Simple & Surprising is a new e-journal on Clorox.com written by various guest bloggers It is all about real-life moments and offers reality-checked simple tips and prizes to pat yourself on the back for all your hard work.

Clorox is giving away TWO Simple & Surprising Prize Packs including various Clorox cleaning products to my readers. (I received nothing to post this giveaway – not even a sample.)

To enter, just fire me off an email with CLOROX in the subject line, and share your favourite cleaning tip!

Linky, actually, but I like alliteration.

Just a couple of giveaways to point you toward…

Organic & natural goodies (closes in a week)

One of the two best books ever for girls of all ages (closes end of September)

Good luck!

We had a fabulous Canada Day.

Yeah, it was over two weeks ago. So what?

That doesn’t make it any less cute.

The outfits? Thanks for asking! Heh. Please Mum has a Canada Day line of clothing that they bring out every spring so I always buy an outfit in the following year’s size when they’re on half price or less.

The storyboard? MCP Magic Print It Boards, which were expensive but worth every penny in the time they’ve cut from my workflow.

Workflow? I’ve been very busy with photo shoots & trying to wrap things up with my sessions so that I can go back to work in mid-August without anything to focus on but my family and a little bit of work. I’ve been busy creating actions in Photoshop and have almost perfected a batch action that I can run on a whole folder of photos which leaves all of the layers open and saves it as a .psd file so I can mess with the layer masks & layer opacities and make it all just perfect. I can get an entire family session done in a couple of weeks, and it used to take me 4-5 weeks. Booyah!

New reviews up this week:

If you’ve got to wash dishes when the maid is on vacation, you should really get these. (with a giveaway!)

Upstairs it’s the foam Elmo & princess chairs they push each other out of, but this is the furniture my kids are fighting over in the basement.

Check out my sort-of-review of a new(ish) natural insect repellant and sunscreen combination.

Be sure to let me know how this review linking thing is working out for you. Inquiring minds want to know!

And how are we all feeling about the switch to purple?

Over and out.

Doe to contractual obligations with BlogHerAds, product reviews will no longer appear right on the home page because I’m getting samples that are valued at over the $40 limit. I’ve got a few upcoming that I haven’t written because I’ve been waiting to have a separate place to post them. I now have one, thanks to the fabulous Skye from BlogHerAds who waved her magic wand and made it happen!

I’ll link to reviews from a post on the main page though. Like THIS, for example.

I don’t think you can subscribe to just the reviews, so I’ll be sure to let you know when one is posted – particularly if I’m doing a giveaway!

Working on reviews.
So many to catch up on.
Books, books, and more books.

Some of them funny,
Some might be called laughable.
You’ll see. Uh…one day.

A couple coming…
Toys and even furniture
From CSN Stores.

Under a hundred
Is hard to do from these stores.
I wanted Stokke stuff.

The high chair’s so cool.
But it is so overpriced.
This garage will do.

Sunscreens coming too.
Just have to try one more thing.
All honest – I promise.

There have been several posts circulating of late on the topic of reviews on parenting blogs.

Personally, I don’t give a hoot if you do reviews on your blog or how you write them. If there’s no giveaway, I’m clicking away immediately before even reading it, and it doesn’t affect me. If there’s a giveaway, I may consider checking that first to see if I want to enter (rarely) before reading the review or choosing to click away (usually). Either way, it’s your blog and I really, REALLY don’t give a flying crap.

However, I do care what you think. I very rarely do reviews and/or giveaways here (because they’re all over here) but occasionally I accept a product sample that either doesn’t fit at T.O.P. or that the company requests be reviewed here instead. (Why? I have no idea. Three daily readers vs. three thousand daily readers. Makes you want to go ‘Hmmmm.’) I wrote a little bit about my policies on reviewing items here, but I’m curious what you (three) think. Do you even care? Should I keep the reviews at The Opinionated Parent), or just keep doing what I’m doing and just go with the flow and do what feels right for each product.

(This post was inspired by a review request for this site specifically from a site that sells kids furniture. I chose a product that my kids can use and that will also be an asset in my classroom once we’re done with it here – stay tuned for that. I know the product from seeing it in my colleagues’ classrooms and I have other awesome things from the same manufacturer so I’m sure it won’t suck and you’ll read about it – here – in the future.)