LOL Surprise Dolls - Hot Holiday Toys!

LOL Surprise dolls are all over BOTH of my children's Wish Lists this year. My kids are obsessed and love these little collectibles. They are so hard to find in stores, but Amazon has been amazing with pre-orders and stock levels!
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The dolls are available in all sorts of packages!  The Big sister dolls include outfits and accessroies and can be found in the series: Under Wraps Dolls - Series 1, Under Wraps - Series 2, and Glam Glitter. Walmart will be releasing a BLING series for the holiday and as soon as they do, I'll post in my Facebook group- along with tons of other discounts and coupons! The Pearl Surprise includes a Big sister, a lil sister and accessories. The Bigger Surprise is new this holiday season and includes wigs for the 2 dolls included!

My kids especially love the Lil Sisters. They newest Eye Spy series is our favorite! There are even a few boy characters!

Additionally, they have Pets Series, and the animals come with their accessories as well! Emmalee is asking for a Biggie Pet, which is a very large pet, that has extra surprises with it! There is also a new Interactive Pet - which is just like those interactive monkey toys that go on your finger, but with a LOL twist!

The biggest LOL item this summer will be the House! It comes with 85+ surprises! The house includes a family and so many accessories!

There are also so many activity books: Press Out and Play Book, 1000 Sticker Book, Tin of Books, Lil Sister Coloring Book, and Stick and Style Dress Up Book. Additionally, a Glow in the Dark Scrapbook or a Light Up Diary would be a great gift! Emma really loved the Creativity Case and Stylin Studio and the Secret Message Jewelry craft kits she saw this weekend. This Activity Tray would be great for all those crafts and even eating lunch!

LOL clothing exists too! From Fur Duffle bags to Tshirts and pajamas, there is so much!

My favorite LOL item this year is the #OOTD Countdown. With more than 25 pieces and with 25 doors, it will make the most perfect countdown to Christmas calendar as well! Emma is going to be so excited when she sees how many LOL items she will be getting this holiday!

xo, Heather

New Charlie's Nature Play Area at Buttonwood Park

It's no secret that we love Buttonwood Park.  We've had a family membership for the past 2 years and used library passes for admission for years before that.  It's a great small zoo that my kids love.  Tyler loves the harbor seals (which he calls sea lions- he'll learn one day), and Emma loves that one of the elephants shares her name, however she is especially excited that Buttonwood Park Zoo is getting a red panda, which is just one of the new things happening at the zoo.

Buttonwood Park Zoo has it's master plan on display in the educational complex and it's very cool to see all the plans they have in place.

While they are still in the middle of building the habitat for the red panda, they have moved around a few of the animals and just finished up construction on the Charlie's Nature Play area, which is "where the goat used to live", according to Emma.

The area is completely new and inspires so much creativity! The kids spent almost a half hour just playing with the tubes, constructing "the longest one in the whole world ever!" I especially loved how collaborative all the kids were. I know we just had a good group of people and that won't always be the case but they were sharing and problem solving together.

In addition to the cool "marble" area, they had a paint with water area, a water area, a huge block building area, tables for smaller block building, a sandbox with an umbrella, a xylophone, balance beams made from logs, a growing area, and a misting area!

I especially loved the log benches set up for parents and the butterflies that were hanging out on the flowers the whole time!

We usually spend about an hour at Buttonwood Park Zoo since my kids love running from one area to the next but we spent an hour just in Charlie's Nature Play area!

I'm so excited about this new area and can't wait to see the next changes!

xo, Heather

Seekonk Grand Prix

Thanks to a Seize the Deal... deal... I was able to grab a discounted gift card to Seekonk Grand Prix in Seekonk, MA.  My kids are obsessed with mini golf and anything that resembles racing like Vanellope from Wreck IT Ralph so a half priced gift card seemed like a good thing to have tucked in my back pocket.

We had some great weather and a full morning and afternoon with no commitments so we took the drive to Seekonk, intent on going mini golf and taking a lap around in the go-karts.

Seekonk Grand Prix is easily accessible and there's a ton of free parking around the building.
Upon entering, there is an area to purchase your play cards.  You can preplan what you're going to do and just purchase that amount on the card or you can throw on an arbitrary amount and reload as needed.  Since we already had $50, we were free to head out to whatever activities we wanted.

In addition to mini golf and go karts (so many different tracks!), they also have a suspended ropes course, bumper cars, bumper boats and an arcade. Since Emmalee is only 46" and Tyler even shorter, we didn't have to pay for either to race in the family go-karts-score!

We started with mini-golf.  My kids are obsessed with it, but oh, so terrible at it. The 18 hole course was great for them.  MOst holes were a Par 3 or 4 so not too difficult, but interesting enough with barriers, log "short cuts" and lots of water features that made you constantly fear that you'd lose your ball.  Emmalee especially loved the waterfall feature on the course!

After mini-golf we went to the family track and again, the kids got to ride free since they were too short to ride alone. The kids had so much fun and it was really enjoyable! It's a great track that loops around, going under a bridge and through a fake mountain! We were allowed to do a few laps around so it was a great value!

We decided to check out the kid track since Tyler really wanted to drive a go-kart and was surprised to find that he could drive (they just have to be 4 years old and under 48"!) so both kids went for a spin.  It's a smaller track but they had to have taken 15-20 laps on it so again, a great value and they loved it!

Since we still had money left on our card (seriously, $50 took us so far!), we went inside to play arcade games.  The kids found their favorites.  I was frustrated with the swipe card.  It didn't always register and we'd have to swipe it 10 times to get it to work.  The great thing was that they fixed it so quick when Dave brought it up to the counter and they replaced it. They even reset the air hockey for us when the game started but no puck came out.

Super exciting is that the ropes course is suspended above the arcade so the kids were enthralled watching people climb around. It's a very small course in comparison to the outdoor course I've done but still looked like it would be fun for an older kid. 

Additionally, there's a small snack bar that served ice cream and vending machines had sodas so we really had everything we'd need while there! If we had stayed longer we may have needed a more substantial lunch but with so many local restaurants, it really wasn't an issue. 

We loved our visit to Seekonk Grand Prix and will be going back again soon! What would you be most interested to do while there?

xo, Heather

New "All You Can Play" from Chuck E Cheese

Chuck E Cheese just rolled out their new "All You Can Play" card and guys... I am here for it.

My kids love Chuck E Cheese and after a really great day with no arguing between them, I brought them so we could check out this new way of paying.. also, Emma found an old wallet with 45 tokens from 2009 so we figured it was worth a shot regardless....

First off, I love that Chuck E Cheese does hand stamps for adults and kids, in black light so that the company is sure you're leaving with the right kids... I mean there are some sick people out there, but anyways... Emmalee immediately asked the guy if she could still use her tokens and he offered to put them on her Play Pass card so she would be able to use them in the machines.

Every commercial I have seen sayd "Play All You Want for Just $9!" but when we went to use the kiosk, it offered a minute card for just $5! After selecting the amount of time I wanted to purchase (30 minutes), it prompted me asking how many cards I wanted the time split up on (up to 4!). I decided to go back and hit 60 minutes so that both kids had 30 minutes of play time on their card. The kiosk wanted $20 for both cards but thanks to Chuck E Cheese's coupons on the website, I was able to get both for only $15.99! It is important to note though that I had to switch over to the counter and speak to an employee to get the discounted price.

Time starts when the first game gets swiped and each time you swipe the card, it tells you how many minutes you have left so the kids were able to countdown and they moved much faster when the time left was less than 5 minutes!

 Every game was available for them, including the non-ticket-winning "rides" like the picture with Chuck E in his car, the spinning cocoa cup, and the giant clock "swing". We did not run into any issues with how quickly you could replay games and the kids could not believe how quickly they could win tickets!

A feature I love is that you can PAUSE your time card We paused ours twice during our trip.  The first was so that Tyler could use the bathroom and the second time was because there was an issue with a game not giving us our tickets. With regular tokens that wouldn't have been an issue, and thanksfully, with the pause button, we didn't lose any precious time!

I especially love that Chuck E Cheese kept their traditional way of playing (Play Points) alongside the new plan. Emma's newly converted tokens gave her even more games to play after her time was up.

It's a great value for the amount of games the kids got to play and helped me set a time limit for how long we were there.  Emmalee is notorious for holding on to her last few tokens, looking for "the perfect game" which drags to an extra 20 minutes of time, so the hard and fast "end time" will be really helpful for some parents.

Overall, I really love the "All You Can Play" and know we'll be taking advantage of it again soon!

xo, Heather

Lcpl. Matthew Rodriguez Playground aka Airport Playground, New Bedford

We're always looking for great playgrounds and we stumbled on a small, but really fun playground. most of our favorite playgrounds are huge, sprawling places with lots of things to do, but sometimes it's nice to have a smaller playground where I can see the kids wherever they are and sit and relax for a bit.

The playground is located at the New Bedford Airport (1569 Airport Rd, New Bedford, MA 02746) and is mostly fenced in.  The kids love that it butts right up to the airport runways and they can watch the airplanes as they play. 

It's such a fun place to spend an hour-- what other playgrounds do you love?

Heather

Summer Fun Plans

I really love summer. I spend all year working, and I mean, I work a lot. Weekends, late after school, early in the morning. I lose a lot of time with my kids to grading so summer is 10 full weeks with my kids and husband.

The kids and I sat down to make our summer fun list because even though summer itself is fun, we want to go to some extra fun places. Plus, having a list reminds me to get things done! Here's our hopes for this summer:

This looks like so much fun, right!?

I can't wait to see which we cross off our list first!

xo, Heather

Coney Island Theme Park - Ohio

With a 5 pm flight, we had some time to kill in Cincinnati. We could have gone into the city but honestly, I was a bit nervous about Monday traffic, so instead we ended up at Coney Island in Ohio.

Emmalee has been all about carnivals and street fairs lately, so Coney Island's rides were the perfect way to spend our morning. The actual park consists of a water park and the rides, but we opted to only pay for the rides and forgo to water park.  At only $13.50 for adults and $6.95 for children ages 2-7, it was a very affordable way to spend the morning.  They even offer wagon rentals!

 After buying our wrist bands, I learned that parents can go in without wrist bands if they do not plan on riding the rides! That's an even better value for parents of children who only wanted to go on the kid sized rides.

There were a good amount of rides for the kids: turtles, airplanes, helicopters, but also had rides that parents will enjoy like bumper cars, a roller coaster. and the scrambler.

The kids had a blast and we got to try funnel cake for the first time! Coney Island is the perfect size amusement park for a 1 day trip, but if we had gone to the water park, we would have needed two! I'm glad we made time to visit!

xo, Heather

Great Wolf Lodge - Mason, PA

For the last year (at least!) Emma has asked to go to Great Wolf Lodge and honestly, I just wasn't really into it.  Over $300 for a hotel room seemed a bit crazy, and honestly, I'm just too cheap for that.

BUT with Emma's birthday being a bit overshadowed by our travel to Ohio for my brother's wedding, coupled with a great promo that the Mason OH location was offering, we figured it would be a great birthday surprise on the road!

We pulled up and Emma screamed in excitement. She could not believe that we were at Great Wolf Lodge! The front desk check in was amazing and quick! They even gave Emmalee a special set of ears that had a birthday hat on it!

We were given the option of upgrading our standard room for a KidKamp and considering how inexpensive the upgrade was, we grabbed it! I am so happy we did since the kids loved the extra KidCabin set up!

The KidKamp was adorable! A bunk bed set up, tucked into a "tent" that had their own tv and table set up. Emmalee was especially excited to sleep o the top bunk!

The room itself was wonderful- comfortable and spacious. We especially loved the balcony that overlooked the outdoor pool.  It was perfect for a end of the day snuggles, late night drinks with my husband and an early morning wake up view. 

Even though we loved the room, we decided the afternoon at the water park would be a better way to spend our time. 

I love that Great Wolf offers puddle jumpers and life vests for children to use. They had so many different activities- slides, including a little set for younger kids, a lazy river, the obstacle challenge, and a wave pool.  Tyler thought it was so cool that some of the slides even went outside! The water park is kept around 80 degrees, but with so much moisture in the air, we ventured outside and loved the quieter outdoor pool. As the sun began to set, we went back into the indoor pool and spent even more time in the wave pool and on the slides. 

I was so glad we were there for more than one day because there was so much more to do! The resort has a candy company, an arcade, and a Dunkin Donuts, as well as multiple restaurants and snack counters.

And if that's not enough, they have a whole schedule of fun every day! We got to do arts and crafts, morning yoga, and meet Oliver! And honestly, the most amazing employee ever works at the Mason location. You can get that whole story on my twitter feed...

I honestly wish we were there for more than one night and I've already started looking at when we can go again to our more local location.  It was absolutely worth it!

Have you been?

xo, Heather