It’s Not Too Late for Holiday Cards

This post is sponsored by Minted

I know, I know.  You’re thinking:  what?  It’s not too late for Holiday Cards?  Is she nuts?

Well, maybe.  But not because of that.  It’s not too late for holiday cards because there’s always another holiday!  Forgot to send out ChristKwanHan cards?  No worries.  Send a little love for Valentines Day.

Better yet, send a little love for no reason at all.

Miss Me?

In case you haven’t noticed (and I really hope you have), you haven’t been getting posts from me for a while.  It isn’t that I haven’t been writing…it’s that I’ve got a brand new, beautifully designed, all-new site that you aren’t subscribed to!!

That’s my new logo right there.  Snazzy, right?

You subscribed to From Hip to Housewife once, so I hope you will again, and it really isn’t hard to do:

Just visit this link to update your delivery settings, and you’ll get notified again every time I post a pithy, funny, ranting, raving, reviewing, crazy, sane or otherwise eminently readable post. (Hey, I’ve been Freshly Pressed FOUR TIMES.  I must be doing something right.) Or, you can go to  http://fromhiptohousewife.com/, and subscribe all over again in the sidebar.

See?  Easy?

Hope  to see you again soon on From Hip to Housewife.

-Nancy

Hey New York! Do you know your zone?

If you live in NYC, it’s hard to avoid the bus stop ads telling us all that “call grandma” is NOT an emergency plan.  And if you’ve lived here for any length of time, you’ve lived through enough disasters — both man-made and natural – that you know you really do need a plan.  Really.

Well, I’m here to tell you it’s time you got off your butt, and did something about it.  After all, it is Hurricane Preparedness week.   Start with Knowing Your Zone.  What zone, you ask? Your flood zone.  Hurricane Sandy proved that flooding and NYC can go hand in hand – with devastating consequences.  And those consequences would be even worse if you didn’t know how to protect yourself.

So how do you protect yourself?  Simple.  Three easy steps.

 

1.  Use NYC’s Hurricane Evacuation Zone Finder or call 311 to find out whether your home or business is located in a hurricane evacuation zone.

2.  Sign up for Notify NYC  to make sure you get the latest emergency information via text, phone, email, fax,   Twitter (@NotifyNYC), and more – should there be an emergency, or should one be imminent, you’ll be aware.

3. Take a look at the Ready New York Hurricane Guide. Its got  instructions on how to develop a hurricane disaster plan and secure your home  before a storm hits.

 

Once you’ve done all of that, take the  Know Your Zone Thunderclap Challenge, it’s kind of like a little test — to make sure you zone savvy and Hurricane prepared!

 

 

Confessions of a Swag Hound: BirchBox, Chaise Fitness and More

Being a blogger has introduced me to so much.  I’ve made good friends, used my social media influence to help raise money for charities like K.I.D.S, R Baby, The Lamp, Mothers2Mothers, and Women in Need. Sometimes, I’m amazed at how bloggers give back, like Jennifer James and her initiatives for women in Africa, or Elena Sonnino, and her work towards encouraging kids to use social media for social good.

Sometimes, being part of the blogging the community really is about making a difference in this world.

And sometimes, it’s all about the swag.

There are times when, yes, I admit it, I go to an event just because I know there will be awesome swag there.  I’m not proud of it – but there you have it.  Confessions of a swag hound.

Here are some details of last week’s swag-a-licious events!

First, I went to the beautiful roof garden at the Gramercy Park Hotel (I went to the Bryant Park Hotel first, by mistake, but let’s not relive my embarrassment, shall we?) for a BirchBox event co-hosted by the always lovely Amy Tara Koch.  BirchBox, for the uninitiated, is the original Beauty Box Delivery service.  Pay a fee, and each month, BirchBox will send you a box filled with sample products tailored to your specific needs.  Go online, and the Birchbox editors will have detailed info on how to use the products in your box, and links to purchase full sized versions.  It’s the super-fun version of try before you buy.

BirchBox’s co-founder, Katia Beauchamp, was there, and she told me that what separates Birchbox from its many imitators is their editorial staff. “We have a bigger editorial staff than Allure (magazine) she told me.”  And I will say, that the full-sized products in my special Mother’s Day BirchBox bag, (they do full sized curated boxes you can purchase throughout the year) did have some awesome stuff in it.  I’m especially fond of the Cynthia Rowley liquid eye pencil. Even I can’t mess it up!

My next totally self-indulgent blogger event was Fit, Fab, and Fly at the 92Y on the Upper East Side.  Brianne Manz of Stroller in the City invited me to try a new exercise class, Chaise Fitness, and then to get pampered for my efforts by Priv, a beauty-on-call home service, Blue Print, the famous cleanse, Zen Home Cleaning an upscale, organic home-cleaning service, and Elemental T’s the t-shirt company started by two moms who make shirts so cute I wish my twins were still 4 years old so they could fit into them.

Chaise Fitness was not easy – but the eerily-reminiscent-of-Cindy-Lauper co-founder of the exercise system, Lauren Piskin made it fun.  Basically, Chaise Fitness involves a sort of spring loaded chair/bench thing with bungee cords hanging above it.  You do exercise on, over and across the bench, many of them including working against the springs in both the bungees and the chair (chaise) itself.

If doing the workout will make me look even 1/10 as fit and toned as it founders, sign me up.

Once I was sufficiently sweaty, I headed out to find Priv.  It’s a genius idea: beauty on demand.  Why should celebrities be the only ones with make-up artists and people to do their hair?  The folks at Priv send the beauty professionals to you –on short notice. Hair, nails, massage, make-up – you name it.  They’ve got a roster of professionals ready to make you beautiful.

And as if that weren’t enough, Brianne et al also thought to make sure our homes were beautified, too.  Zen Home Luxury Cleaning was there, showing off their all-organic, super elegant cleaning service. Yep, you heard that – elegant cleaning service.  Custom uniformed, fully screened cleaning personnel will come to your home and do everything from re-arranging to downright scrubbing.  All with organic, specially made products.  So your home is clean and safe.

After all this beauty and fitness it was hard to resist the last bit of swag that arrived this week: a case of pop-chips!  Did you know they now come in sour cream and onion, sweet potato, and bar b q flavor?  Good thing I got some free Chaise Fitness classes to help me work them off.

 

 

Crafting for Jews with Hershey’s

On Purim, Jews celebrate Persians trying (but not succeeding) to kill us, on Channukah, we commemorate how the Greeks tried (and failed) to kill us, and on Passover, we celebrate escaping being killed by the Egyptians. All this, Shalom Auslander points out in his novel, Foreskin’s Lament. And all this, is why there aren’t a whole lot of crafts surrounding the Jewish Holidays.

Take Easter:  The Christians have bunnies and chicks, and colorful eggs.  All lovely inspirations for fun family crafts. At that same time of year we have Passover:  famine, and locusts, and killing of the first born.  Is there a craft for that?

Well, there’s about to be.

Yesterday, I went to the Hershey’s Easter Party, a PR event where they showcased their adorable (and yummy) Easter crafts and products for 2014. Easter all the way.  Admittedly adorable. Easy to do crafts. Yummy treats.  But decidedly NFJ. (Not for Jews!)

So I say genug es genug (enough is enough – in Yiddish).  It’s time for some Passover Crafts!  And I’m here to help you adapt Hershey’s Easter crafts and Goodies for Passover.

1. Forget the Bunnies: Go Frogs

St. Petersburg/Clearwater and Tampa: A Whole New Side of Florida

Busch Gardens, The Dali Museum, and The Chihuly Exhibit offered me media rates for my visits. All other expenses – and all opinions – are my own. Some links in this posts are affiliate links.

I’ve been going down to Florida for most of my life. As a kid – and into my 20’s – I went to visit my grandparents in Hallandale, near Ft Lauderdale on the east coast. Pre-Kids, my husband and I used to hit South Beach for the restaurants and fun club scene. I’ve been to Orlando with theme parks and without, and for the past 15 years – I’ve been going to visit my own parents on LongBoat Key near Sarasota on the West Coast of Florida.

I’ve written before about how different LongBoat Key is from the Florida I’d always known before – the east coast. But I’d never before taken the short drive from LongBoat to  Visit St. Petes/Clearwater to check it out.

I didn’t know what I was missing.

Top Five Things I Learned at Type A Parent Bootcamp at Walt Disney World

This weekend, I attended Type-A Parent Bootcamp sponsored by Disney Parks at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Type A is a blogging-for-business conference that teaches bloggers how to work with brands, how to find new avenues of monetization, how to brand themselves, and more.
My KidzVuz co-founder, Rebecca Levey, and I gave a presentation on pitching brands for new business (rather than waiting for them to pitch you), called “From Pitch to Paycheck.” I certainly hope that attendees learned a lot from us about preparation, identifying targets, telling their story, organizing their efforts and more, since I know I learned a ton from the other presentations I saw and from the conference in general.

Here are my top five takeaways:

The Perfect Bacon Bowl

Yum. Anything in The Perfect Bacon Bowl tastes better.

Like the bad Jew that I am, I LOVE bacon.  I can’t help it.  It has all the things I crave: fat, salt, crunch. Yum.

So I was super excited to be invited to the Perfect Bacon Bowl Breakfast at the super fun Ellen’s StarDust Diner only a few train stops away. (full disclosure: while there, I ate a lot of free bacon, and I left with a free sample of the product).

We ate bacon bowls filled with eggs (awesome for me – -I’m on the Atkins diet (don’t ask!), bacon filled with crab meat salad, and I watched friends like Gay NYC Dad and The Can Can eat Perfect Bacon Bowls filled with slated caramel ice cream. Sounds awesome, looks awesome, tasted awesome.

BUT – (you knew there had to be a but, didn’t you?)  in addition to being a bad Jew, I am also a cynic.  So I figured that the perfect looking Bacon Bowls at the event would not be so perfect when I tried it at home.  Which, it being Shabbat the next day, I did.

I carefully followed the directions, wiped the Perfect Bacon Bowl Maker with a paper towel coated with Pam, cut one piece of bacon in half and crossed them over the base of the device to make the bowl’s bottom, then wrapped two other pieces around it to form the sides. I did have a little trouble deciding which was the fat side, since the instructions say “fat side up.” Aren’t both sides of the bacon the Fat Side?   Then I put them in the microwave (one at a time as per the instructions) and…

It worked!  Maybe my bowls were a bit shrunken, and maybe they weren’t quite as lovely as the ones at the event..but I’m pretty happy with them. And the way my family chowed down on ’em…they were too.

The Worst Disease You’ve Never Heard of and How you can Help

Imagine having a child whose skin is so sensitive that even the clothing they wear rubbing against their skin can cause abrasions so severe they may never heal.  Imagine if hugging your child causes them to feel pain.  Imagine a child unable to avoid constant cuts, wounds and abrasions both externally and internally, and you can begin to imagine life with EB.

My friend Wendy’s friend, Rafaella Lily, was born with a severe form of a rare genetic disorder called Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB).  Often referred to as “The worst disease you’ve never heard of,” EB is a devastating disorder which causes children’s skin to be so fragile that simply scratching an itch results in blisters and tears.  Kids with EB are known as Butterfly Children.  Their skin is as delicate as a butterfly’s wings.

Knowing this, a group of moms from Rafi’s preschool got together to make a difference.  They began Rafi’s Run two years ago to raise money to fund research for a cure for EB, and thanks to the amazing generosity of family, friends, and businesses, have collected $400,000 for the cause.  Every penny donated to Rafi’s Run goes directly to researchers who are already making amazing discoveries that will benefit not only kids with EB, but a host of other children with similar disorders and beyond.  Information about Rafi, EB and EB research can all be found on their website: www.rafisrun.com.

Forget Football: Go Drama Geeks!

 

(Photo credit: The Guise Archives)

 One Mom’s rant against the deification of sports.

Raise your hand if you think the best thing about this past weekend’s Super Bowl was Bruno Mars.  Now raise your hand if your school has pep rallies, cheer leaders, and neighborhood celebrations for the school band, or the drama club, or the dance troupe.

That’s what I thought.

Despite the fact that 4000 former players recently sued the NFL over head injuries – despite the fact that 1.35 million kids go to the ER each year because of school sports related injuries – despite the fact that having a kid involved in team sports results in thousands of parents  standing on freezing fields, in the rain, early on Sunday mornings when really, they’d rather be curled up with a cup of coffee and the paper, or better yet, still asleep – despite all of that —  our culture idolizes sports and kids’ participation in it, and barely looks up when a kid is a star performer in any of the arts.

It’s time we gave arts programs for school aged-kids  at least the same love we give sports programs.