Mee Wee

On my personal blog, I open every post with a song. By perusing the songs I use there, you can see that my tastes tend toward the metal and/or alternative genre, but I have been known to enjoy hip-hop from time to time. Unfortunately, most of the modern stuff I enjoy isn't exactly kid-friendly (unless of course you want to have you kid ask you about hookers and blow and bustin' a cap and vicodin), so I can't really listen to it in the car with my kids.

When I was first contacted by representatives from Mee Wee with an offer of some of their mp3s in exchange for review of their music, I was skeptical. What is Mee Wee? From their website:

MeeWee is fun, exciting, and uplifting Hip-Hop music for elementary school age children. Through the years, nearly all Hip-Hop music and culture has been designed for adolescents and adults. These fans now have children who love the lively and energetic songs that they hear; unfortunately, most of the lyrical content isn't quite appropriate. Well, MeeWee solves that! With songs like "I Need A Hug", "Us Bus", and "I Can Be Anything", Hip-Hop fans who are six, seven, and eight years old have cause to celebrate. So do their parents, as they get their children ready to rap and dance to the beats and rhymes of MeeWee.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Wrong.

Mee Wee is everything they promise and more. The songs are positive and fun and entertaining. From "I Can Be Anything" (which can be heard on their homepage) to "HipHop-O-Potamus" (my daughter's favourite) and everything in between, Mee Wee is a welcome change to the typical folksy kid's music most parents suffer through. In all honesty, I'm not sure if Mee Wee was a bigger hit with the kids or my wife.

I highly recommend giving Mee Wee a listen if you're a hip-hop fan, and even if you're not - parents can always use a new set of songs to listen to in the car, right? You can download their music at various online retailers, including Amazon (they also have previews of all the songs) and iTunes.

If Your Kid Eats This Book, Everything Will Still Be Okay

Recently, I was provided with a copy of If Your Kid Eats This Book, Everything Will Still Be Okay by Dr. Lara Zibners for review. (Actually, the complete title is: If Your Kid Eats This Book, Everything Will Still Be Okay: How to Know if Your Child's Injury or Illness Is Really an Emergency. I know; I like short titles too.) Dr. Zibners is a pediatrician specializing in emergency medicine, and her book is intended to convey her years of experience in the emergency department to parents in the hopes of helping them avoid unnecessary visits to the hospital, panic and anxiety.

The book is logically organized; there is a section for babies that covers many different areas, but then there are complete sections about poisons or allergies for example. It is thoroughly indexed, and is intended to be used more as a reference than to be read cover to cover. There are also small mini-sections within the book, highlighted by a shaded background, with critical information for parents (further identified with headings like Warning or 911 to indicate a need for an emergency department visit).

It is also written is clear, easy to understand language, which is especially important since parents are most likely to consult this book when their child is ill or injured and they are unsure what to do. This is probably the strongest feature of the book.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book. Even though we are not the type of parents to make a quick decision to take one of our children to the hospital, it was still an informative and helpful reference. I would recommend it to anyone, and I personally think it would make an excellent gift for new or expecting parents.

Dads And Grads Book Giveaway Winners

First of all, a huge thank you to everyone who entered the Dads And Grads Book Giveaway sponsored by Hachette Book Group. This was the most successful contest I have ever run at Reviews From The Dad Side.

The winners, chosen at random, are:

• cheekofgod
• Rebecca Cox
• jwx4

I will be contacting you via email shortly.

Thanks again, and check back soon for another book giveaway (this time for summer reading) sponsored by Hachette Book Group.

Pacify Me

Recently, I was provided with a review copy of Pacify Me: A Handbook for the Freaked-Out New Dad by Chris Mancini. The back cover of the book promises guidance and answers for soon-to-be fathers who are nervous, scared, or apprehensive about their impending fatherhood.

Admittedly, the author is pretty much the anti-SciFi Dad. Whereas his revelation of his wife's pregnancy was met with trips to the therapist and prescription medication (initially), I was quite the opposite. (True story: at the first session of one of our prenatal classes, the instructor went around the room and asked the dads how they felt. The answers went like this: stressed, stressed, stressed, stressed, stoked, stressed, stressed, stressed. Guess which one I was?) In fact, he even admits up front that dads like me should "give this book to one of their friends and go to Babies R Us right now and fill out your registry".

However, since I already have two kids, registering would be a little weird (although, now that I think about it, technically Babies R Us allows you to add things from Toys R Us, which means I could register for a whole whack of Star Wars action figures and maybe that massive Lego Star Wars Death Star, which would have been cool). Plus there was that whole review thing I had promised, so I soldiered on past page seven all the way to page nine.

The book reads like a mixture of personal anecdotes and advice/opinion with a side order of humour. Since the intended audience is men, I won't dwell on the caveat that the humour is "man humour", meaning lots of pop culture references (he has a table comparing Dr. Spock to Mr. Spock) and pot shots at people (like French Canadians and their famous singing brethren). If I had to say something critical, I would mention that some topics are merely glossed over because the author didn't feel they were important.

That aside, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It was entertaining and light-hearted, and would likely be a source of comfort for more nervous dads to be. The fact that I had almost no connection to the feelings he was describing, yet was somehow able to relate to them, is a testament to how well the book was written. I would definitely recommend this book to any dad: "to be" or otherwise. It takes an honest look at parenting from the dad's perspective, not from the "male mother's" perspective most books of this genre take.

Dads and Grads Book Giveaway

I am hosting a giveaway sponsored by Hachette Book Group called Dads and Grads. The following books are part of the prize set:

• The Nine Lessons By Kevin Milne ISBN: 159995074X
• Do-Over! By Robin Hemley ISBN: 0316020605
• The Man's Book By Thomas Fink ISBN: 0316033642
• Ghostwriter By Travis Thrasher ISBN: 0446505587
• An Honorable German By Charles McCain ISBN: 0446538981
• The Richest Man in Town By W. Randall Jones ISBN: 0446537837
• Lincoln on Leadership By Donald Phillips ISBN: 0446394599
• Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell ISBN: 0316017922

To enter, simply leave a comment in this post. All entries must be received by 11.59pm EDT on Wednesday, June 17, 2009. I will choose three winners at random from all entries. Contest is limited to addresses in the US and Canada (sorry European readers). Winners will be posted on this blog (in a new post) on Thursday, June 18, 2009, and will be emailed if they include their email address in their entry (or if it is accessible via their Blogger profile).

Disclosure: I am receiving books from Hachette Book Group in exchange for hosting this giveaway.

New President's Choice Meat Products

President's Choice is expanding its selection fresh meats in celebration of 25 Delicious Years. I was provided with samples of their PC Tender and Tasty steak, PC Free From pork ribs, and PC Air Chilled chicken. To compliment these meats, I was also given some condiments to try.

We made some steak with the PC Steak Spice Marinade, as well as some using only the sea salt and black peppercorn grinder. Both were grilled, were quite tender and moist, and tasted great. The only concern we had was with the peppercorns in the marinade: my four year old found the steak a little too spicy. However, once we scraped them off, she was able to enjoy it.

We grilled the ribs and the chicken with some barbecue sauce another night. The ribs were amazing: tender, meaty, and fall off the bone good. (Our eight month old son loved to teethe on the bones - completely supervised, of course.) The chicken drumsticks were so moist and soft that we actually put some pieces into our son's mesh feeder and he gnawed away on them happily, getting bits of chicken.

We were very satisfied with all of the meat offerings, but our favourite was the free from pork ribs. The fact that they came from animals who were never given antibiotics made us feel better about the choice too. The sea salt and black peppercorn grinder was also a hit for its convenience.

Potty Training Talk

When my daughter was just under two, she expressed an interest in using the toilet, so we started the process by keeping her in a diaper and letting her use the toilet whenever she asked. Eventually she graduated to pull-ups (we used them as a milestone/reward).

Then, one day we were at the mall, and she asked to go pee. It wasn't a convenient time, so we told her to just go in her pull-up instead. She did, and immediately asked to be changed.

After that, she totally reverted and was back in diapers full time within a few days. (Our approach was that if she was going to use the pull-ups like diapers, we would use diapers. Pull-ups were a privilege she wanted because of the characters on them.) It took another few months before she was ready to try again, after seeing some panties that my wife had found on sale and purchased in anticipation of her potty training completion.

We went through the progression from diapers to pull-ups to panties, and eventually left off the diapers at night (the last stage for us). But we learned two important things from this: first, when your kid is ready, they will tell you (ours was ready a lot earlier than some of our friends) and consistency is the only path to success.

This post has been prepared for a Parent Bloggers Network Blog Blast entitled "Potty Training Talk", sponsored by The Potty Project.