After several years of renting the ratty Santa suit from our local rec center at $30 a pop, my friends are looking to buy some Santa suits of their own.

When I heard they were looking, I recommended that they buy it online from buycostumes.com. I used buycostumes.com to purchase a Harry Potter costume for an event awhile back. I was very happy with their prices, the quality of the costume, and their shipping costs.

buycostumes.com has over 30 different Santa costumes to choose from including a Sunny Claus Costume if you live in Hawaii or Florida, and an Ultra Velvet Santa Suit, which is satin-lined. They even have suits for Mrs. Claus, and accessories like wigs, Santa bellies, and glasses. buycostumes.com is a one stop shop for all your Santa needs.

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Many parents try to keep their kids believing in Santa as long as possible. One way to do that is by using a service like PackageFromSanta.com to send your children a letter from Santa Claus.

The Basic Package is just $12.99 if you order before November 1 and comes with free First Class shipping. Your child receives a personalized Santa letter printed right on on Santa’s custom North Pole letterhead with his real signature and official gold foil Santa Seal of Approval. It arrives in a bright green, shiny, metallic package personally addressed to your child, and has a genuine Santa Claus return address label and custom North Pole postage.

If you have more than one child, don’t worry, they will not receive the same letter from Santa. PackageFromSanta.com sends each child in the same household their very own, unique Santa letter since there are up to six different letters to choose from.

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Are you involved with your child’s online life? Highlights Magazine and Glubble want to know. That’s why they’re inviting parents to participate in a short poll at Highlights.com.

If you’re like most parents, you want your child to ask permission before they get a snack or ride their bike to a friend’s house. So why shouldn’t they ask permission before visiting any site on the Internet? With Glubble, kids have to ask your permission to visit sites on the Internet.

What’s Glubble?

Glubble is geared to families with children under 12. Think of it like “Internet training wheels.” Glubble offers a safe online place for families where parents can be involved with their children’s Internet usage. By doing this, Glubble hopes parents can teach kids the how to use the the Internet in a positive and safe way.

Also, children are going online at a younger age. My five-year-old is constantly coming to me with requests to go to www dot something or rather and watching Sesame Street videos on YouTube with her dad. With Glubble, parents are able to choose web content for their kids the same way they choose books, television shows, clothes and movies. Glubble makes it easier for parents by packaging over 2500 kid-friendly websites like Discovery Kids or Sesame Street into “glubbles.” Parents can add to this list by easily adding sites they like.

Finally, you can see what Google search terms your children are using. What they’re allowed to search on can be filtered based on parent created lists as well. It’s also a way to find out what they’re researching for school. Think of it as a conversation starter, “So tell me more about your Greek mythology paper. Who’s this Zeus guy anyway?”

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Did you know that October 10 is World Egg Day? Well, thank to the folks at the Incredible Edible Egg (the American Egg Board) I do. (Check out their World Egg Day Incredible Egg Designer for some online egg decorating fun.)

So no excuses, let’s indulge in some egg recipes!

Making crepes with the kids

I love typical French egg dishes – quiche, chocolate mousse and crepes. So when I learned to make crepes in home economics class back in seventh grade, my French mother was thrilled to share Julia Child’s Crepe Fines Sucrees recipe from Mastering The Art of French Cooking, Volume One. It’s a bit involved and uses orange liqueur, rum, or brandy. Still, it was the recipe we loved to use.

Since my kids are a bit younger, I wanted something simpler to make, so I picked the crepe recipe from the Disney-Pixar Ratatouille movie cookbook, What’s Cooking?: A Cookbook for Kids. What I like about it is that it’s simple and the cookbook has a pictorial on how to cook and flip a crepe.

Making the batter: We made the batter on Saturday night (you have to refrigerate it overnight) so we’d have crepes for Sunday morning. I pre-measured the ingredients and let the kids pour them into the blender.

Cooking the crepes: Please be forewarned that making crepes is a bit tricky. You have to be generous with the butter, make sure the pan is hot, and throw out the first crepe, which is usually a mess. (Mine magically turned out O.K. But if yours doesn’t, I won’t tell if you decide to scarf it down or feed it to the dog.) This may be something you want to handle instead of the kids.

Also, it takes a lot of time to make 12 crepes. Either start early before everyone’s famished, or get two pans going at once. I kept my kids busy by letting them drink cafe au lait (more lait than cafe), put on music (DEVO, go figure) and having them dance around the house in their underpants. Daddy missed all the fun because he was hunting.

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Courtesy of EcoBrain, I’m giving away one free ebook copy of Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth by Jim Merkel!

About Radical Simplicity

In the face of looming ecological disaster, many people feel the need to change their own lifestyles as a tangible way of transforming our unsustainable culture. Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth employs three tools to help readers begin their customized journey to simplicity:

• It builds on steps from Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence so readers can design their own personal economics to save money, get free of debt, and align their work with their values.
• It uses refined tools from Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth so readers can measure how much nature is needed to supply all they consume and absorb their waste.
• And by advocating time alone in wild nature, it opens readers to another reality with humanity as one species among many on a complex and inter-related planet.

Combining lyrical narrative, compassionate advocacy and absorbing science,  Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth is a practical, personal answer to 21st century challenges.

How to win your free ebook copy of Radical Simplicity:

1. Leave your name, email address, and blog address (if you have one) in the comments below for ONE entry.
2. If you have a blog, feel free to post about this contest on it for ONE additional entry. Then come back here and leave a comment with a link to your post.
3. Maximum amount of entries is TWO.
4. You must be willing to send me your full name, email address, and mailing address. I will forward this information to EcoBrain so they can provide you with your free ebook. If you do not feel comfortable giving me or EcoBrain your personal information, please do not enter this giveaway.
5. I will announce the winner on October 13, 2008 on this blog. I will not share your mailing info with the public, just your name. If you have a blog, I will link back to it when I announce the winner.
6. You have until midnight MT on October 12, 2008 to enter.

Prize valued at $17.95 or less. Open to legal residents of the United States 18 years of age and older. No purchase required. Up to TWO entries per person. Void where prohibited by law. By submitting your name and email address, you agree to receive relevant promotional emails and contest follow up communications from My Readable Feast in compliance with my privacy policy and contest rules.

Thanks to Green and Clean Mom and EcoBrain (read my review of their ebookstore here) for sponsoring this giveaway.

EcoBrain is an online ebook store that offers thousands of titles from top publishers about sustainable, green living, home and garden, cooking and more. Since ebooks don’t use paper and ink to produce, or fuel to deliver, you’ll be saving yourself money while doing something positive for the environment.

What’s in it for you?

EcoBrain has a great selection of elementary, middle school and academic environmental science material like A Guide for using The Magic School Bus® Inside the Earth in the Classroom. Many of their ebooks would be a great resource for parents, teachers and homeschoolers.

Of course, they have cookbooks! One title that I’m considering downloading is A Fork in the Trail, a book of 208 lightweight, mouth-watering recipes to turn an ordinary backcountry trip into a gourmet adventure. I’m always freaked out about the over-processed junk that we bring camping “for convenience sake.” With recipes that you can cook and dehydrate before the trip or just add boiling water, it sounds like this book can help us do much better.

EcoBrain recently added some very cool titles like:

• Skinny Bitch
• Big Green Purse
• The Home Energy Diet: How to Save Money by Making Your House Energy-Smart
• The Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat

Check them out!

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The Vtech – V.Motion Active Learning System arrived on our doorstep a few weeks ago thanks to Vtech and the Parent Bloggers Network. You should have heard the commotion when I opened the box – squeals of delight, crazed jumping up and down, and lots of “thank you mommy” from Nathan and Lucie.

The V.Motion Active Learning System is an educational video game for children ages three to seven years. Basically, it’s like an educational Wii system for little kids. It incorporates learning about basic math, reading, science, and spelling with motion-activated gaming.

Features

The console plugs directly into your TV, DVD or VCR and while it can run on AA batteries, you should spend an additional $10 and get a 9-volt Vtech – V.Smile Adapter adapter to plug it into an outlet. (The adapter also works with Vtech – V.Smile Pocket Learning System, the LeapFrog® Leapster® Learning Game System, and a variety of other electronics.)

The V-Motion game console is also 100 percent compatible with the entire V.Smile Smartridge library. So if you already have a Vtech – V.Smile Pocket Learning System, you have games compatible with the V.Motion Active Learning System. (We’re a Leapster family so we don’t.)

It’s more expensive than most gaming systems for kids as it retails for $69.99 with the games going for around $24.99, online from Amazon as well as retail outlets like Target and Wal-Mart. However, it’s way cheaper than getting a Wii, which is around $250 if you can find one.

The V.Motion Active Learning System also includes a VTech V.Link™ that connects kids to VTech’s secure online site for kids to track their scores and unlock bonus gameplay.

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