Sponsored Review for MyLocker, Custom School Apparel Site

MyLocker.net is a website where you buy custom sports apparel. I assumed that meant designing my own logo and then choosing to have it printed on a tee shirt or sweatshirt, like on CafePress. But oh no, that’s not the case here at all. I don’t know how they did it, but somehow MyLocker.net ALREADY KNOWS the name of your school’s team and your school colors and can print it on sportswear for men, ladies, and kids, as well as on school football apparel, blankets, backpacks, hats, and more. They have over 110,000 individual online shops, people! Read the About My Locker page, which is really well written because it reads like someone is actually talking to you, to learn about how it started with printing custom blankets for a friend and, after a whole lot of hard work, became this awesome site.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I put in my zip code and the dropdown menu showed me the name of every school in my district. I can’t even imagine the work that MyLocker put in to creating a search engine that would do that, but then to also figure out not just the name but the school COLORS? I’m still just flabbergasted by it! Anyway, I picked our high school, and my page became my own personal School Apparel Shop-

I started looking through the sweatshirts and tee shirts, printed with sayings like “Waverly Diving” and “Warriors Soccer” and then I realized something that makes the site even MORE cool – I can edit the text on any of the items so it says exactly what I want it to say. So, I made this:

Seriously, how awesome is that?? And you know what that sweatshirt would cost me? THIRTY FIVE BUCKS plus shipping. I am so totally buying one!  Trust me and go to MyLocker.net and check it out for yourself, and not just because I got paid to review the site. Do it because it’s an awesome site unlike any I have seen in my six years online, and that’s saying a lot.

Free Reading Games for Preschoolers at GoGo Kabongo

GoGo Kabongo free games for preschool age kids develops cognitive skills while kids play fun free reading games. Kabongo games help kids develop the skills they will need to be better readers, including:

* Attention and Focus
* Memory Skills
* Processing
* Planning
* Visualization
* Comprehension

At Kabongo.com, parents create an account with an email address or Facebook account, create their child’s profile, and choose how many areas of the game, called habitats, their child will be able to access. Your child’s character is an alien skateboarder who hangs out in a cool treehouse. Once your child customizes their character (that’s Kaitlyn’s creation on the left), they can use the Map hanging on the treehouse wall to go to areas like Twister Top, Galaxy Gardens, and Laughter Lake. Laughter Lake is free, Galaxy Gardens is free for a limited time only, and Twister Top has a $4.95 introductory price.

Inside the treehouse, your child uses the mouse to move their avatar around to explore or go to other areas. The Avatar maker lets them change their avatar any time, the Map takes them to different habitats, the and there’s also a Comic Book maker I haven’t fully explored yet. Kaitlyn is five and picked up how to play each game pretty easily.

I’ve checked out a lot of different online educational sites for kids, and based on the unique characters and the focus on teaching reading skills, I’m giving Kabongo.com a big recommendation. This is a cute site for kids and best of all, mostly FREE, so I hope you’ll check it out with your preschoolers!

disclosure: This post contains a sponsored link. I was not required to write a positive review and all opinions are mine. As always.

Photos and Muppets and Minivans, oh my.

I’ve just been a busy little bee this morning! I had an 8:00 AM conference at Nathan’s school to go over his I.E.P. for next year, so I woke up extra-early to get both Kaitlyn and him fed and dressed, bundled them into the MomVan and turned the key. CLICK. CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK. Huh? FRAK!

Got them both out of the car, Kaitlyn wailing “Nooo! I wanna go to Nathan’s school and PWAY in the CWASSWOOM!” Called the school, profuse apologies. Now, technically, we could have walked to the school from my house, it’s just down the sidewalk and around the corner, takes about 7 minutes to walk it, but it was already 8:00 and we were going to be late, I knew there wouldn’t be enough time to go over everything before school starts at 8:40. Called Allstate Motor Club, who sent out a very nice young man in a big shiny red truck to jumpstart my car. He saw Kaitlyn watching us from the living room window and told me about the two year old foster child he and his wife are adopting, aww.

Then, I decided to write a post about David Cook winning American Idol, and next thing I knew I was searching for a photo of him and decorating it in Photobucket and making the image in the post before this one, titled David Cook Wins American Idol. If you want to leave your thoughts about that, please click the link and leave a comment! I LOVES me some David Cook, people.

After THAT, I wrote a review for Parent Bloggers Network about a really cool photo sharing site called Kinzin. It’s free to sign up, and what you do is upload photos of your kids and then they send ten prints a month to three different addresses, at $2.99 a month each but the third one is free, so you get all three for $5.98 a month. It’s such a DEAL. Plus you can invite friends and family to view a page for each of your kids where you can post updates of what they are doing, there’s a Facebook application as well as a Flickr group. So whether your friends and family are online or not, you can show them the latest photos of your little darlings! Please click here to read my whole review on MomReviews.

AND, I finally finished watching The Muppet Show-The Complete Third Season, which I received for review. The third season has got some of the best guest stars of the whole show, including including Roy Clark, Pearl Bailey, Jean Stapleton, Harry Belefonte, Danny Kaye, Cheryl Ladd, Raquel Welch, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and Sylvester Stallone. And, of course, all of the Muppets, including Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Fozzie Bear, Scooter, Rowlf, Crazy Harry, Beaker, and Animal.

It also has a great Bonus Features, including a rare look at the puppeteers, and the dog food commercials that first introduced the character of Rowlf the dog. Just remember, The Muppet Show was a musical variety show, so the episodes are mostly musical numbers, something that is pretty much unheard of these days. There are plenty of hilarious skits though, like the classic “Pigs in Space” and “Swedish Chef”, plus plenty of one-liners that will probably go right over your kids’ heads while you are cracking up. It’s a trip down memory lane, watching The Muppet Show again, I think you’ll like it!

So that’s been my day so far, and it’s not even noon. Whew!