Giveaways

Just two days left in our week of Holiday Giveaways and we're finishing it off with a bang. For the next two days we have a huge number of tickets to some of NYC's best family events: We're giving away two family packs to the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. Plus four tickets to Wintuk. Four tickets to the Big Apple Circus. And ten tickets to New York Shop, which I'll be giving away in pairs. That's nine giveaways in the next two days. That's over $1500 in prizes!

Here's the trick, the giveaways are going to start at random times and end at random times, so keep checking back to catch one. There's lots of tickets to win, so send the links to your friends and you can all go to one of these events together. You can enter as many of the guiveaways as you like and you can also win more than once.

I'll also be announcing the beginning of each giveaway on Twitter, so if you are on Twitter, follow me and you can keep tabs on the situation from there. Read more »

My son, Roan, has reached the age of forced ambivalence. I didn’t see it coming, at age four, yet here it is. When I asked him on Sunday to accompany me to a concert by the band Milkshake, he acted cavalier and stipulated that his cousin, Boone had to go as well. I invited Boone, nine years old, who is the king of cavalier. I think his mother threatened or bribed because he eventually was on board. I mention this because I did not expect these boys to dance, sing or frolic during the concert. I was wrong. Read more »

How do we accumulate so much stuff, when, I swear, we never buy anything? We do our best to follow the one-in, one-out rule. My kids are actually pretty good about giving up their old toys (they have a knack for expressing contempt and disdain for most of the things in their lives). And yet, my closets look like booby traps for unsuspecting fools who might attempt to open them. They are so packed with...I don't know what.

Cleaning up, to us, means moving everything from the surface of the place we want to be clean to some other surface that is as far from that one as possible. I dream of making it my life's work to make our home a sanctuary where every place you rest your eyes is a perfect picture of tranquility and beauty. Hahahhaha. Well, maybe in another life, the one where I'm not scrambling from one thing to the next every waking minute of the day.

But wouldn't it be nice to have someone just come in and take care of these things. Even just a little facelift before our homes are over-run and picked over by relatives over the Holidays. A little nip here and a tuck here to get our apartments organized. I Thought so. Read more »

This week to promote our Holiday Guide, we're doing a whole week of fabulous giveaways. This is by far the best line-up of giveaways we've ever done on the site, with well over $1000 in awesome prizes.

We're kicking it off with two awesome giveaways of Mattel's best selling toys for boys and girls. Each prize is worth $150. and will make you the most loved parent ever on Christmas or Chanukah. Check out what you get: Read more »

Thanks to everyone who shared their great Holiday Activity ideas in our blurb giveaway post. If you are looking for ideas for starting our own traditions, definitely read all the comments in the original post. Read on here for our five winners and the blurb discount code: Read more »

We wrote about the book making possibilities from Blurb last year, but I had never tried it myself. Well, I just made my first digital photo book through Blurb.com and it came out great. I love giving photo albums, calendars and other custom and personalized gifts at Christmas and a Blurb book is perfect. In the past I have printed them out on high quality color printers and either had them bound at Kinkos or bound them myself, but having a professionally bound book is much easier and looks pretty slick.

Here's what I liked and thought could have been improved, plus what I learned along the way. At the end of the post find out details for our giveaway. Five winners will get to make their own blurb books, plus we've got blurb discount codes anyone can use right away. Read more »

...Third Place in our Halloween Costume Contest!

We always say, everyone's a winner on Mommy Poppins, so even though McCain/Palin didn't win the highest office in the land, their campaign wasn't for naught and they won't go home empty handed. This mini McCain/Palin duo takeThird Place in our Halloween Costume Photo Contest.

See the other great winning costumes: Read more »

It's Science Week on Mommy Poppins! This week, along with our usual stuff, we're going to be writing about all kinds of cool science-related stuff to do and we're kicking it off with a great giveaway. Just leave a comment on this post sharing your favorite indoor activity for when the weather turns colder and you'll get a chance to win four terrific science kits: Stepping into Science, The Magic School Bus World of Germs, My First Chemistry Kit, And Little Labs Cranes.

Starting tomorrow we'll be telling you more about these kits and others in our reviews of the best science kits for kids, plus, the coolest science spots around NYC, some great science sites, and more, so stay tuned.

To enter our giveaway: Read more »

We're getting some awesome pictures entered in to our Halloween Photo Contest already. If you went out to some of the Halloween events this weekend and snapped pictures of your cuties in their costumes, make sure to submit them to our contest. It's so easy and we have great prizes. Look at some of the great entries we've gotten so far:

Read more »

We got lots of great reader responses in last week's Time and Money Saving Tips post with more great ideas. There's really too many to recap here, but here are my top 5 favorite, plus our giveaway winner and discount codes for everyone:

(oh, and don't forget to enter our Halloween Kiddie Cruise giveaway by Thursday). Read more »