Last weekend I had the chance to attend the XSRE Casting Call Event at the new store at Destiny in Syracuse. It was a blast, and it was great to see all the girls and women who showed up to try on some fun accessories and get their picture taken.
If you have never been to an XSRE store it is overwhelming! The entire store is full of every accessory that you could ever think of.
I have bad feet, and unfortunately I seem to have passed them along to my children. My 16 year old daughter recently started working a fast food job, and she has found that standing on her feet for long and boring 6 hour shifts results in sore feet! So when I had the chance to review some orthotic insoles from Footminders she insisted that I let her have them, so she could get better arch support.
The new Wonderworks attraction has opened at the Destiny USA Mall in Syracuse, NY, and I had the chance to visit with my family! It is a great place to go for hours of family fun. It is actually in the Mall, and integrated quite well with it. The Canyon Cavern Ropes course goes out over the Mall, and is hard to miss. When my family and I first walked in to the Mall we were a little unnerved to see people on ropes high above our heads! We headed upstairs and found the entrance to Wonderworks, an upside down house that seems to have landed right in the middle of the Mall.
After you go in and get your tickets you have to go through an inversion tunnel to “reorient” yourself for the experience. This is amazing, and really makes you feel like you are going to fall over, since the lights moving fast all around you give the sensation of motion. It is a great start to the exhibits, many of which are about optical illusions and virtual reality.
My son had to make a dessert for his homeschool co-op history class, and he ended up making this Maple Nut Cake. It is supposed to be colonial although I am not sure how colonial a packaged cake mix is. Anyway it was a way to use some of the maple extract I bought a few years ago and had never opened! It tasted delicious, and it was very easy to make.
Scrabble Catch Phrase is the new version of Catch Phrase from Hasbro. This new game is the same basic game as the original Catch Phrase, but the words and categories are changed so that it is like a whole new game. The motto of the game is the “Grab It, Guess It and Pass It Game," and it lives up to that billing. In this game you are given a word or phrase on the game screen. You have to give your teammates clues so they can guess the word or phrase. Once your team has guessed the word you pass it to the other team, and they take a turn. This continues until the buzzer goes off, at which point whichever team is holding the unit loses.
Recently I had the chance to tour a state of the art diary farm here in Upstate New York. I have visited a few farms over the years, but never a dairy farm, and I was amazed at everything I learned. I had no idea that dairy farming was so complicated, and I am quite impressed at how efficiently farmers are at getting dairy products to grocery stores! We take for granted the easy access we have to fresh foods, and rarely think about all the work that goes on behind the scenes to produce it, so this was a great chance for me to see how it all comes together.
If you live in the Syracuse area I am sure you have already heard about the fun new attraction that just opened at Destiny USA, WonderWorks. It is an interactive indoor amusement park, which combines education and science with lots and lots of fun, and I can’t wait to try it out with my family!
The Canyon Climb Ropes Course is the World’s Largest Suspended Indoor Ropes Course. It is 70 feet tall, with 3 levels of ropes and over 81 different obstacles and activities including swinging steps, lily pads, a tremor bridge. My teenagers are dying to try this, although I am a little bit nervous.
Another exhibit that my son is looking forward to is the Wonder Park. In this exhibit he will be able to be a major league pitcher and stand on the mound and pitch to a major leaguer like Chipper Jones, Derek Jeter, Ryan Howard, Sammie Sosa, or Barry Bonds. My son has already decided he is pitching to Chipper Jones, he thinks that is his best chance at throwing a strike and not a homerun.
We had a Family Night fun get together to eat pizza and cupcakes and watch the movie.
Winter squash are some of my favorite vegetables! There are so many kinds of dished you can make with them, as side dishes, main dishes or even desserts. Here are some of my favorites:
It seems like there are so many things that need to get done every fall! Yard work, cleaning, getting firewood for the winter, prepping our boat and pool for the cold weather, picking apples and the list goes on and on.
The idea behind World Foods sauces is to provide a range of easy to use, economical sauces to make putting together a fantastic taste dinner quick and easy. My family loves Asian foods, but I don’t always have the Asian spices on hand to create authentic dishes. Sure, I could make a special stop at the local Asian food store, and pick up something like kaffir lime leaves, but the reality is I only do that a few times a year. It is much easier to let World Fusion do the work, and create a sauce from 100% natural, authentic ingredients.
I wasn’t around guns much growing up, but my husband enjoys target shooting and has had a shotgun and pellet gun for years. So it didn’t surprise me that my son was interested in learning how to shoot. My son is very involved in Boy Scouts, and has done some shooting at Boy Scout camp, so this fall my husband decided to do some target shooting with him in the backyard.
We quickly found out that my husband’s pellet gun is not a great kids gun. It is fairly high powered, and my son has trouble pumping it. Obviously we needed a BB gun, and what better one than the classic Daisy BB gun, the one that was a key feature of the the movie A Christmas Story! We also realized our daughter should learn to shoot too. She wasn’t instantly thrilled by the idea, but knowing how to handle a gun is a life skill that everyone, male or female, should have.
My kids loved The Avengers movie, which is no surprise since the movie was so popular it set box office records everywhere. I thought it was very fun too, and we have been looking forward to seeing it again on DVD as a family. The kids also love gadgets, so when I heard that Walmart had a special Augmented Reality App I knew my children would enjoy going to Walmart and playing with the app for some Avengers family fun.
