Category: Products & Services (Page 4 of 24)

Last weekend I got the kids the Cranium Cadoo game (found it at Thriftown for $1). I’ve loved Cranium games so far, but I found this one to be disappointing.
The concept of the game is pretty fun and straightforward. You have a gameboard with four rows of four spaces. Each player has tokens of a color, and she needs to get four of her tokens in a row to win the game. You get tokens by answering the questions or doing the activities shown in the cards.
The problem is that while the game requires kids to be readers – so they can read the cards -, which means that they must be at least 6 if not 7, years old – the questions are really, really, really easy. I played the game today with my 5-year-old daughter and her 6-year-old friend (I did all the reading), and they pretty much got all the questions/activities immediately. They enjoyed themselves, but there wasn’t much of a challenge, and I doubt the game would be much fun for an older child.
So alas, this is one game I cannot recommend.

We’re in the middle of summer vacation, and one of the ways I prepared for it was by getting lots of kits, crafts, games and activities so that the kids would not be bored to death and they wouldn’t spend all day long watching shows on netflix (not that they don’t anyway).
Today, for example, Camila and I spent the morning making soap and doing fun, gross experiments from the Scientific Explorer’s Disgusting Science kit (which I will review in a couple of weeks when the cultures we are growing are ready). We had lunch, watched some TV (of course), read books, hugged a lot, and decided to finally open the Wrist Pix Kit which I got on listia a few months back.
This kit (an older version of the one linked above) was surprisingly fun. What you do is either draw tiny pictures on stickers or color the stickers included with the kit, stick them on rectangle metal beads. Then you put a transparent thick sticker on it, and you’re done with the beads.
Actually using them to make jewelry is a bit more difficult. The kit comes with a bunch of nice 4mm plastic beads and very, very, very cheap elastic cord. The problem is that it comes apart very easily, making it difficult to thread – but not impossible. The other problem is that my girls apparently don’t want to do the actual beading – making the picture tiles is more fun 🙂
Anyway, this is a fun kit all in all.

Today Mika and I had a great stay-at-home day together, about which I hope to blog later. But now I’m taking a break to write about two new (to us) products we used today that we enjoyed.
One is the Cranium Balloon Lagoon game, which I got at Thriftown for $2, seemingly with everything it originally came. The game seems to not be available anymore – it’s about $100 at Amazon marketplace – but you may also be able to find it in a thrift store.
Mika and I played it today and it was a lot of fun. It has 4 stations. In one you have to flick toads into a pond, in another fish letters to form words, in a third push levels to get the correct parts of a pictures, and in the last one throw pictured dice through a chute until you get the correct picture. Pretty simple things, but fun nonetheless. Of course, Mika won, I’m not sure it’d have been as fun for her otherwise 🙂 In any case, well worth $2.
Another item that we used today was the Conair Quick Wrap Styling Kit which I got on listia.com for the equivalent of $4. It also seems to be out of production, but I’m sure you can find it somewhere. It worked surprisingly well. You just put a spool of thread inside it, thread the hair and some thread through the whole in the machine, and then press a button and slowly push the machine down as it wraps the thread of hair. My only problem has been being able to make the wrapped threads be straight, I think the key is to be pulling down on the hair stiffly as you wrap it. In any case, Mika liked the results. I’m hoping that the machine will work with regular thread, as I have a lot of that.
Anyway, time to go back to pay attention to my girl 🙂