Last week was one of those weeks where I over-committed a bit. It’s been awhile since that has happened. A quick re-cap, because we all know how often I blog. Ha!

• I introduced our new client, Artizone (launching in February and you will be glad when it does!) to my BFF moms in business friends at the quarterly Neighborhood Parents Network networking event. If you are a small business member of NPN, it’s totally worth it to attend one of these get-togethers!
• I co-hosted a great blogger breakfast for my friend Hope and her Social Media Masters Summit with my other friend Alison.  We got to meet representatives from two amazing companies, Jockey and Calumet Photo.  Just so happened the Jockey PR rep was my friend from grad school, so, in addition to all the amazing blogger friends I got to see there, I had a little IMC reunion! Holla!
• I got to attend the Social Media Masters Summit. I don’t get to go to conferences out of town that often so when I can do something local I get so excited to learn from my peers. Especially good was the panel on brand and bloggers (clearly my interest) with Foiled Cupcakes Mari, Gabi Tompkins from Crain’s and Gina Judge a PR pro from PepsiCo and also a new Chicago mama. I’m hoping after this panel and the resulting changes made to Klout, we can all agree, influence is social media is all relative! You have to decide for yourself and not only pay attention to just the numbers.
• I went to the opening of the new baby store behemoth in the suburbs, WONDER! WONDER! Is CRAZY COOL!! I mean, look at this wall of strollers below. That’s right. Strollers. And that’s just a start. They offer classes, every baby product competitively priced under the sun, customized birthday parties, healthy food (cafe coming soon), and also soon enough, an online store.
  
• All the while, I was able to shop on Totsy all week (I’m a compensated Totsy mom but all opinions about the site are true!) for some awesome stuff for the kids for the holidays and a few awesome pieces of jewelry, for, well, ME! Not everything on the site is a great fit for me, but this week I scored! I totally recommend you registering and of course, buying!

Thankfully, this week is a bit slower…

So, what did you do last week? What are you up to this week?

As I mentioned before, I rarely get asked to do stuff through my blog, and when I do, it usually is to review paper clips, or something really exciting like that. But because I’m having a week of awesome (except for the start of today, which was decidedly NOT awesome, therefore I’m not writing about it), I’m writing this post from the terrific-ly interesting city of New Orleans because someone way on high at Microsoft Windows Phone thought I was worth enough of a sponsorship. Which brings me back to seriously awesome.

So, I’m living it up.

Me + Rice Krispie treats = Heaven

I spent the afternoon lunching and wandering around with friends in the awesome French Quarter testing out that fabulous phone o’mine. I’m pretty obsessed with the way it is so easy to upload photos to email. It’s so freaking fast! See? I got this one uploaded of mah friends in under .00233 seconds. Good stuff.

This is before Julie saw the heels she will covet for the whole entire conference.

And so while I’m telling you about the phone, I’ve got to mention the customized home screen, which consists of “tiles” that you can move around and about your phone in the order you want your information to appear. Some people “pin” (that’s what you do to get a tile locked into the home screen of the phone) their husband’s contact information to their home screen. Me?

Is it bad that I “pinned” myself to my own start screen? It’s so I don’t forget who I am. Or something.

The phone has an impressive camera, if you couldn’t tell the one above was by my lowly Blackberry. It does look subpar, doesn’t it? It’s one of the most impressive options of the phone. Also, the video camera pretty much kicks ass too. But I haven’t taken any video yet. That’s for later. I did use the camera to take a photo of my most-awesome room on the “Club Level” (hence, the Rice Krispie treats — there were no regular rooms left!).

Room: almost as good as the Rice Krispie Treats

This won’t be the last you’ll hear about my awesome new Windows Phone, as the kind folks at Microsoft have allowed me to try it for THIRTY DAYS!! Which should give me just enough time to install all those cool apps from the Marketplace, upload my songs to Zune, and of course, take that darned video.

DISCLOSURE: Microsoft Windows Phone offered to cover up to $2000 of my expenses towards Mom 2.0 and I’ve kindly accepted their gracious offer. In exchange, I will be tweeting and writing two posts about my experience with the phone. Thank you #windowsphone!

]]> http://www.selfmademom.net/2011/04/14/wherein-i-discuss-my-mom-2-0-sponsorship-by-microsoft-windows-phone-yay/feed/ 1 http://www.selfmademom.net/2011/04/08/brand-and-blogger-magic/ http://www.selfmademom.net/2011/04/08/brand-and-blogger-magic/#comments Sat, 09 Apr 2011 01:49:52 +0000 selfmademom http://www.selfmademom.net/?p=2083

This never happens to me. I’m a very very fortunate person, but I never win anything or get offered much. Unless you count the time I won a mountain bike my senior year of high school when my mom was on the raffle committee. I swear to g-d it wasn’t rigged.

But this week it feels like I won the blogger lottery. Literally. First, the amazing folks at GM offered me a vehicle to test drive for the past week. My vehicle of choice? The GM Acadia Denali – with chrome wheels. Because every grocery-getting mom in the city needs some chrome.

Man, I really loved looking at this car. Parking it in a tight city spot? Not so much.

GM has been so kind to me loaning me cars to take about and I’m so appreciative. It’s so smart of them to let bloggers and others test drive their cars – we are in the market for a car with a third row – and now I will definitely consider the Acadia when it comes time to switch out. And I’m not just saying that! I told my husband I wish we could test drive every car we like for a weekend instead of a five minute drive up and down the Kennedy. So, thank you GM.

And yet, my week just got better. Because on Tuesday, I got an email from the folks at Waggener Edstrom and so I opened it up right away. I know how good that PR firm is. (It didn’t have anything to do with the subject line which read: “Mom 2.0 Sponsorship”). And sure enough, when I opened it, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Waggener Edstrom, in conjunction with their client, Microsoft Windows Phone (yes, that Microsoft!) was offering me a full ride to the Mom 2.0 Summit + a 30-day trial of the phone. I almost spit water all over my Mac Book. (I told them I use a Mac – it’s compatible. Yay!)

Whenever something like this happens on a smaller scale (much smaller scale), I like to ask how folks from on high find my little, unpublicized, topsy-turvy-on-topics blog. They said they looked at working mom blogs, and there I was.

How ironic is that? I just started working again!

Sometimes brands and bloggers just f*** it up bad with asking too much, too often. And then there’s a week like I had. Where I received meaningful outreach that helped me in ways beyond the blog. It can happen.

]]> http://www.selfmademom.net/2011/04/08/brand-and-blogger-magic/feed/ 3 http://www.selfmademom.net/2011/03/01/im-a-totsy-mom/ http://www.selfmademom.net/2011/03/01/im-a-totsy-mom/#comments Wed, 02 Mar 2011 02:12:47 +0000 selfmademom http://www.selfmademom.net/?p=2037

As if I haven’t committed myself to enough already (new business, new Chicago Parent blog ((details forthcoming)), I was asked this past Fall to be a “Totsy Mom.” If you don’t know, Totsy is one of the hottest deal sites on the web for clothing, products, goods for moms and kids. They have daily sales, much like Gilt Groupe and the brands they have deals on are ridiculous — Schoenhut, Melissa and Doug, Kidorable, American Apparel — just to name a few.

I usually don’t sign up for things like this. I rarely attach myself to a brand, product. I have done some branded posts lately, but those were mainly for WORK…

However, something about Totsy felt right to me. For one, I like to shop. A lot. And I like to shop bargains. Totsy is bargain shopping for your kids (and some for yourself) at it’s finest. Alright, it helps that I’m getting some Totsy credits to use each month for posting deals about their brands and deals. I might even have some specials for you, my fine readers!

So, I’m here to try being a Totsy Mom for awhile. I hope you’re all cool with that and come along for a fine, shopping ride.

Yes, I am being compensated in Totsy credit for posting on my site a couple times a month about Totsy + hang out with them on Twitter and Facebook.

Earlier today, I got to put on some real clothes (they were trouser jeans, as Caitlin noticed, much to my happiness) and head out to a brunch put on by the ever-fabulous Bump Club and Beyond. I was on a panel of “the city’s leading mom bloggers” (HA! Don’t they know I’m a blogging slacker??) and my co-hosts Cindy, Linda and Caitlin and I had a ball giving some of our best tips around the city to Lindsay’s group of new moms.

My quick talk was about tips and tricks to planning your child’s first birthday. Because, eventually, all those cute newborns grow up to be cake-smashing, drooling one-year-olds. Because I forgot, unlike my counterparts, to actually print up and hand out my tips, I told everyone I’d post them on my blog. So, here, in no particular order, are my thoughts:

1) Make the party favor part of the party – if you have a musician, give each kid a maraca. The little babes don’t know what a goodie bag is – take advantage of that while it lasts!

2) Kids this age don’t need much for entertainment – a place to crawl around, 30 minutes of activity and somewhere between 20-30 to eat. By then, they’re pretty much wiped and will hopefully nap all afternoon for you.

3) I personally think a mid-morning, post first nap party usually works the best for you and for your friends – sometimes the afternoons are unpredictable! Well, at least they are in my house.

4) Pack two shirts – one for photos and one for after the cake – and bring a good bib! (This one, I admit, is pretty self-explanatory.)

5) My eldest got really freaky and nervous at his first birthday party. My youngster loved every minute of the party. Bottom line — don’t worry if you’re kid is nervous – it’s a lot of attention.

And you were waiting for the Chicago-specific stuff, right?

Best locations for a Chicago kiddie bday party:

• Just about any pizza joint – remember my baby’s first birthday party last year? At Pequod’s pizza. It was relatively inexpensive, I bought one of those foam letter mats and threw it on the ground so the kiddos could crawl around and it was a blast. And the dads could swill beer too. Happy Birthday.
• If you think a pizza dive isn’t quite for your family, there’s always the East Bank Club where I had my eldest’s party. Yeah, it was like a mini bar mitzvah. Best food I had at a first birthday! But notice, I didn’t repeat that one.
• For a smaller get-together I love Musical Magic on Roscoe. So sweet and cozy inside and so easy to manage.
• And then there’s the name-your-own-kiddie-gym-place like Bubbles, My Gym, Gymboree, Little Gym. All good choices.
• The park district also has many rooms for rent – I am partial to the one at Sheil Park because it’s close to my house, and it’s clean and a good size for a party. I think that sort of stuff matters.

Best entertainers to hire for your party (if you’re in to such a thing):

I can’t say enough about these three very fine kiddie entertainers…

• Miss Amiee Leigh. We took her class at the JCC for so many months and years I lost track along the way.
• Little Miss Ann. She is the best of the best. Book her. If you can.
• Mr. Singer. The kids adored him.

Ideas for how to gift the birthday baby:

• I recently got tuned into Echo Age by a friend of mine. Basically people donate a certain amount of money towards your gift which you can use to buy a few gifts of your choice, or to donate to charity. Really love this concept. Especially for a baby who doesn’t even really know what “cool Fisher Price toy” means yet.
• Buy the babe some books. They never grow old.
• Create a gift registry if you must. At least you’ll get what you want, right? Cuts down on those return errands and gift receipts.
• One thing I always did was test out toys my friends had whose kids were older. If my kiddos loved playing with them at a friend’s house, well, I’d just invite myself back over to that friend’s house. No, I’d put it on a wish list.

And with that, my favorite first bday toys:

• Fisher Price Laugh and Learn Door. It’s expensive, but worth it. My five-year-old still plays with it. Have the grandparents buy it or something.
• Any pre-walker push toy. Unless your kid is walking already. Good for my kiddos who were well over a year before they considered walking.
• Any Little People toy. Those things are indestructible.
• A set of wooden blocks. Basic but always good to have around the house.

How to invite all those people to your shindig:

• You may want an invite for your scrapbook, but those babies can’t open the mail, so save the money until they’re at least 2 – use evite, or, my new favorite online invitation store, Paperless Post.
• I must also mention my go-to printed invitation source – Tiny Prints!! You can even save money on your kids’ birthday party invites by using the code from my blog: AFF1105.

I have two new items in my house geared towards making our lives more centered. I’m not known for my spirituality, but I am known for my love of cool products and yoga. You didn’t know that? I’ve been doing yoga before hipster moms in lululemon made it trendy. I first experienced yoga under the teachings of famed New York City instructor Elena Brower in a small, hot and very crowded yoga space on 3rd Avenue in New York City over 11 years ago. After I left New York, I had a hard time finding my Chicago “Elena,” a teacher who understood the physical and emotional needs of a young yogi. I had a hard time until I met Betsy, teacher extraordinaire of the physical side of yoga.

I’ve been taking her class religiously (well, with the pregnancies, on and off) for the last 4 years at East Bank Club on Monday and Wednesday mornings. I schedule work meetings around her class, I schedule sitters, day care appointments and drop-offs at my mom’s house to make the class. It’s that good. And apparently, I’m not that busy yet.

Well you can imagine how excited I was to hear that Betsy came out with a DVD of one of her classes this past week and I got a copy to review! I popped the 50-minute DVD in on a Thursday morning when I couldn’t make it into the gym and I was not disappointed with my solo yoga session in my basement. Of course there are downsides to practicing yoga in your home. The blackberry flashes, the phone rings, the baby cries on the monitor and your moment of Zen disappears into your kid’s toy basket like the latest issue of People magazine you haven’t read yet.

But, by the end I was sweaty, if not totally centered in my yoga zone. Which, is what just what I asked for on a day when I couldn’t be present in person to Betsy’s class. (P.S. you can buy the DVD on the Yogatude website!)

Which leads me to how else I’m centering my household – by foot. See, last May I re-did my kitchen and made a great new table that sits six people. As part of the re-do, I purchased some great, if not ergonomic for the kids chairs, from West Elm. The curved back, the sloped bottom of the seat was visually appealing to me, but not so comfortable for my eldest. He needed somewhere to rest his feet.

I’ve heard along the way in my son’s preschool that kids need to rest their feet in order to be comfortable sitting around a table. It was just a rumor, but I saw the truth to it many times when he’d be sitting calmly at a kiddie chair, but fidgeted like mad in an adult chair. I thought I had made a mistake selling away our Svan chair that we thought my son had grown out of. I never truly loved that chair, but it did have a foot rest.

And then enter my friend who introduced me to Charlotte of Stokke, who, after several conversations about marketing to moms (there was a business reason for the introduction!) told me about their “high chair” – the Tripp Trapp chair – which is so not a high chair, but more of a lifestyle chair. A chair that grows from birth (the newest addition to the Tripp Trapp family is a newborn set) to adult hood, I wish I had this chair when I was growing up!  And she was so kind to send me two for each of my kids to test out.

Design-wise I liked the structure of the Tripp Trapp better than the Svan, and my son felt that it was a big upgrade from what he thought was his “high chair.” Lifestyle chair, I say. And, just as I was starting to write this post last night, I saw a link to this post on the Stokke Facebook page about the importance of a child’s feet being centered on something when they sit. No more rumors!

Only happy minds and happy feet in my house now.

I was given a copy of the yoga DVD and two Stokke Tripp Trapp chairs for review.

One of my *new* “clients” (More information forthcoming, I swear!! Too busy to blog! Does this blog feel like an advertisement yet? Ack!) is running a very cool campaign for the next 10 days. Mamaloot, the awesome daily deals website geared towards Chicago parents, is donating a can of food for every email sign up they get over the next 10 days to the Greater Chicago Food Depository. Isn’t that nice? And I said I’d help spread the word… It’s so easy to sign up on their site and every day they send you an email of some really great parent-focused discounts and steals. Not just for moms of young kiddos!

Better yet, some of Mamaloot’s “Best of the Best” partners (Bullfrogs and Butterflies, Grow, Building Blocks, Little Threads, Psycho Baby, Pump It Up, Kid City, Green Genes, Galt Baby and Wishcraft) are also hosting in-store email sign ups and some of them are matching the food donation or making unique gives of their own. We love these partners!

So if you’re feeling giving and want to save money on stuff you’re doing with your kids already, go sign up! Better yet, spread the word and help to feed some hungry folks this holiday season.

The best baby boutiques and personalities in Chicago hand-picked some awesome holiday gifts for your baby (and you and your huz) for my first-ever holiday gift guide on my Chicago Parent Second City Baby blog.

You’ll have to go over there to see all the photos and descriptions, but I wanted to personally thank my friends at Twinkle Twinkle Little One, Piggy Toes Shoes, Little Threads, Little Green Baby, plus Amy Tara Koch and Belly Man for contributing! Hope it inspires some good gift ideas.

It occurred to me not too long ago that I have no framed photos of my baby in my house. I searched from room to room and all I could find was a newborn shot that our photographer took last year. It’s hidden up in my bedroom so only I see it. Other than that, all the frames in my house are filled with my eldest and of my husband and I when we looked a lot younger. (OMG the GRAY!)

However, I have been pretty good about getting photos, while not up in print around my house, into electronically-produced photo books. The kind where I can go online and select some photos I uploaded and click to put them on pages and then click to buy the book. It’s not the most creative way to record my family history but it’s efficient and effective. And, it just so happens I’ve been doing this through Kodak Gallery for the last 4 years. All on my own.

So, when Kodak Gallery approached me last month about trying out their new photo book process and they’d pay me for trying out that process it was a natural fit. Plus, I realized I hadn’t put together books since my baby turned 5 months. Clearly, there is some sort of deficit in my brain.

With Halloween photos and birthday party photos piling up in my iPhoto tray, I was really excited to bring them to life outside my beautiful Mac screen. iPhoto has this great feature that lets you automatically upload to Kodak Gallery with the click of one button. Again, click.

On Monday I uploaded 191 precious photos into 2 separate albums on Kodak Gallery and then organized them into two different photo books. I had some trouble clearing out the photos from the first book to put in the second book, but I realized my mistake after about a minute (you must “clear tray” before you create the book), and then sorted it out. In about 5 minutes, after uploading time, I had 2 books for the last 3 months of my kids’ lives. Seriously. That easy. After checking out early Tuesday morning I was told late yesterday that my order had already partially shipped.

That’s about 3 months of photo work memorialized forever in 2 days. And the quality of the new books seem great. I chose one medium and one small and I’m happy with the way the pages were automatically laid out. Now, I just need to get some of those prints into some frames around my house before the baby realizes he basically doesn’t exist outside my bedroom.

Does this ease of memorializing your family sound appealing to you? Well good! Because I have TWO $75 gift cards to giveaway from Kodak. It’ll buy you about 3 small books with 30 pages each or a small and extra-large amount of photos medium book. Just tell me that you’re more unorganized than me when it comes to photo documentation in the comments or give me a tip about how to become better organized, and I’ll enter you into a raffle to win the gift card. Contest will end on 12/1 just in time to get your books for the holidays. You can comment once here and once on my Chicago Parent blog to enter twice, if you like!

Cross-posted to Second-City Baby.

Disclosure: I was given a $75 gift card to post about my experience using Kodak Gallery plus purchase my photo books.

It all started over the summer at the Not BlogHer event when Caitlin and I were discussing our current projects. Just so happened we had some crossover in meeting Deree Kobets, the owner of grow modern boutique in Wicker Park. The conversation was casual but purposeful, “wouldn’t you love to do something with her?” “Yeah.”

See what I mean?

After a nice meeting in early Fall, we proposed an online campaign plus an in-store event to try to increase grow’s awareness online with our blogger friends, but also within our social and community network. Our campaign, a culmination of tips from Deree and four amazing giveaway packages last week were a huge hit and the event on November 4 was a beautiful showcase of the power of community (thank you Wicker Park!) and good mommy fun.

But I can only write so much about how nice the evening was. I’ll let the photos tell the rest…

My messy closet floor is evidence I was in a huge rush to get to the event in time.

Did I mention it was really rainy hailing hurting snow pellets that night? Really hard to get somewhere in time in rain/ hail/ wind/ oh my!

So mad props to the moms who braved the Chicago weather to join us. (Cyn and Alma not pictured, because my camera deleted that one. But they deserve a shout-out.)

But I did get there. Ok, meet Deree (right). Isn’t she cute? I still can’t believe she grew up on a farm. She’s standing with Sarah from Olive.You.Nanny. Gosh, they just accentuate my brunette-ness.

Thank g-d wine from The Noble Grape, cupcakes from Tipsy Cake (pictured) tea from Honest Tea, pizza from Crust and appetizers from Real Naked Food (not pictured) were there waiting for me. Because of course I had no time to eat before.

Once Little Miss Ann started rockin’ we all forgot about the downpour and cold outside. She just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy!

I also think the kick-ass goodie bags and giveaways sponsored by Square One Organics, Little Miss Ann, Time Out Chicago Kids, Little Twig,  and Eco-Minders helped.

By the end of the night, I was one pooped lady, but one pooped lady with a whole lot of love after a fun night out and a great week of learning about how to live more organic, smart, and modern. It was worth the wait!