The Original Ultimate Spinner Game is a game that can be enjoyed by children from 4 and up and adults too. No chance to get bored with this as there are multiple choices of what activity to play.

The board is made of pine wood and is very sturdy as is the spinner, which is in the shape of a hand. The discs are interchangeable and that’s where the real fun comes in! You can play games like “What Time Is It”, “Spinner Speedway”, “Spin Do” and more.

• “What Time Is It” helps children learn how to tell time. You replace the hand spinner with cardboard spinners that have “hour” and “minute” written on them.
• “Spinner Speedway” is a racing game to see who passes the finish line first, but there’s lot of forward or back as you move along. Racing terminology is used in this game.
• “Spin Do”is a fun, imaginative play game where you get to act, pretend and be silly.
• The numerical discs help children to learn math, including addition, subtraction and multiplication.
• The letter discs help children to recognize letters and when ready, begin to read and spell.

In total there are 12 games. For younger children you can use  “Considering Tender Hearts”  rules which make the rules a little less challenging and lessen waiting time.

My daughter thought the best game was “Baseball Game” because “I like watching baseball games with my Dad”.  She also said, “I can’t wait to try it out when we have a party so we can play outside.”

This is the perfect game for family night. There are hours of fun packed into this one game made by Robbins Toy. Playing board games helps my family keep a tradition alive that my husband and I both grew up with. It’s nice to pass this down to our daughter.

Thanks to Family Review Network for the opportunity to play a good ole fashioned game.

Every school has rules about when to keep your child home from school. There’s the contagious stuff like Pink Eye of course. You know not to send your son in when he’s running a fever or your daughter in when she can’t keep any food down. What do you do though when your child tells you that they don’t feel well and there really aren’t any drastic symptoms?

Have you heard on a school morning, “Mom, my tummy hurts” or “Mommy, I’ve got a headache”? I have lots of times. Determining the truth can be about as difficult as picking winning lottery numbers. Because kids are smart, smarter than we think. And because we moms sometimes act out of guilt, even though we don’t want to admit it.

I’ve learned about this the hard way. My older daughter is now 21. She is in Graduate school and has done very well in school every year. She has graduated high school and college early. I didn’t have to help her with homework or studying. If she missed school because she pretended to be sick and I fell for it willingly or not, no biggie. She could easily make up the work and the time lost was just chalked up to a mental health day in my book.

Now comes my 9 year old. My guilt trip is that she’s our last child and I’ve been sick with Myasthenia Gravis and then lots of other things since she was 4 years old. You fill in your guilt issues. Almost anything can make us as mothers feel guilty. We work too much. We don’t play enough with our children. We don’t discipline them the right way. The list goes on.

Next your child goes off to school. Most of the time that first day in Kindergarten makes us sad. Some of us cry. Even the first days of the later grades are hard for us. Possibly more guilt.

Here’s the math - Possible Child’s Sickness + Guilt = ?

For me the answer was let her stay home from school. Maybe she really was sick. What an awful mother I would be if I sent her to school and she got worse. Maybe she was tired and didn’t sleep well the night before. In Kindergarten, even First Grade it wasn’t so bad. As it continued though it was becoming a habit and I wasn’t helping to stop it. She was starting to have to make up her work and her grades were hurting. There were family emergencies that came up and then she really was sick. Her time out of school was getting to be too much.

I’ve learned my lesson big time. I’ve accepted that I was giving in to my daughter. And it was out of guilt that I thought I deserved. I now understand that I don’t. I’m a good, caring Mom even though I am sick. Yes she’s my last child, but so what does that have to do with her?

When she tells me she has a headache I tell her if she doesn’t have a fever she’s going to school. If her stomach hurts, she’s going to school unless she’s green. There’s ground rules now. She’s taking more responsibility and feeling more mature. And it’s working so much better for the both of us.

NaNoWrimo or National Novel Writing Month is a forum for people all over the world to encourage and inspire people to write a novel in one month. This is a yearly event that occurs every November.

I’ve always dreamed of being an author. I guess that’s one reason that blogging appeals so much to me. But write a book in one month? Can I do that? If it’s a book of short stories perhaps. If I didn’t have to do anything else expect write, perhaps. If I could type faster and more accurately and not worry about my arthritic hands hurting, perhaps.

Curious to see my typing speed, I took an online test and found out that I only type 41 wpm. That’s a lot worse than I thought. I think I was nervous, thanks a lot Dragon’s typing speed test!

After taking this test, I saw that the Dragon Naturally Speaking Speech Recognition System did a heck of a better job than I did. Not only would I save time but my hands would feel a lot better too. Since I don’t use a Mac, I’d chose the PC version of Dragon.

I checked out the Dragon Reviews and saw that people like it and use it for every day use, not only book writing. So beyond my wish to write a book to be published (I just added that, because I want some fame too), I could use this program for blogging the thing I hate most, writing emails. Talk about saving time.

Come November 1st, I may be end up using using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for NaNoWrimo.