Your Opinion Needed

I am a hands and knees kind of floor mopper, AND I have these ugly light colored vinyl kitchen floors as well as tile in the bathrooms, and hardwood floors in just about the whole rest of the house. On top of that, I have four little ones constantly trampling the floor and bringing dirt in. Honestly, I only mop my kitchen once a week although my floors could stand a lot more, but my knees just can't. "Why not use a push mop?" is the famous question. The reply? Because all they do after the first use is push dirt around, not clean it up. Imagine my interest when I saw the infomercial on the Shark Steam Mop. Wow! Does that look great! It says that it can get your floors cleaner than anything else, and it has a washable mophead........just what I would need if I were to use a push mop. After asking around, I have found a couple of people who have purchased this mop and really like it a lot. My brother being one of those people, testified to the fact that they USED to have a paint spot on their floor that they could never get up until they bought the Shark Steam Mop. Sounds great to me. Here's my delimma. I started looking at reviews of steam mops on the internet and found that the Shark has a competitor with a much higher rating. It's called the Bissell Steam Mop. What I would like to know is, are there any people out there who would like to testify to the goodness or badness of either of these mops. One thing I do know. I sure am planning on eventually getting one.......which one is the question.

If you are interested in either of these products, Target carries the Shark Steam Mop in its store, and Wal-Mart carries the Bissell Steam Mop on its website. I'm not sure if they are actually in the Wal-Mart stores.

Health Insurance

It's been a long time since I've written anything up here, and I had planned on dropping the blog as I wrote earlier. However, I kept seeing people dropping by reading the little bit that I had written before, so I decided to start back telling about good things (and sometimes bad things I've come across.)

Given the concerns about health insurance, I thought people might be interested in finding different options available to them. We have insurance through my husband's work, and they have changed companies that they use down through the years. However, the company that was easiest for us to use was United Health Care. We really liked their services a lot and had no hassle with them. My husband's company now uses Blue Cross and Blue Shield. It has been adequate with a few set backs along the way. It's just not as user friendly as the other was.

I guess the upside for Blue Cross is that they provide health care to self employed people, while United Health Care only provides health care to individuals employed through a company. For health insurance information in your state click here.

Let me recommend........

My sister has a blog designed for the same purpose as this one except that she posts things on her site once or twice a week. For some reason, I can't find the time to do that here. For that reason, I am no longer writing for this blog and wish to recommend rantsravesandrejects.blogspot.com as an alternative to my "Good Stuff."
Thanks!

TV Guardian

Our old DVD player went on the blink, so my husband went and bought a new one. When he did, he saw that it came with TV Guardian capabilities. It cost us a one time fee of $20 to sign up for it, and we love it. What TV Guardian does, is read the closed captioning on a DVD and based on how strictly you put the settings, blocks out inappropriate language. It says that it is 95% accurate. We have been happy with its performance thus far.
You can also order a TV Guardian box that will work with your TV programming. It costs more, but I think it would be worth it to keep from hearing all the inappropriate language. Check out their site for more info and prices.

Photo courtesty of: TV Guardian's Web Page

Some Helpful Hints

Being a parent of three little ones, I often come across something that my children have done and wonder how in the world am I going to remove that!!!!!!!!!! Here are a couple of common items that I love.
Rubbing alcohol--does wonders on ink and permanent marker. One of my little girls decided that black marker would look beautiful all over her pink wall. I took a baby wipe and poured alcohol on it and washed the marker off the wall. The more porous the object, the more difficult it is to get the marker or ink off, but I still recommend alcohol. If a regular ink pen marks on a garment, try pouring alcohol on the mark and throwing it in the wash. That usually works pretty well too.
We also use rubbing alcohol to clean our CD's that have little finger prints all over them.
When I was in college, we also used rubbing alcohol to clean our telephones. Have you ever looked at your telephone. It gets this gunk on the earpiece......anyway, you get the picture. In fact, I may go clean my phone right now!

This wasn't so good

I got my husband a Durabrand wireless optical mouse for Christmas. We really liked using it for a while, but after a while the arrow on the computer screen was jumping all over the place instead of where we were pointing the mouse. It became so bad that we went back to using our old mouse. I think a wireless optical mouse is great...........just don't get a cheap one like I did!

Photo Courtesy Of: Wal-Mart Website

Back With the Program..........I Hope!

I know I haven't written anything up here in a long while. I was discouraged with the lack of results from this site, and then..........I got morning sickness. It was not at all conducive to writing blog articles, home schooling, and just being a mom. Hopefully the trend of nothing up here will be over for a while.
As a quick recommendation, I would like to say that I really like Shout stain remover gel. I just came across a site that tells the opinions of different stain removers. You might like to check it out too!