When I’m not with my family or obsessively shopping on the Internet, I’m an educational consultant. And I was just named one of Education.com’s JustAsk Experts. Education.com has some amazing resources, including a community, articles, and plenty of activities.

My daughter and I signed up for the Summer Activities Challenge–just complete 20 activities by August 31, 2009, and you’ll get a certificate of achievement and even be entered to win some prizes.

Bedtime can be quality time rather than battle time. By establishing a consistent routine, you can make bedtime more enjoyable for the whole family.

Haydenburri Lane’s Bedtime Safari products were designed in conjunction with child development specialists to help children learn the necessary skills and activities needed to get ready for bed.

Haydenburri Lane provides advice to parents on how to establish a positive bedtime routine and why routines are important. (Click here to read their Parents’ Guide.) And they offer a series of board books for preschoolers that make learning routines fun. There are five main characters- Bubbles the Hippo, P.J. the Bear, Chomper the Crocodile, Paige the elephant, and Rory the tiger. Each character stars in a board book and teaches a different skill.

If only Elizabeth Pantley would accept my offer to come live with me, I could hear her helpful and calming advice all day long. Maybe her next release will be an affirmation CD for stressed-out parents.

Pantley’s The No-Cry Nap Solution: Guaranteed Gentle Ways to Solve All Your Naptime Problems is another winner–combining research-based information about children’s sleep needs with practical and gentle advice and Pantley’s own unique supportive perspective for parents.

Congresswoman Barbara Jordan once said, “Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap.” That woud be lovely, but I would content myself with just my household…

Tests have shown that there are more germs on household floor surfaces than on toilet seats, kitchen counters and bathroom tiles combined. While exposure to some germs may help build children’s immune systems, allergens like mold, dust mites are a leading trigger of allergy and asthma systems in both children and adults.
Regular vacuums alone– even those with HEPA filters– can’t kill the dust mites. Since carpet can contain as many as 100,000 dust mites per square yard, allergists often suggest ripping out carpets. But who wants to live and play …

I’ll admit that I was unprepared for the amount of laundry just one small, drooling baby can create. I never imagined that I’d be doing so many loads of laundry.
BonnBonn Baby’s special fabric has reduced my laundry burden by keeping baby’s crib sheets, bibs and onesies dry and fresh-smelling– reducing the number of sheet and outfit changes needed on a daily basis.
BonnBonn Baby is the only baby line to use EcoFresh certified antimicrobial protection with a patented moisure-control wicking fabric. Unlike those stiff antimicrobial shopping cart covers, BonnBonn Baby’s fabric …

I’ve been looking for a hard floor cleaner for as long as I’ve had hard floors. Typical upright vacuums don’t work because they are designed around a rotating brush to funnel debris towards a single suction point. If you put the spinning brush on a wood floor it just throws debris all over. If you stop the brush, the vacuum doesn’t pick up dirt across its entire width.
Canister vacuums with hard floor attachments are better, but they often have brushes both in front and in back that are just as …

I’ve written before about how much I liked eDiets (click here for a full review). But if you want to lose weight or just eat healthier and don’t want to pay the monthly fee for eDiets, try www.sparkpeople.com.  
I recently joined SparkPeople. It’s free because the people who started it were early eBay employees and made a bunch of money. SparkPeople offers many of the eDiet features I loved: nutrition tracker, fitness plans and an online community for motivation.
eDiets offers more personalized service (access to nutritionists and personal trainers is included in the …

Setting up a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) is a great way to save money on your doctor’s co-pays, health-care deductibles, prescription drugs, and more. But if you have any money left in your account at the end of the year, you’ll lose it.
You might not know that you can use your FSA funds on home health-care and baby care products like band-aids, aspirin, Desitin, Vaseline and more. Drugstore.com even has a special FSA store listing all the items that qualify.
Check out the FSA store and spend your FSA Dollars before …

Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs) that screw in to regular bulb sockets consume less than a quarter of the energy of incandescent (tungsten) bulbs that produce the same amount of light.  They cost a lot more than tungsten bulbs, but since they also last at least four times longer they easily pay for themselves.
I tried screw-in CFLs a few years ago and found that they had a number of drawbacks:

Bad color quality
Faint flickering
Minutes to warm up to a steady state
Not dimmable

Home Depot sent me a sample of the next-generation dimmable CFLs, and …