Jamba Juice Smoothies Review and Giveaway

One thing that has always frustrated me is how brands and stores are often regional. That's why my husband insisted on stopping at a certain fast food chain on the way to the beach that had been previously limited to the West Coast, and why it was a Happy Day when a certain large retailer expanded from the Midwest to the East Coast many years ago. Of course, you can always order over the Internet when it comes to clothes or non-perishables, but that's not always an option with food.

Until recently, I had never had a Jamba Juice legendary smoothie because there isn't a location in my state. But now you can buy Jamba smoothies at your local retailer in the freezer section and enjoy them at home!

The smoothies come in three flavors--Strawberries Wild, Razzmatazz and Mango-a-go-go--and I received one of each to try. Each is a mix of frozen fruit and fat-free yogurt, along with Jamba's antioxidant boost, and to make them, you add 8 ounces of apple juice and make them in your blender.

What I Liked

• the ease--pour the contents of the package and the apple juice into a blender, cover and press a button, and in less than a minute, it's ready. It would take much longer to make a smoothie from scratch. These would also be convenient for a party, or for the middle of winter when these fruits are not in season locally.
• the lack of junk-the smoothies are fat-free, and contain no HFCS, no added colors or preservatives. My kids are not big fruit eaters, so I felt like this was a healthy way to get some fruit into them without also loading them up on sugar and fat.
• the taste--all three flavors were delicious, especially since we tried them in the middle of a heat wave. The strawberry flavor was the most popular, especially with my kids.

What I Didn't Like

• the size--one package makes two 8-ounce servings, which didn't go far for my family of four.
• the seeds in the berry flavor--I didn't mind them, but my kids didn't like the raspberry seeds in the Razzmatazz flavor
• the price--At around three dollars per package, using the smoothies for a crowd would get expensive.

Additionally, when I made the first smoothie, the pieces of fruit and yogurt jammed up my blender, but I suspect it's because mine is an old model that should really be replaced. Letting the package sit at room temperature to thaw a little fixed the problem on the other two packages.

The Giveaway
I have FIVE coupons to give away. Each coupon is good for one free package of Jamba Smoothies, any flavor. This giveaway will be open for one week, ending on Monday, July 5th at midnight. I will choose and notify winners on Tuesday, July 6th. Sorry, but this giveaway is only open to US residents. To enter, leave me a comment telling me which flavor you would like to try. For your entry to be valid, I MUST have a way to contact you, so please leave your email address or website that you check regularly. If I don't hear from you within 24 hours, I'll have to choose a new winner. Good luck!

*disclaimer-The Jamba All Natural Smoothies retail for $2.99 to $3.29 per package. I received three packages to try for this review at no cost to me. My opinions are my own and I am not being paid for a positive review.

**Edited to add--Congrats to Stephanie, Jules, Chris, Mumple and Emily for winning a coupon for a free Jamba Juice All Natural Smoothies.

Big Girl Now--Review Teaser

A funny thing happened recently. My baby girl grew up! All the baby gear is gone, and we're shedding the little kid stuff slowly but surely. And for the latest item, it's CSN Stores to the rescue. I've done two reviews with CSN Stores in the past and am thrilled to be working with them again. If you haven't already checked them out, they have over 200 online stores selling everything from dining room tables to patio furniture to baby cribs and bedding. The search function is easy to use, and shipping is reasonable, or even free.

When the weather is cooperating, and even sometimes when it's not, my kids really like to ride bikes. My 3 1/2 year old has been riding a small tricycle that was a hand me down from another family member. She's starting to outgrow it, plus the way it is constructed means she pedals furiously to keep up with her older brother on his two wheel bike, but doesn't get very far. One day, after being left in the dust, she told me, "I don't want this baby bike anymore, I want a big girl bike with two wheels!"

So coming up soon, I'll be reviewing a 12 inch bike (with training wheels, she's not that big yet!) for my fast growing big girl. Stay tuned! Thanks to CSN Stores for this opportunity.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear about when you made the switch from trike to bike and how it went!

Menu Plan--Hot, Hot, Hot

The East Coast is stuck in an endless heatwave. They keep saying it's going to break soon. It hasn't. We need rain. My flowers and plants are wilting and the city is dusty and dirty.

The heat is bad for my appetite. I don't feel like eating. Or cooking. It hasn't affected the appetites of my kids though, so I'm cooking things that are easy and light and that don't heat the kitchen up too much.

This week, we'll be eating:

**Toasted Artichoke Sandwiches--I'm not over my artichoke obsession yet. Mmmm...This meatless sandwich comes together quickly and also requires one little pan and only a few minutes of cooking. I'm thinking fruit and salads with them.
**Cheese Tortellini with Tomatoes and Corn--Another one dish meal that comes together quickly. Garlic bread to go with it.
**Asian Pork Linguine--A new recipe from Healthy Cooking. The peanut-honey sauce should appeal to the kids. Broccoli and fruit to go with it.
**Lemon Chicken--This might get done on the grill, or it might get done on the stovetop in a grill pan. It depends. Coleslaw and corn n the cob to go with it. **Tacos--A request by the H. Spanish rice on the side.
**Potato Crusted Chicken Casserole--This sounds like a middle of winter comfort meal, but I can do most of the prep in the morning when it's cooler and then pop it in the oven later just in time for dinner.
**Chicken Cheesesteaks--My husband asked if he could cook dinner one night and I said, "Hell YES!" These sandwiches are a little lighter than the steak version.

How's your weather? What are you eating these days?

Hard Questions

One of my favorite things to do as a mom is to sit back and watch my kids at unstructured play. This is a time when their imaginations really shine, and when they practice important skills like sharing ideas and working together to fix a problem. It's also a way for me to gauge how they have absorbed what they are exposed to and how they apply that learning during playtime.

Most of the time, they make me laugh, but sometimes they teach me things too. Like when I heard my daughter bossing her dolls around with an inflection that she clearly got from me, reminding me that sometimes I need to soften my tone. And sometimes playtime leads them to ask me questions that make me wonder how to best teach them what I believe in a realistic manner.

Last week, Amy at Crunchy Domestic Goddess wrote this thoughtful piece on how to respond when her almost six-year-old daughter asked why girls have to wear bathing suit tops (or one pieces) and boys don't. I read the post and comments with interest because, while we are a family that is very relaxed about nudity and not overly concerned with closed doors, in America, at some point it is no longer acceptable for a girl child to be out in public without a top. Even if she's flat as a pancake. However, my own almost six-year-old is a boy, so I thought I had more time to consider the issues of boys, girls, societal pressures and equality before Maureen, now 3 1/2, started asking questions.

And, as usual, I was wrong.

Earlier this week, my kids discovered a packet of colored index cards in our art basket and proceeded to use them to label their belongings. That meant the Lego bucket had a card with Johnny's name taped to it, and Maureen's stuffed cat had a card with an M written on it, because she can't write her full name yet. Eventually, they labeled the downstairs bathroom as the "girls room" and the upstairs bathroom as the "boys room." When I asked how I was supposed to know that the stick figure on the card on the upstairs bathroom was a boy, my son rolled his eyes at me and said, "Don't you know? Girls wear skirts!" When I looked at the card on the downstairs bathroom, sure enough, it looked like this.

Clearly, he had absorbed the lesson my husband taught him--how a child who cannot read can distinguish which bathroom is which using the symbols on the door, a la Dan Brown.

He followed this with, "See! Boys can't wear skirts.....can they?"

Thank you, Internet, for providing photos of men from cultures that do wear skirts, the most famous being the kilt.

However, the fact remains that in the United States, men usually don't wear skirts. When I recounted the conversation to my husband that evening, I said something along the lines of there being no law preventing a boy from wearing a skirt. And he looked at me and said, "So if he's in high school and he wants to wear a skirt to school, you'd say yes?"

And that's where it gets complicated.

I'd like to say that, yes, my answer would be yes. But when I was in high school, there WAS a boy who wore skirts to school. It was a black cotton floor-length skirt, and he wore it with a heavy metal t-shirt and Doc Martens. I can't remember his name, but I do remember that lots of other kids thought it was weird, gross or gay, and I remember that he had a bit of a reputation among the teachers as being a troublemaker. Could I send my own kid to school knowing he would be ridiculed or judged? Is it worth it to rock the boat to prove a point?

Maybe you think I'm over thinking this. It's an innocent question asked by a small boy who may never actually want to wear a skirt, in public or otherwise.

But here's the thing. I don't like being told that I can't do something, especially if the reason is as stupid as being a woman, or a mom, or married or too old or too young. And I really don't like it when someone has a stupid reason for telling my kids they can't do something. If you've been a reader for awhile, you might remember how I bristled when a stranger questioned my son's career goals.

Plus, I just finished reading Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier. The two main characters, actual people, were vitally important in the world of finding fossils, but they lived in a time when a woman was considered a spinster if she wasn't married by age 25, when she couldn't walk on a beach alone with a man without being gossiped about, when an intelligent woman interested in science was considered peculiar. These women were unable to reach their full potential simply because they were female. At one point, I wanted to throw the book across the room in a fit of rage, because one of the characters was continually marginalized, ignored, taken advantage of, because of her gender. Even though this woman has been dead for 163 years, the injustice of it left me seething. And obviously, things have changed a lot, because someone had the courage and strength to stand up to societal norms that were ill-conceived or just plain unfair. My kids have rights and opportunities that are only available because someone else chose to rock the boat.

I want my children to continue to ask me difficult questions, because even as I struggle to come up with age appropriate answers, they make me think good and hard about what I believe and why I believe those things, and if those beliefs need to be changed. So I can support them if they decide something is unfair and they want to challenge that unfairness.

What do you think? How do you teach your children to challenge societal norms without exposing them to ridicule, bullying or labels? If your high school student wanted to wear a skirt to school, how do you honestly think you would react?

First Visitor

The butterfly bush is blooming and it's also enormous. 8 feet tall and maybe even wider.

It's mostly been attracting bumble bees, but I spotted this Red Admiral a few days ago. Apparently, this is a common butterfly to see in residential neighborhoods of big cities.

Introducing The World's Largest Softball Trophy

There were no winners and losers. All the kids did a great job. And everyone got a trophy. At the end of the season, we came home with this enormous trophy. That's a 5x7 picture frame next to it, turned on it's side, for size reference.

Despite my mixed feelings about it, I have to say Johnny is so proud of his trophy. He dusts it daily. He has been talking up softball to Maureen, convincing her that she wants to play next year too.

But the biggest question is, in 20 years, will there be a box big enough for him to store it in the depths of his basement?

Ditching My Bad Habits

I've been a nail biter for as long as I can remember. I don't remember when I started chewing them, or why. But it's a bad habit I've been trying to kick since at least high school.

I also have very short nail beds, so my hands usually looked really terrible. I coped by not doing anything that might draw attention to my hands, including wearing jewelry. Every once in awhile, I had acrylics put on, usually for special occasions, and for a few weeks at a time, had lovely nails that I couldn't stop looking at.

In March, I was tired of my chewed, icky looking fingernails, so I had pink and white acrylics done for no special reason. They lasted for 3 weeks, and when they started to come off, the natural nails underneath were thin, jagged, and....long.

I don't know what made it different this time, but instead of biting them all off, I shaped them with an emery board, applied a couple of coats of clear polish and let them be.

It wasn't perfect. A bunch of nails split and had to be filed down further. But I didn't bite them. Since then, I've been continuing to not chew them. When they get to the length where they tend to break, I shape them again to a more reasonable length. For the first time in years, I don't feel like I need to hide my hands.

It's stunning how easy it was. As I said before, I really don't know why this time was different, other than it was just time.

The success of quitting my nail biting habit has given me the confidence to ditch another worse habit--my intake of Diet Dr. Pepper.

I don't even know when my consumption of diet soda spiralled out of control, but I do know that there are many, many reasons for me to quit. And I'm convinced it's in my best interest to quit, but it'll have to be cold turkey and I'm nervous about that. But my success at stopping my nail chewing tells me I CAN do it. And it's time.


To reward myself for quitting a decades long bad habit, I recently purchased this fun rose ring. I saw one like it in a magazine and loved it. So I found one (Etsy people, check it out!) and I bought it.

I'm not hiding my hands anymore. And I can quit soda.

This Is Why I Don't Have Houseplants

John and Johnny started a lot of plants this year from seed. Everything grew so well that we ended up with extra plants. So we gave them away. My mom got a tomato plant.

I like to garden, but house plants have never been my strong point. The front window seems to be the best place for sun, but I tend to forget to water things and they cook to death. The rest of the house is too shady or too cold.

But the biggest threat to my household plants? The cat.

On Sunday, we spent some time with the family of one of John's cousins, who just graduated from 8th grade. Johnny wanted to take a pepper plant and a bean plant to share with them, but at the last minute, wanted to leave the bean plant home. So John left it on the entertainment center.

We left a healthy plant behind. When we returned a few hours later, it was a sad plant.



This is why even if I could remember to water my house plants, they just don't make it.

Menu Plan: Summer Heat

Summer isn't quite officially here, but the thermometer says it is. The kids finished school last week, and this is the last week of softball. And the produce section at the grocery store is full of melons, berries and corn. Yay Summer!

A few weeks ago, my mom gave me some back issues of Sandra Lee's magazine, Semi-Homemade. And this week's menu plan is based on fast and easy recipes from those magazines, because the sunshine and the heat make me want to go outside and not cook.

Here's what we'll be eating this week.

**Artichoke Chicken Bake--I don't know what it means when you crave artichokes, but I've been eating them a lot lately. Dips, cooked in a little oil with tomatoes as a side dish, and now in this fast and easy chicken meal. Steamed veggies and some kind of fruit to go with it.
**Pork Chops with Onion Gravy--Johnny and Maureen will always eat pork chops. The original recipe uses a packet mix for the gravy, but I can make my own from scratch. Broccoli and salads to go with it.
**Slow Cooker Swiss Steak--I love my crockpot for so many reasons. In this case, it's double love, because not only will it make the beef nice and tender, but it won't heat up my kitchen. Rolls, mashed potatoes and some kind of veg with it.
**Pan-Seared Crusted Tilapia with Creamed Spinach--The fish counter says tilapia is in season, but you wouldn't know if based on the price I paid for fish today! I'm wondering how much the oil spill in the Gulf has to do with that, and if it stays that expensive, we won't be eating much fish. The creamed spinach looks fast and easy. Salads on the side.
**Slow Cooker Vegetarian Lasagna and Garlic Bread--I've never made lasagna in my crockpot before, but this looked like a good meatless option. Garlic bread and corn on the cob on the side.

What are you eating these days?

It's Not Personal

Recently, I was reading a piece in a magazine by a woman whose husband had left her for another woman. She was coping with the betrayal, in part, by repeating the phrase, "There is nothing personal going on here." It sounds crazy, but realizing that the problem wasn't her, it was her husband's own drama, made it easier to accept and easier to deal with fear and anger.

The piece resonated with me, and the words "it's not personal" kept popping into my head in the following days.

I've long held the belief that when people get angry or frustrated, it's often for the wrong reasons. That person who cut you off in traffic didn't do it because he picked you out specifically to annoy; he's just a rotten or a distracted driver. That coworker who slacked on a project didn't do it to make you look bad and steal your job; she may have been tired or overworked or maybe just is not a team player. Yes, it's annoying when there aren't enough checkers at the grocery store and the lines are long and tempers are flaring and the kids are climbing in the cart and squashing the bananas; but management didn't cut staff with the express intention of making you mad. It's my opinion that there are very few things worth getting truly angry over.

But somehow, I had a hard time applying this theory when it comes to parenting. When your children are misbehaving or being defiant or tantruming or just being difficult, it's really hard to not take it personally. Sometimes it feels oh so personal.

A couple of weeks ago, my husband was out of town for work, and my kids were dragging out bedtime one night. After my 5 year old got out of bed for what seemed like the hundredth time, I got angry and said, "Why are you guys doing this to me?" And then it hit me. They weren't doing anything to me. Bedtime battles are incredibly normal. Developmentally speaking, 5 and 3 year olds aren't supposed to want to stop playing and exploring and going to sleep. I have a problem settling down at night too, that's why I do yoga.

It was not personal. My children had not huddled together in their room and made a pact to stay up half the night and keep me from cleaning and paying bills, and let's be honest, blogging and updating my Facebook status.

Once I acknowledged that the bedtime struggles were not a personal vendetta against me and my desire for alone time, it was easier to be rational. Easier to put the kids back in bed one more time, easier to not blow a gasket when they wanted water, easier to tell them that they needed their rest to be healthy and that I was done answering questions and fetching water and helping in the bathroom.

It worked. My calmer self led to calmer children who stayed in bed and went to sleep.

The next time I'm struggling as a parent, I'm going to remember this. It's not personal.

Try it. What do you think?

**crossposted at API Speaks

This Way To Kindergarten

Grouchy face didn't want to smile, but here he is, having graduated from his second and final year of preschool. In less than three months, I'll be the mother of a kindergartner. The closer we get, the more I feel like I'm going to lose it on the first day of school. When did my baby get so big?