endearing and not anywhere near as intimidating as the image I’d had in my head.
The library/meeting space at Ralph Lauren looks exactly how you’d think it would look: lots of polished wood and plaid. Here was my impression of how a rich, Ralph Lauren wearing, charity gala going woman would sit in the Ralph Lauren library, looking as disaffected as possible (sorry, I couldn’t resist):
But after spending an evening with some of the people who work at Ralph Lauren – including his son David Lauren – I realized that there’s no reason to be intimidated by this company. Their kids clothes, especially, are adorable – not stuffy or stuck-up at all, just classic.
Plus, I love that the company is using its name and reach to raise money for breast cancer treatment and research through the Pink Pony Fund. 100% of the net proceeds from their current online auction go to the fund, as well as 10% of the proceeds from Pink Pony products. There are some really fabulous items up for grabs on the auction, not that I can afford any of them! But at least the money goes to charity, and that’s always a good thing.
I am a participant in a Mom Central Consulting campaign for Ralph Lauren and have received various Ralph Lauren products as part of my participation.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 8. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and Momtourage.
Tags: Pink Pony Fund, Polo, Ralph Lauren
Win a Staples gift card
Oct 20, 2010 Contest/Giveaway, Product Review
I am a frequent Staples shopper. I go there for everything from printer paper to copies (very handily set up and ordered online) to ink to school supplies to home organization items. Frankly I don’t like shopping all that much. I know it’s hard to believe, but I don’t. I like getting things and having things but I don’t like the actual act of going to a store. So it’s a win for me when I can get as many things as possible in one place, and Staples is great for that.
Staples sent me a selection of their products, and even though I’ve been to the store more times than I can count, some of them were a complete surprise. For example the small electronics section is something that I usually skip. And honestly, even if I had seen this Omnitech Mini Speaker in the store, I would have passed right by it because what kind of speaker would actually work well for $9.99? But oh my God, I couldn’t believe the sound that came out of this little thing! Not only do I use it with my laptops (which are never loud enough when I’m watching Hulu), but I also use it with my Zune and my Droid (it has a rechargeable battery inside that you can charge up on your laptop via USB so that it has juice for the smaller electronics). Plus, I’ve been the hero at a couple of meetings already where the presenter thought that an entire table of people would be able to hear audio from laptop speakers. It’s so tiny and portable and the sound is great and did I mention it’s only $9.99?!?
The bright, colorful notebooks and binders are also items that I’ve pretty much ignored up until now, since my kids are in elementary school and still have supply lists filled with plain folders and those black-and-white marble notebooks. In fact, when my daughter saw these she was crushed that she wouldn’t be allowed to use them for school, so she uses them at home when she plays school (yes, she plays school, giving herself homework assignments that she does after her regular homework…I don’t know where she came from). The notebooks that I was sent are from a Staples line called DoSomething.org – Staples has teamed up with the popular social cause website to help teens fund volunteer and school programs. There are links and suggestions inside the notebooks to help teens get involved. So, you know, maybe when they’re not facebooking and texting and being cool and apathetic they can help somebody.
Staples has given me a $25 gift card to give away to a lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is leave a comment on this post telling me what you would buy at Staples with $25. Personally, I would buy two more of those Omnitech speakers for gifts, then some pens because I can never find a pen when I need one.
For a second entry, you may tweet about this contest with a link back to this page. Or, you can copy and tweet the following:
Want to win a #Staples gift card from @SelfishMom? Enter here: http://bit.ly/b1hIke
Make sure to leave a second comment with a link to your tweet, or it won’t count (instructions on how to find and post the url of your tweet can be found here).
So, that’s a maximum of two entries per household please! This contest will close at noon-ish on Wednesday, October 27th and the winners will be chosen by random.org. Prize can be shipped only within the continental United States. Must be at least 18 years of age to enter. See my complete Giveaway Rules page for more information.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Laptop advice & more from Ben the PC Guy
Oct 20, 2010 Blog & Social Media Stuff
The Blogging Angels – Rebecca, Nancy, Heidi, and I – have been plugging along for nine podcasts now, tackling everything from conferences and swag to advertising and rude commenters. I would have been happy with our little project if it simply gave me an excuse to talk more while hanging out with friends, but it’s growing into something much bigger than the four of us. And I still get to talk more and hang out with friends. :-)
I’m very excited that for our ninth Blogging Angels podcast, we had our first guests: Ben “The PC Guy” Rudolph, and Lisa Worthington. Both work for one of my favorite companies, Microsoft, and had some fantastic advice, including great laptops and netbooks for bloggers, how to work with brands, and how to balance how much you share from your home life on your professional blog. I’d love it if you take a listen! And if you have any ideas for future podcasts, please leave a comment and we’ll definitely consider it (and give you a shout out if we end up doing it).
The Blogging Angels’ ninth podcast: We are so PC!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
