Are you a parent? Do you know CPR? If you don’t, you’re putting your children in danger. That sounds mean and scary and that’s not what I’m going for but, really, it’s the truth.

My husband is a paramedic as well as a professional firefighter. I have heard him recount story upon story regarding the importance of CPR. I am certified myself. Why? I mean, he’s a paramedic. Shouldn’t one parent in the house knowing what to do be enough? Not quite. You see, professional firefighters and paramedics often keep a unique schedule, working 24 hours at a time followed by 48 hours off. If we’ve learned anything it is that bad things only happen when FireDad is at work for 24 hours. That’s the way life works. As such, it was important for me to know what to do in the case of an emergency.

However, finding a class that also worked with our schedule was somewhat difficult for our family. The American Heart Association now wants you to know that you can learn CPR in the comfort of your own home with their program: CPR Anytime. It is a self-directed course that basically lets you learn CPR in 22 minutes. The kit comes with an inflatable and reusable mannequin as well as a DVD for instruction. They do have an infant kit (for children under the age of one) and a separate child/adult kit. (Why? CPR for infants is different than CPR for children over the age of one and adults. Important to know.) While the home kit doesn’t give you certification, the point is that the more you practice CPR, the better you will be able to handle a situation in which CPR is necessary. Practicing it a few times during a class doesn’t really give you enough to go on when a crisis situation arises.

Who would this be great for? Moms and Dads, whether you’re at home or working outside the home. If an emergency happens on your watch, knowing what to do is important. If your babysitter is not CPR certified, first off, it wouldn’t hurt you to pay for them to take the class. Second of all, a refresher with your babysitter wouldn’t hurt either. Anyone who cares for your child could benefit from using it as well as anyone who cares for an older individual. Basically, this is one thing that almost anyone could benefit from as keeping your family and friends safe in an emergency is usually a beneficial thing!

You can learn more about the kits at the American Heart Association’s website. The FireFamily gives this a full endorsement. Do it. Now.

[Thanks to Mom Central for including us in this important blog tour.]

When MomCentral asked if I wanted to review Listerine’s new cavity fighting mouthwash, Total Care, I kind of giggled. My mother-in-law works for a dentist office. She does things like fill my “groovy” teeth, as she and my dentist refer to them. You see, it’s not that I don’t care for my teeth. I do. It’s just that I have extra grooves and such in my teeth, making them succeptible to things like… sigh… cavities.

And so when my mother-in-law approves a product, I listen. And she approves of Listerine. As such, we’ve always had some in our house. We didn’t yet have the new Listerine Total Care in house yet so I was excited to get it. Also, the purple color made me happy!

First and foremost, I’m a mouth wuss. I can give birth to children but mouth pain, even in the form of mouthwash, is not my bag of chips. However, this Listerine isn’t what I would call “super burn-y” or too powerful for my wussy mouth. I was able to keep it in my mouth for the full, suggested one minute, “vigorously” swishing it and telling myself that I was awesome! Second, I really like the taste. Different than the blue or orange flavors but equally good in its own way.

The nice thing about Total Care is that it’s not just for cavities (though it is!). It does six things:

1. Helps to prevent cavities.
2. Restores enamel.
3. Strengthens teeth.
4. Kills bad breath germs.
5. Freshens breath.
6. Fights unsightly plaque above the gum line.

And, so, even if you don’t have groovy teeth, like me, this stuff can be of benefit to your oral hygiene care! And, plus, if my mother-in-law recommends it, you’re in good care. Swish up!

The new Listerine Total Care can be purchased for anywhere from just over $3.00 to just over $6.00. And if you’re using the recommended two teaspoonfuls (and not too much), it will last you awhile! That’s something that works for me in this economy!

When Mom Central let me know that Johnson’s No More Tears was turning 50, I chuckled. I grew up being bathed in the stuff. I watched my mom and aunts bathe my brother and cousins in it. And I now use Johnson’s wash on my kids. So when I was asked to review some stuff by Johnson’s, I knew I’d be getting some good quality stuff.

But I didn’t know how much I would love it.

We were sent some Head-to-Toe foaming body wash and some Bubble Bath & Wash. Of the two, I am in absolute love with the bubble bath & wash. Why? The scent. I absolutely love running a bath for my boys right now. As they finish up their evening snack, I run off to the bathroom and start the warm water. As I put some of the bubble bath slash wash into the running water, the scent that fills the room is heavenly. I can’t quite explain it. You can’t blog a smell except to say that it smells like happy babies in a tub. After I turn off the water, I retrieve the children and corral them off to their rooms to remove clothing. By this time, the scent of the bubbles has wafted into the hallway… and by the end of the bath? The whole first floor smells lovely.

Oh, and it cleans my kids without making them cry. I shouldn’t probably mention that as an aside. It’s true though. It doesn’t bother their skin and my youngest son has horribly sensitive skin all over whereas my older son only has a few patches of sensitive skin. Since using these two new products, there has been no irritation. I’ve been pleased. Plus, when my house smells that lovely, it’s easy to please me.

I also have to tell you something spiffy about the foaming wash. Well, two things. First off, BigBrother laughs when we use this wash as he says it’s like “washing with bubbles.” Secondly, the spout of the container turns to the side and thus clicks itself “off” so that the kids cannot randomly squirt it at one another. Also, FireDad has decided that it is also Dad proof. I laughed. But that just means that it travels to and from Grandma’s house without making a mess. Hurrah!

To celebrate their big 5-0, Johnson’s has launched a YouTube channel. (Oh, technology has hit everywhere, hasn’t it?) It’s a mix of expert advice with tips from moms. Like us. Win! Go check it out!

With all the different soaps available on the market, it can be hard to know which one to choose. You can be confident choosing Johnson’s products for your little ones as they have been around long enough to prove that they are trustworthy. And, seriously. That blue bubble bath? Heavenly. I think I may go soak in the tub myself…

We were sent some Yoplait Kids Yogurt for review. To be honest, there wasn’t much for us to review. BigBrother has been eating Yoplait Kids since he outgrew a yogurt for babies. (You know the one.) He runs to the fridge and exclaims and variation of words for yogurt. Gurt! O-Gurt! Randomly, E-gurt! And on occasion, Yo-gurt! He’s recently mastered holding the yogurt cup with one hand while spooning out the yogurt with the other. When he was first learning to do this, he pulled too hard on the spoon and got yogurt all over his forehead.

Okay, I digress. But it was a funny sight. (However, it’s not a totally jump. Yoplait has tips for letting kids learn to spoon-feed themselves right on their site! See. I knew what I was talking about!)

What’s so great about Yoplait kids? You mean, beyond the fact that they are decorated with Blues Clues, Dora or Diego? (Hey, when you’re fighting a food battle kid and he likes something healthy because it has a character on the front, well, you just don’t argue.) Yoplait Kids yogurts are smooth. No fruit chunks to provide choking hazards. Or, if you’re like my son, to spit out. (Things “in” food are a no-no for BigBrother.) The flavors of the traditional yogurt cups are good. No. Really. I once accidentally tasted the vanilla (Blues Clues) and then I finished eating it. (As a side note, I now eat Yo-Plus vanilla everyday.) The yogurt drink is in a small bottle but, I must admit, BigBrother isn’t in a bottle-holding-to-drink stage yet. It got a bit messy over here. I would assume by summer he’d be more able to handle such a thing. Until then, we’ll spoon out our yogurt!

Beyond that stuff, Yoplait Kids is nutritious. Don’t tell your kids but this yogurt has 25% less sugar than the average of leading “kids” yogurts. I don’t know about your kids but BigBrother doesn’t need an excess of sugar. Nope. Not at all. Less is good for this child. Beyond that, it’s a good source of calcium, vitamins A & D, and naturally occurring omega-3’s (DHA) for forming brains. Awesome.

Back to the yogurt drinks? Uhm, I drank them. They were good. I do feel it will be a great snack for BigBrother this summer when everything has to be done quickly so we can get back outside as soon as possible! We just need to work on the actual process of drinking something like that. Or buy straws. Yes!

All in all, we love Yoplait Kids Yogurt in this house. (And the adult brands, too.) BigBrother doesn’t have a wide range of tastes in food right now so I’m glad that he likes something that’s remotely healthy.

And now you can give it a try. Go to YoplaitKids.com and click on the “free coupon” button on the right hand side of your screen. It’s good for a free package of Yoplait Kids yogurt! Free is good! Healthy is good! Good is good! Good!

I’ve done a lot of dieting over the years. I’ve done some smart things. And some not-so-smart things. I’ve bought expensive stuff. I’ve tried the cheapie generic brands of the expensive stuff. I don’t enjoy the process of losing weight. However, I just had another baby and want to lose the weight. So, I jumped at the chance when the Parent Bloggers Network asked me to review The Ultimate Tea Diet by Mark “Dr. Tea” Ukra.

Before the book came in the mail, I was trying to figure out what the heck it could be about. I was hoping the book wasn’t going to say, “Drink tea only. Don’t eat. Just drink tea!” I figured that would also aid in some unhealthy weight loss but, as much as I love a glass of iced tea or a cup of hot tea, I also dig me some food. So I was pleasantly surprised to know that this book is not about cutting food out of your diet and replacing it with a beverage. It’s about adding tea to a health choice of foods and getting off your rear end.

Apparently tea has three super awesome things that, when placed together, make you lose weight. I’m sure you know one. Caffeine. You’ve gotta read the book for the other two. (I’m awful, no?)

I enjoyed reading this book. As a long time tea drinker, I enjoyed learning the history of tea, some really interesting facts and other information about tea. I learned what is and is not a tea. You know that chamomille that I used to drink before bed in college? Totally not a tea. It was a history lesson without feeling like “learning.”

What I really enjoyed were the recipes and meal plans in the back of the book. I’m not always that inventive in the kitchen so having new stuff, easy to make, right at my fingertips was a great resource. It takes this book from being a fad diet to a usable guide to weight loss! Of course, I can’t have the cinnamon roast hot todtea because I’m allergic to cinnamon but not every recipe called for cinnamon. Just for tea! That’s right. Every recipe, whether it is for breakfast, lunch or dinner, calls for you to add some tea. It’s an interesting way to look at cooking. Chicken tea soft tacos. Eggplant and sun-dried tomato tea chicken. Quick and easy tea hummus with whole-wheat pita. Those are just three of ones I’m most interested in!

To be honest with my readers, I haven’t yet made any of the recipes nor have I started the diet. I’m still too soon after birth to really get “in” to a diet. I’m thinking after he turns three or four months that this will be my first stop on the weight loss trail. Other than the gym. But just because I haven’t tried it doesn’t mean I think it’s a waste. The book offers a simple to follow plan. And this important advice:

If you say you can, you will; if you say you can’t, you won’t.

Amen. That’s advice to live by! I hope to come back by my brother’s wedding in August and tell you that The Tea Diet combined with normal exercise got me into that bridesmaid dress and made me feel awesome. I guess that will be my “final” review at that time. Until then, pick up the book and get cooking. And brewing some tea.

I agreed to review KINeSYS sunscreen shortly after my sunburn debacle. I was impressed by the oil and alcohol free parts that the product touted, having sensitive skin myself and a child that has shown some sensitivity to certain products. Prior to the arrival of this sunscreen, we had been using a few different brands of the continuous spray children’s sunscreens. While they worked well, BigBrother was not a fan of the sound of the spraying. I figured trying something new couldn’t hurt us. I mean, did you see my legs?

When I received the package of products to review, we were sent a small bottle of the Kids Funscreen Spray (30 SPF), the large bottle of the SPF 30+ Sunscreen Spray with Parsol, a small bottle of Funscreen cream lotion (30 SPF) and a face stick (30 SPF). Reading the back of each bottle, I was immediately turned off. Immediately. The directions read:

Spray liberally and evenly to all exposed areas 30 minutes before sun exposure. Goes on wet and will dry in 2 to 3 minutes.

Thirty minutes? Surely you don’t have a twenty-one month old child! I laughed to myself. Even though we apply our sunscreen before we go outside, right after a diaper change, we have a time limit set by our Kid Time Bomb of Doom. If we don’t get outside in about fifteen minutes, all heck is going to break loose. Seriously. He knows that when the sunscreen goes on, he’s going outside. And this kid loves to be outside. He automatically runs to the back door, repeating, “Ready, Ready,” while I say out loud each thing I am doing to round up our ourdoorsy type things. “Now Mommy is getting water for both of us. Say water.” “READY!” You get the idea.

To further confuse issues, the paper of information that the company sent with the products said to wait twenty minutes after application. That’s right, all the bottles say thirty minutes and the information says twenty. Which is right? I don’t know.

Curious, I grabbed the spray can of sunscreen that we are currently using. Amusingly, it says to allow fifteen minutes before sun exposure. I find that to be much more appropriate than a full half hour. That said, I somehow managed to deter my son for a full thirty minutes after application before going outside. He was not happy and it did not make me a Happy Mommy either. I should note that while it didn’t dry in two to three minutes, it dried relatively close to that amount of time. We used the SPF 30 with Parsol on our first trial run. The smell didn’t gross me out. I also sprayed myself down, giving it a decent feeling rating. I didn’t feel overly greasy. The smell is mango which is nice. Still sunscreen-y but vaguely different from others. I also applied the face stick to BigBrother’s ears, cheeks and nose. He didn’t seem to mind me pressing hard on his face to get it to actually apply but I can’t imagine that will always be the case. Do note that the face stick does not give a time to wait before sun exposure. This made me nervous.

We were outside for quite some time on our first test run. It should be noted that no one burned. However, I was sitting pondering when we should reapply the sunscreen. It says to reapply after two hours. Now, is that after two hours from application, which would be an hour and a half in the sun? Or after two hours in the sun, which would be two and a half hours after application? The instructions didn’t clarify. I don’t really know, so I went with the safe side and reapplied sunscreen to both of us after an hour and a half in the sun.

To say that we stayed in the shade or went inside to wait another half hour would be lying. We didn’t. We continued to play. Again, we did not burn, so maybe that says something for the product itself. Perhaps they were also playing on the safe side when they wrote their instructions. I don’t know. It’s a bit confusing to me!

We did use the product on two other occasions before this review was written up. No one has burned in the sun while wearing any of the KINeSYS products. I find that to be a good sign, personally! BigBrother might actually prefer the pump spray bottle of the KINeSYS products to the continuous spray bottles of other brands we have used. (He calls it water, by the way, which is how it feels to me when I’m applying. Seriously, not greasy. Good stuff for someone who breaks out at the hint of grease.) I do worry about all over and even application with a pump spray bottle but I do think I’m improving in my application skills.

I do find the price, listed on the website, to be a bit much: $15.00 for 4oz (the larger bottle) and $9.00 for the face stick. Then again, the face stick could really come in handy and I might legitimately pay that much. However, with how much you have to spray to get an all over application and considering that you need to be reapplying every two hours, $15.00 really might be out of reach for some families, especially ones with more than one child. However, if you’ve got some skin sensitivity issues in your family, like we do, it might well be worth the price.

As you might have read on our family blog, we’re actually on vacation this week in North Carolina. I’ll be interested to see how it reapplies when sand is involved and whether or not BigBrother will wait thirty full minutes before jumping up and playing. Again, I can see fifteen minutes to sit down and eat a sandwich but thirty minutes is an awfully long time to expect a child to wait when the sun and sand and sea are beckoning…

In the end, I might consider purchasing KINeSYS because of our continued skin issues. We didn’t have reactions. We didn’t burn. We’ve had reactions to other sunscreens. So, this one will go on our short list of ones that Don’t Make FireMom Break Out in Hives and ones that Don’t Turn Us Into Greasy Pigs.

Many thanks to the Parent Bloggers Network for the opportunity to review this product!

Sometimes things work out the way that they should, despite your own procrastination and inability to make a decision. I had been saying to my Husband, for months, that I needed a new razor. My old one wasn’t cutting it, literally, and frankly, I like new things. However, when I would stand in the razor aisle, I would get overwhelmed with choices and prices and colors and packaging and I would walk away, every time, empty handed.

Then I got a package in the mail from Vocalpoint! Imagine my surprise when it contained one Gillette Venus Breeze razor and one razor cartridge! (I also began to wonder if our house was bugged by marketing companies but that may just be my anxious/paranoid personality.) Amused, I set it in the bathroom, hoping to test it out sometime soon. It sat for a few days as my not-quite-as-smooth-as-they-could-be legs and armpits mocked me after every shower. Finally, I decided to perform a totally unscientific scientific experiment.

I shaved my left leg with my old razor which only has a small moisturizing strip. I shaved my right leg with the Venus Breeze which has a razor head that is completely surrounded by gel moisturizers. To note: I’m a lazy shaver and I have very sensitive skin. Even with my old razor and it’s insanely small moisturizing strip, I don’t use shaving creams or lotions of any kind. I shave solely with water. No soap either. Just water. So, each leg was going into this unscientific scientific experiment with the same things to offer: themselves.

I did not use any moisturizers after my shower. I did not want to taint my unscientific scientific experiment with another product. That evening, when my normal “five o’clock shadow” would normally be setting in, I had my Husband perform the final step of the unscientific scientific experiment. It will be known as the Touchy Feely Stage. I had him feel my left leg, shaved with the old razor, and then he felt my right leg, shaved with the new Venus Breeze. I asked him which leg felt smoother to the touch. He felt “against the grain.” He touched my knees, which are known bad spots for razors. Basically, he felt up my legs. (I think he liked this unscientific scientific experiment!)

The end result: he chose the right leg which was the one shaved with the Venus Breeze.

I can’t say that I’m surprised. The shaving process itself was immensely smoother than anything experienced with the old razor (a razor that I used to shout the accolades of upon buying it a few years ago). The shave gel bars didn’t make a “later” or cause any allergic reactions in my uber-sensitive skin so I was pleased. I was able to touch and feel as I shaved in the shower and immediately feel the difference from my other leg. Not only did the hair feel less present but the leg itself felt smoother.

That said, there are always drawbacks. Since this particular razor does not come with a holder for your shower wall and it has the smoothing-effect of shave gel bars, I’m not really all that ecstatic about the “mess.” After being used (and thus wet), the shave gel bars tend to drip for awhile as they dry. Laying it on a flat surface creates a sticky situation that I could really do without having to clean as a busy wife and mother. (However, I have cheated and have used my old razor’s hanging mechanism. Sadly, the goo has still streaked down the wall just under the holder. I still find this somewhat more sanitary.) As with anything new, the price is higher than my old razor and cartridges. Amazon.com lists the razor itself at $9.59 and a pack of eight cartridges at $23.21. I’m sure they are somewhat more reduced in your local discount store. I have now used the razor (everyday!) for an entire week and still have enough gel on the bars to last me for what I’m assuming will be two to three more weeks. (I’ll post an updated on that when I run out!)

However, price and messes be darned, I will continue to keep using this product. I just had it at camp with me where showering involves mostly cold water and a chilly breeze from the outside. Even shaving over big goosebumps, I did not cut myself, cause an allergic reaction or unslightly rash and was done shaving in record time. I would suggest this razor for anyone who has had previous problems with reactions to shave gels or just needs something to better take care of the hair problem.

That said, I have FOUR coupons, good for FOUR DOLLARS OFF a Gillette Venus Breeze razor. Please leave a comment on this post (simple “WoO!” will work) and I will select, randomly, a winner by Friday, July 27th at noon (EDT). Four dollars off is a great coupon deal!

(Also, if you’d like access to coupons and other small free items, consider signing up for Vocalpoint. I haven’t been disappointed yet. Free razors, coupons for Tide to Go and a box of cereal mark just a few things that I’ve received.)