Kodak Gallery recently gave me a $35 code to try out their digital scrapbooking system and potentially share it with you. If you’ve been reading here for any length of time, you know this will be an honest review and no amount of free crap would make me lie to you. (With giveaway – read on!)

Let me preface this review by saying that I’ve been scrapbooking for years before I even had children and am a completely addicted Heritage Makers addict. So much so that I became a consultant just to get the deals for myself because I do so much of it. After paper crafting for years, I tried the Creative Memories storybook software, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish and many more. There may not be one I haven’t used, and I decided on Heritage Makers about three seconds after trying it and seeing their products. This will become important later on.

The Kodak website is fairly easy to use. Log in or register, choose a template, upload your pictures, drag and drop them in to pre-made templates. You can edit the pages to the very smallest degree possible – that is, you can choose another of their pre-made templates to switch into that spot. For anyone with the teeniest amount of creativity it’s incredibly limiting. I found it very frustrating not to be able to change colours, add embellishments, move text around or really do anything other than drag and drop. However, for someone who doesn’t like to craft and wants to do a book without ever having to really think about it, I would imagine Kodak Gallery would be great. The book was $35, and I had to pay for my own shipping – normally something that would make the review a no-go (ridiculous, much?) but I wanted to see the difference between these and the Heritage Makers books that I love so much. Truly, there’s no comparison. The Kodak book has a decent binding but not great, and the “linen” cover feels pretty low quality. It’s not customizable at all, and just has a little window in to the first picture, the size of which is not editable so part of my kids are cut off from the cover view. I’m not impressed and wouldn’t pay to order from Kodak Gallery again. Perhaps if I’d never seen a Heritage Makers book I may have had a different opinion, but the quality of both the online software and the product are so much less with Kodak that I just can’t recommend them. But I can hook you up with Heritage Makers if you like – just let me know in comments.

That said, I still have a $35 gift code to give away so comment here or email me if you’d like to try it and I’ll get the kids to do a draw from all comments and emails when I get around to it and one of you can try it out too.

Heh. As I was posting my review of the Kashi bars below, I realized I never did post about the delicious cereal they sent me last month! Kashi Honey Sunshine are bite-size, puffs of yum. As with all Kashi products, they include Kashi’s heritage Seven Whole Grains and add a sweet honey flavour is delicious dry or with milk. Or rice milk, according to my dairy-free huz. They’re sweet and higher in sugar than what I’d allow every day, but they’re really tasty and the whole grains make them a great treat option.

We just received boxes of the new Soft-Baked Granola Bars from Kashi. I don’t accept a lot of the food offered to me because I don’t feed my family shit. However, I love Kashi as a company and actually purchase a lot of their stuff regularly so I was happy to try these out. They’re available in two flavours – ripe strawberry and blackberry. They’re made with all-natural ingredients and feature a lightly sweetened 7 whole grain outer layer, soft-baked around a real fruit filling. They must be good because when I stuck one in Primo’s lunch kit he told me he found a chocolate bar in there for a snack!

Both flavours taste great and have decent nutritional information for a processed snack:

• 10 g whole grain and 2 g fibre per bar
• Low sodium
• Free of artificial ingredients
• Free of Trans fats

I’ll still make my own granola bars because nothing beats that, but in a pinch these will do just fine.

I always make Valentines for my kids’ friends, but Pear Tree Greetings has stepped it up to a whole new level with their personalized kids’ Valentine cards.

As you can see over there, your child’s photo can be incorporated into many of the cards, and still more are designed for your child to colour. They run between $6.50 and $7.50 for eight cards so they’re certainly more costly than the grocery store variety, but they’re also infinitely more special.

One of you could win 24 cards of your own! Just comment on this post or email me at muchmorethanamom@gmail.com with “Pear Tree Valentine” in the subject line by noon mst on Saturday, January 8th, 2010.

DONE LIKE DINNER. Congratulations to email entrant Jenny O!

I love love love Pear Tree Greetings! I’ve had several products from them over the past year or two, and everything I’ve ever had has been of the highest quality. Adorably cute, looks costly but isn’t…right up my alley!

I’m going to give one of y’all (well, they are…through me!) 16 of their awesome New Year’s resolution cards.

Check out these awesome cards and comment here or email me at muchmorethanamom at gmail dot com with PEAR TREE DEC 2010 in the subject line and tell me what you’d put on yours to enter BEFORE DECEMBER 25 at noon!

Rotsa ruck!

My fave-o Pear Tree folds are offering a $30 coupon code to ONE of y’all to be used on ANYTHING in our store!

Of course, ‘tis the season for sending Christmas Cards!

Pear Tree is not just giving to you this holiday season. They’ve also partnered with the American Cancer Society and have designed six exclusive Christmas cards. By purchasing one of those cards, 100% of the proceeds go to the American Cancer Society. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT. And that, my dahlings, is that. Wowza!

Email me at muchmorethanamom at gmail dot com to enter to win the $30 buckaroos! Put PEAR TREE NOV 2010 in the subject line, s’il vout plait. Closes at noon mst Nov 30, 2010.

So, it’s been, um…a MONTH since I’ve posted here. Oops. Life got in the way, which is good and bad. It’s not good to be as busy as I am, but hey…I’m alive!

I’m coming back with a nice giveaway for y’all – email me at muchmorethanamom at gmail dot com before Monday, November 7 at noon with KODAK in the subject and you might win one of two $50 gift cards to Kodak Gallery. Just a little thanks for sticking around! Before I became a Heritage Makers addict (and consultant) I used Kodak for one book for each of my children and loved the quality. It’s not Heritage Makers but it’s definitely just as easy and the well known name sure helps. I can vouch for the customer service because I always choose free shipping (to my local Future Shop) and when it was lost in the mail they couriered me another one overnight right to my door no questions asked.

Good luck!

Check out my review of an inexpensive product to help you get fit, and get your own for just $4!

If I didn’t receive anything to review and am just giving something lovely away, so I still need to post this off of my main page? Huh? Bueller? Bueller? Blogher?

Anyhoo, the kind folks at Pear Tree Greetings have repeatedly asked me to be a part of their Pearista program and I finally had time to send off a “Sure!” So, because I took that few seconds out of my busy day, you guys get a chance to win something from them every month! That’s it; that’s all!

This month, you can win FIVE sets of address labels – that’s up to 120 labels! View Pear Tree Greetings’ entire collection of address labels!

Pear Tree Greetings is a fun, fresh and affordable personalized stationery company that offers birth announcements, kid birthday invitations, note cards and more!

Simply email me at muchmorethanamom at gmail dot com with Pear Tree Greetings in the subject line and tell me which one(s) you’d choose, or leave a comment on this post before noon mst on June 18 to enter.

Rotsa ruck!

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.)