Our family has been living gluten-free due to Celiac Disease for over 6 years. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, rye, barley, and very similar to the protein found in outs. This means that any food needs to be made specially – bread, pasta, cake, pizza crust, pretzels, cookies, etc. Finding the Betty Crocker gluten-free mixes was a wonderful surprise!

Over the past 6 years there has been a huge increase in availability of gluten-free products, but most of the GF products have been found in the health food aisle of the grocery store or in a specialty store.

However, gluten-free products are becoming more mainstream as the number of people diagnosed with celiac disease rises, as well as the number of people living gluten-free for other reasons. Last summer, General Mills introduced a new, gluten-free formulation of Rice Chex (they changed the sweetener from barley malt to another sweetener). In addition to becoming more mainstream, gluten-free products are becoming much more commonly available and found in most grocery stores.
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Children bonding over a warm fire. OK, we don’t have a fireplace, but …

We uploaded a new video that was less dark, and it includes instructions for you to do the trick yourself! If you wanted to, you could pretend that the fire popping up in the air is like the star appearing over Bethlehem…

note – have talk with kids about fire safety!

My reading choices vary by mood – some days I might want a suspenseful novel, and others a romance. Sometimes a mystery will hit the spot, and others a chick lit novel is more to my taste. If you are in the market for a novel that will lift your spirits without being saccharine sweet, pick up Earthly Pleasures, a new novel by Karen Neches. Earthly Pleasures will enchant you with its storyline about the inhabitants of heaven, but you’ll keep turning the pages to see how the romantic storyline unfolds.
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We have teamed up with the Parent Bloggers Network and the Discovery Channel Store on two prior occasions, reviewing Paz’s liftoff rocket and the game Rapelli. Both products were big hits in this house, and continue to be well-loved. Our newest collaboration is for the Solar Science Lab, a kit for children which explores different methods of harnessing the sun’s energy.

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When you’ve been reading romantic paranormal novels for a while, there’s a point where you think you’ve seen every storyline. Prepare yourself for something new this time, a concept I haven’t seen in print in about 15 years, and an execution that is engaging, endearing, and unique. Bound To Love Her is a novel in which the worlds of the elves and the humans collide by new author Esri Rose. If you aren’t accustomed to paranormals, you’ll want to give this a try, as it doesn’t require as much of a suspension of disbelief as many other novels in this genre.

In Bound To Love Her, the elf and human worlds collide when Erin is walking her neighbor’s dog and happens upon a handsome injured man in the park. She helps him up off the ground, and ends up bringing him to her house before bringing him to the hospital with her housemate. While Erin’s housemate Jed is collecting his things, Erin brushes Galen’s hair off his face and uncovers his pointed ear, and Erin learning that elves are among us.
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I’ve written several times about the fabulous books by Katie MacAlister. If you’ve been waiting for something great to read, don’t wait any longer – Katie has a started a new series! If you liked the Aisling Grey Guardian Series, starting with You Slay Me, the Silver Dragon series will pull you in quickly, as it is a spin-off of that. We’ve seen Gabriel, the leader (wyvern) Silver Dragons before, and we see him in new lights and shadows in Playing with Fire (Silver Dragons, Book 1).
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We are a family which loves to play games. Card games, board games, outside games, and other games that seem to defy description. When Parent Bloggers Network was looking for someone to test the Discovery Store game Rapelli, we were happy to give it a try. The Rapelli Game is a 15 minute game which is part of the Discovery Store’s new line of bamboo products, and is designed for kids ages 4+.

Bamboo is a renewable resource which has become popular for creating everything from sheets to flooring. Bamboo grows and matures quickly, making it easy to harvest and then plant another crop, unlike slow-growing trees. Bamboo’s versatility is well-utilized in Rapelli, the pieces are multi-sectioned caterpillars, dice, and a cylinder, all of which look just like wood. Discovery has a pop-up window which explains more about their eco-friendly products, the natural materials, and environmental sustainability. Usually the consumer is torn between wood, which is natural but requires cutting down trees, and plastic, which could contain any number of chemicals, but doesn’t use up the forests. Bamboo offers a third choice which combines the benefits of both, without the negatives of either. Bamboo grows well in China, and the Discovery Store collection of bamboo toys are made in China in conjunction with several agencies.

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Spring and Summer have arrived, so it’s time to break out the outdoor games! Gamewright has been our favorite source for games for the past year and a half, and with its new releases, it looks like that trend will continue. (and not just because they send us games for review!) We spend the winter (and evenings) playing games from Gamewright, so it is only fitting that we are playing one of their new games, Boochie, outside!

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We live in a world filled with creepy-crawlies. We’ve also become more and more aware of them each year. From dust mites to mosquitoes, seemingly nuisance pests are wreacking more and more havoc. Then, each spring moms are starting to cut their boys’ hair to make it easier to do tick checks (all our friends are nervous about ticks after our Lyme Disease issues). Other than ticks, our biggest tiny bug anxiety is about lice.

Do you remember that feeling of squickiness and shame when the school nurse found out you had lice? ick But now parents are not only worried about eliminating the lice and nits, but also worried about using pesticides on their children’s heads in order to kill off the lice. Everyone needs to comb every strand of hair, but coating the head in olive oil or mayonnaise and then a hair thingie for 3 hours seems to work, but not everyone can do that. The kind folks at MomCentral have teamed up with Lice MD to show parents that there’s an alternative to pesticides sitting on their pharmacy shelf.
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I spend a lot of my time with my girls and pups taking pictures, which we post in blogs and on flickr. The joy of digital cameras is that you can delete the bad pictures, and crop the images so that the pics you select are exactly what you want to share with your friends and family. There are a lot of programs and websites where you can share pictures online, but there aren’t many where you can choose who can see the pictures of your kids OR sites that easily mail your digital images to someone who might not have a camputer. Kinzin is a program that allows you to limit who can view your pictures, and will mail 10 pictures to any address once a month. With out of state family and great-grandparents without computers, (and far too many unfulfilled promises about mailing prints) we were eager to review the service for PBN.
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