This is a sponsored post, but, who among us has not always had a childlike wonder about wall beds?

I’ve always had a keen interest in wall beds, I think since seeing one on Laverne and Shirley when I was a little kid. I have always thought they were so cool! This murphy bed is seventeen hundred times cooler than that old thing that flopped down from the wall on Laverne and Shirley so many years ago!

Before deciding to give up my office to my oldest son so the boys can each have their own rooms, I had considered something like this for the office. I had been looking at Futons that folded out into beds. I have the perfect space for it and I thought that it would be great in here, because, when the kids want to come in here and talk and hang out with me, they would have something to sit on. And then when we have out of town guests, like my mom or my dad, the office could double as a guest room. That would definitely be cool. And holy macaronis, if I could afford this Murphy Bed – that would just totally rock!

These things are really cool! You should go to the site and watch the video to see how easily they convert back and forth between bed and couch, couch and bed. It’s really neat. It would definitely make my dream office, that’s for sure!!

I say ‘your’ car, because, I have a minivan. And this invention isn’t really needed in my minivan. I did need it this summer (several times!) when driving my mom’s car, though!! How many times have you dropped something in between the seat and the console and hurt the back of your hand or your wrist trying to fish it out? I know! Me too! I hate it when that happens! And sometimes you can’t even actually get the ‘whatever you dropped’ out! It’s like the car just swallowed it up completely. You stop the car, get out, crouch on the ground to see underneath the seat and you still can’t see the durn thing!

Well, the answer to your hand-hurting prayers is the Drop Stop – a super cool little doohickey invented by two guys who wanted to make all our lives just a little bit easier! Marc Newburger and Jeffrey Simon put their heads together to create this helpful addition to your car after Marc had a very close call with a pole!

With all of the cool stuff in the auto parts section of the giant discount stores or all of the cool things at auto parts stores – you would think someone would have thought of making this car wedge sooner! It’s so strange that someone just now came up with this! What is wrong with us? Didn’t we learn anything from all these years of scratching up the back of our hands? Thank goodness Marc and Jeffrey did! You can read all about the journey from concept to completion and all about their team on the site. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page and click, ‘About The Inventors’.

I love the way they surprised people in the video – that’s so funny that no one picked out what they had put in their cars! I can’t say that I would have noticed it, that’s for sure!

I’ve often thought about buying one of those consoles that you can put in minivans that you can buy in the auto parts section. (I’m torn, because, then no one can crawl through – well, not very easily.) I wonder, though, if I did – if it would work with that kind of console, too. If not, maybe that could be their next product invention. They could call it “Drop Stop II”. Until then, though, my mom’s gotta order Drop Stop for her car so next summer I won’t have so much trouble losing things in her car!

P.S. They have a Thanksgiving offer right now for 15% off!

These adorable pretend play kitchens are so completely cute and awesome! I love them! There are many different styles and sizes from which you can choose! I love toys like these that really encourage imaginative play. So many toys just ‘do the playing’ for the kids! And in my experience, the children actually tire of those toys so much faster. The thing that I really noticed with my own kids is the ‘more’ the toy does for you, the quicker that toy gets put off to the side, never to be picked up again.

Sammie did have a toy kitchen when she was little and we did really love it and got lots and lots of play time out of it. Hers was plastic, though – and these wooden ones remind me so much of the ones that were around when I was a kid. They are like the 1970s versions with a whole lot more pizazz!

Call me a child of the 70’s, but, there is just something magical about wooden toys. They just seem like a springboard for lots of fun ideas and interactive play to blossom. The Pretend Play Kitchens Shop has quite a variety of kitchens from which to choose – they are in all kinds of different sizes and styles. And they come in a lot of different color schemes, too!

Man, I’m telling you, I just love munchkin toys and I’m so bummed that my kids are so old and we don’t get to shop for this stuff anymore. I’ve actually been thinking of starting a site and/or blog just devoted to my love of munchkin toys.

The kitchen that I like best at the Pretend Play Kitchens Shop is the Grand Gourmet Corner Kitchen. It is the one that I have pictured here and I just be any one of my four nieces would just love it and have many hours of fun with it! Yep, it’s the most expensive one they have! But I am telling you – it is awesome! And it has a pink color scheme and even has pink curtains that open and close! I don’t know, though, the Pink Retro Kitchen is pretty cool! It has a separate refrigerator and because the pieces are separate, it really reminds me of the set that my cousins had when we were kids. Man, I loved their kitchen! I was so jealous of it! Hehe.

And if you have limited space available, there is even a kitchenette – and even it comes with all kinds of cool stuff!

Any one of these would make a great Christmas gift for the little one in your life! I’m just sad that we’re past that stage in this house! You should totally check out how cute these are, though!

This post was sponsored by PretendPlayKitchenShop.com and I’ve had so much fun looking at all of their cute kitchens!

Ok, I’m not in the UK, but, can I just say? I love the Office Supermarket website! Yes, it is a retail website – but, it is a helpful retail website! I have been thinking about what all I want to do with my home office, in terms of decorating and organizing, a lot lately. It is my ’space in this world’, if you will – and I want to make it, not only, all my own, but also, an easy place to accomplish all the things that I want to do. And that list of things I want to do is long, let me tell you! So it has seemed an overwhelming task, trying to figure out how to incorporate all the home office furniture and space for the many things I want to do and have it look kind of nice!

There are two pieces of furniture on which I get stuck making decisions all the time! The first one is my desk. I just love my “desk”. I put that in quotes, because, it is not really a desk. It is a piece of furniture that my husband got off a job about twenty years ago. He said it was being used as a dining room table. It actually looks neither like a desk nor a dining room table! It has this odd, sawhorse-type frame underneath made of wood and metal and the surface is just a giant piece of really thick glass. I absolutely love this hideous thing. Of course, I loved my ‘79 Delta 88, too. A lot can be said for my taste – or maybe, of my taste. It has such a wonderfully large surface, though, that I have avoided giving it up for a very long time. The really cool thing about Office Supermarket is that, for those of us looking for office desks, they offer a office desk buying guide. It’s actually really simple, but, it helps me to map out the choices in my mind. It neatly puts them in sections for me. I love it! Choice can be really overwhelming to this ADD-girl, so this kind of help is priceless!

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently had the opportunity to try a new chocolate delight from the Ferrero Chocolate people. It is the company’s first dark chocolate treat and it is called Ferrero Rondnoir.

It had to have been the most interesting chocolate candy I’ve ever tried. What made it so interesting? The layers! Layers and layers of different tastes and textures. It was so delicious.

Let me see if I can get this straight – first you have the little tiny pieces of chocolate on the outside, then comes the wafer, after that is my favorite part – the soft, creamy chocolate – and in the very middle is a regular piece of yummy dark, delicious chocolate! It was so yummy!

You can read all about it here: Ferrero Chocolate. First click on ‘Ferrero Rondnoir’ and then, to see all of the delectable layers, click on ‘Experience Rondnoir’.

And a really cool thing about the company is that they’ve paired up with Share Our Strength in the Share Something Sweet project. They are working to end child hunger in the United States, and you can help to support them by going to their site, and send a personalized snow globe e-card to someone you love! I sent one to my mother, who was really impressed that the chocolate company was working to end hunger! We both think that rocks!

You have got to see this grandfather clock that is also a fountain! It is so gorgeous! I’ve always loved grandfather clocks and I’ve always wanted one, but, I’ve never seen one that is a fountain, too! That is just cool! It’s very modernly made with slate and copper and it’s so amazing! We are planning a major remodel to the living areas of our house, and I think we would have a perfect place for it in the corner of the dining area, next to the fireplace. It would look so nice there!

I completely love this clock, I can’t stop looking at it. I think the rich colors of the slate are really pulling me in. The water runs all the way down the front of the clock to the base, in which there are ornamental rocks, and also a soft light that illuminates the tower. It would be so nice to get up in the middle of the night for a drink of water and pass this lovely, soothing clock with the water flowing and the light glowing…I can totally picture that – just lovely!

It will be great when we can finally get busy on our remodel and start making this house our own beautiful creation. Obviously, we can’t create it – it’s already been made, I just mean, make it our own, you know? One of the big things we are going to do is tear down the wall between the living room and dining room and make it into one big Great Room. That is going to be so nice – it is going to open it up so much in here and make the place not feel so small. And then I can start looking at grandfather clocks and I know just where to look!

1-800-4clocks.com has got every clock under the sun – it is the perfect place for me to look! And they have a great blog, too! I love it when companies have blogs, and not just blogs, but, good blogs – blogs that are helpful and informative and let you get to know the company better! I learned something on their blog tonight, that I had wondered about, but, just had not bothered to research myself. Their post, Grandfather Clocks and Daylight Savings Time – A Change in Times informed me as to why the time change changed like it did this year. That was such a pain to me, because, at the time I was still using Windows ME, and there was no patch for ME. It’s really interesting what they said about the candy lobby possibly being responsible. It definitely makes you wonder, that’s for sure!