review Archives - Sly Spoon

Review – Green Toys, Made From Recycled Material, Tools Chest

June 13, 2016October 15, 2021 Brittney Leave a comment

In elementary school a big blue garbage can marked with a circle of arrows showed up at my parents house. We talked about the importance of recycling and doing your part to reduce, reuse, and recycle. While I’ve been a recycler for as long as I can remember (sometimes to a chagrin of my husband who doesn’t want to waste time cleaning out a peanut butter jar if we are essentially just going to throw away) I started caring about it so much more since my kids came along.

I suspect many of us get that way. We’ll do what’s right because we’re supposed to, but we don’t really think or care about the broader picture until we’ve got someone who is really going to benefit or suffer from our actions. Anyway, there is my pitch for recycling. It’s a good thing, and you should do it.

So, after the hundreds of cans and bottles I’ve cleaned out and sent off I was very pleased to be able to see this recycled stuff come full circle (in a more interesting way that a paper box) with a company called Green Toys.

A company that takes recycled stuff and turns it into toys. How fun is that, and what a great way to motivate your own kids to recycle. I’m thinking a toddler would happily make sure a milk carton made it into the recycling if they knew it could become a tool set. Then I found exactly that. A tool set made from recycled milk cartons made by a company called Green Toys.

They take recycled material and refashion it into toys! I think it’s a great idea and a perfect way to encourage kids to recycle. “If you put this milk carton in the recycling it can become a toy car,” seem pretty persuasive to me.

Green Toys has some fun toys on their website that include play food, trucks, tools sets, play flowers, outside games and more. All of them are made out of 100% recycled material, and even the cartons holding the products are 100% recycled and recyclable. I love it! Plus all the products are from stuff that has been recycled and refashioned in the USA, saving on extra fuel emissions and what not. Bottom line, this is a fun way to play and a fun way to help save the earth.

Okay, so I was really excited to find a brand of toys that I could feel so great about promoting but I was curious about what the actual toys were like.

First they were packaged in a cardboard box (recycled of course) and there were no twisty ties or plastic bits to claw my way through, also as soon as I had my toys removed I could drop all the packaging right back into the recycle.

Green Toys tool chest made from recycled milk cartons

The tool set itself was great. The pieces have a rough texture like a milk carton, but it’s clear that that is by design. The toys were solid and well made. My son had a blast trying to screw the pieces into the side of the tool chest and hauling the whole thing around the house. It was the perfect size for his little hands and while the tools were solid they weren’t so heavy that I was afraid of him causing real damage by hammering things other than the provided nails. He probably spent 15 putting both the screws, nails and screw drivers in the little holes around the tool chest, and he had a great time playing with it.

Green Toys Pros:

Environmentally Friendly
Solid and Well Built
Hassle Free Packaging
Multiple Color Options (the tool chest, dump trucks and trains also come in pink)

Green Toy Cons:

Fairly Simplistic Toys
Not a Huge Variety
Fairly Expensive (the tool chest will run you a cool $28)

There are so many toys are made out of plastic these days, if you want to have plastic toys you feel good about check out Green Toys.

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What are some of the best ways you’ve tried to encourage your children to recycle? I’d love to hear about it in the comments section.

Review – Pacific Baby World 3-1 Insulated Toddler Travel Cup

May 16, 2016October 15, 2021 Brittney Leave a comment

We live in Boston, and since we live in a big city parking in most places is a nightmare. We often end up taking public transportation and do a lot of walking. Summers here are hot and I often get concerned about how my son is going to handle being out in the warm weather. I sunscreen him up, he wears a hat and I try to keep him in the shade, but it’s still so hot.

I want to be able to get as much liquid into him as possible and I’ve found the Pacific Baby all-in-one cups to be a pretty amazing addition to our summer outings. Not only are they super versatile but the are amazing at keeping drinks cold. Ice cold. In fact, if I add ice to his drink, 4 hours later there are still ice cubes in his cup… Pretty fantastic right?

Here is a brief summary of the benefits of a Pacific Baby Cup:

They keep drinks cold or hot for up to 7 hours!
They are a great transition cup and you can upgrade it to meet the needs of your child simply by switching out the mouthpiece on the cup; they have bottle, sippy cup, and straw tops.
They are environmentally friendly (and you only need one cup for a baby through a 5 year old).
It’s made out of stainless steel which is good for sanitation.
It’s super easy to clean by hand and they are dishwasher safe.

Pacific Baby 3-1 insulated sippy cup review

My son never took a bottle, so we didn’t end up using the default top that came with the cup and instead we went straight for the sippy cup top. My boy loved it. It’s soft and flexible, easy to drink from and the cup really is amazing at keeping a drink cold… like to the point I’m a little bit jealous of it. I also love that it comes with lid to cover the sippy cup spout and I can add hand grips to the side if I want them.

This cup seemed perfect for a few months… and then we noticed a few slight drawbacks. First there was a day I filled up the cup, didn’t bother putting the handles on it and handed it off to my son. About five seconds later he was screaming bloody murder because it had slipped out of his hand and smashed his foot. I believe it hurt. These cups are really sturdy.
The spout on the sippy cup is really easy to invert but kind of a pain to pop back out (and toddler will play with anything they can get their hands or mouth on so our gets inverted fairly often.) The sippy cup top is also really flexible which means my son can easily push the whole spout into the cup if he’s playing with it… which of course makes a mess.

And finally, we found that straw top is not quite as good as the other two tops at keeping liquid in. If I have the cup in the side holder of my backpack and it’s got the straw top on it I can expect to have a slight amount of leakage if I don’t keep my backpack upright (the other I could flip in circles and they didn’t leak a drop.)

Pros:

Durable Bottle
Fantastic Insulator
Changeable tops resulting in less clutter and the need for fewer cups
Customizable
Washable

Cons:

Heavy
Sippy cup top is a little too flexible
Straw top is more prone to leaks (though it does have a great built in cover)
Price

All in all it’s been a great bottle to have over the summer, and I’m looking forward to being able to use it this winter as well. I can recommend it as a good product and I think it’s worthing having something that can keep your toddlers drink (especially if that drink is milk) cold even when it’s 90 degrees outside.

Check out Pacific Baby and more about their 3 in 1 bottles

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What are you favorite kinds of cups/sippy cups for outdoor adventures?

Review – Begin Again Toys Wooden Dinosaur A-Z Puzzle

April 18, 2016October 15, 2021 Brittney Leave a comment

I adore wooden toys. I love how resilient they are. They don’t fade or break, they have a little bit of substance when you hold them in your hand, and they last forever! By forever, I’m talking generations. My grandma has a freestanding wooden elephant puzzle in her house with about four pieces. (It’s white and was a white elephant gift. Ha!) Growing up my cousins and I loved playing with it. It was always out around the house, and as I grew older the silly elephant stuck around. The only up keep it needed was a paint job every now and then because the white started to look a bit dingy with so many little hands carrying it around, but it never broke and it never grew old. Twenty years later my grandma still has that puzzle!

I first saw BeginAgain Toys as part of a Zulily promotion for wooden toys. Since I already love the idea of wooden toys I was enthralled with the whole list of toys but I was absolutely mesmerized by the BeginAgain Puzzles. I was hit with a wave of nostalgia seeing the free standing animal family puzzles (they even have an elephant!) and pulled in by the beauty and simplicity of their designs. The patterns on their puzzles are unique, the painting is colorful, and they’ve made them even better learning tools by having numbered or lettered pieces on some of the puzzles (uppercase and lowercase depending on the side of the puzzle you’re looking at).

Plus I can really get behind the BeginAgain company and their “Workshop Rules” aka moto for toys:

Kids are the true noisemakers!
– No batteries, no electronics, ever!
Share your ideas, then build
– Collaborate, share, and build in partnership.
Don’t leave a mess
– Take OIL out of play, use plant based materials whenever possible and always reduce, recycle, and seek improvement.
Great products have greater purpose
– BeginAgain gives 1% to the community.

These puzzles are fairly expensive ranging from $10-$30, but my grandmas puzzles had lasted through multiple generations and these puzzles looked like they were built for the same kind of multi generational love. To me it seemed worth the price. And so we got the wooden alphabet dinosaur puzzle. A puzzle I knew was a little advanced for my young son, but it seemed like a puzzle he could grow into and one that I could use as a teaching tool in a lot of different ways as he did.

The puzzle came with a nice wooden tray, great for storing the pieces in when the puzzle if finished or still in pieces (though I wish the tray had a lid…). One side of the puzzle has capital letters the other side has lowercase letters so your child has a chance to learn both, and the puzzle can be built face up, face down or standing on it’s feet.

The puzzle is well crafted and the pieces are solid and easy to put together. I was a little surprised by the difficulty of the puzzle, I thought it would be a breeze since it’s more or less alphabetized, but I think I relied on the alphabet a little too much and it took me a try or two to piece the thing back together. I thought it was surprisingly fun to piece together and I really love how big the pieces are the 3D feel of the puzzle.

My son LOVED that this was a dinosaur! But the actual puzzle part was still a bit beyond his ability. While he wasn’t able to build the puzzle, but he did get a good chance to work on his fine motor skills as I helped him piece little bits of it together and he had a blast identifying the different letters on the pieces and sorting the colored shapes into piles. And the great thing about puzzle is, it’s wood, it’s not going to fade or break and we can play with it all over again when he’s ready to start piecing the whole thing together.

I guess I really got this puzzle in part for me. On their website they have a whole range of puzzle, many with much more simple pieces (like the cat puzzle pictured above). I have a feeling that my two year old would have had a lot more success piecing those together.. and possibly also enjoyed being able to play with the individual cat pieces in the process.

They have a butterfly that is a tint but more intense than my dinosaur puzzle suggested for 5 year olds, a food assortment puzzle (Alphabites) that is suggest for 3+, and adorable wooden block puzzles for 18+ months. The Alphabites Puzzle, has pieces shaped like a bunch of food, and when all the pieces are removed from the tray, the tray is shaped like a serving tray, complete with plate and napkin and the flip side of the tray is shaved like a stove top! It sounds like some fantastic, dual use play food to me.

BeginAgain Puzzle Pros:

Super Sturdy Puzzle
Duel Use Puzzle
Brightly Colored
Made Sustainably
Teaching Tool
Easy to Hold Pieces

BeginAgain Puzzle Cons:

Expensive
The storage box doesn’t have a lid

Anyway. I’ve been really happy with my puzzle. It’s as awesome as it looks and it’s fun to build. I really think these puzzles and this company is worth checking out! See more BeginAgain Toys on:

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We love puzzles at our house, if you’ve come across any great or unique ones please tell me more about them in the comments section,

Apostolic Clothing – Spring Styles {Review}

March 19, 2016October 15, 2021 Brittney Leave a comment

We had our first glorious day of 75 degree weather here in Boston last week. (Thankfully no snowmageddon this year!) And while it may be too early to start thinking about summer it’s not to early to start thinking about is Easter! Heads up, the holiday is on March 27th.

Disclosure: Brittney from Sly Spoon received products from this sponsor to facilitate her review, no other compensation was received, and all opinions expressed are 100% her own.

I love spring dresses and I love getting dressed up for Easter Sunday. Apostolic Clothing is the perfect place to turn to for new fun frocks that are ideal for looking classy on the town and great at church.

They have a fantastic selection of dresses and skirts and they are adding new items to their stock all the time.

I was thrilled when they sent me the dreamy Dixie dress and the amazing reversible skirt (Sophia). They are exactly what I was hoping for for spring.

The Dixie dress is so flattering on! It has a round neckline and a few accent pleats around the neck. The dress is fully lined (not see through at all!) and made out of rayon so there is a tiny bit of give to the fabric, which makes the dress really comfortable to wear. It’s a great addition to a spring wardrobe and a total win in my book.

The second I saw that there even was such a thing as a reversible skirt I knew I had to have one. The skirt looked amazing and the idea of being able to flip it inside out was just too fun to pass up. Apostolic Clothing currently carries two different reversible skirts the Sophia and the Sophine. Both are A line skirts with one black side, and one black and white printed side.

It says on the website that one size fits all from S-XL. I found the lack of sizing a little daunting but the skirt has a thick elastic waistband that fits comfortably and the skirt can easily be moved up or down your torso until you find the fit you like. The skirt is made out of dual layer polyester and its heavyweight enough that you won’t need a slip with it.

Personally I think it looks amazing no matter how you wear it. I love the playful peek-a-boo patterns that show when it’s worn black side out, and the stylish accents when it’s worn pattern side out. Its classic colors make it easy to match with just about anything, and really how can anyone say no to the magic of a reversible skirt? Being the mother of two young boys I have no doubt this fun feature will come in handy.

Apostolic Clothing is a Georgia based company that specializes in modest, modern clothing. I’ve had the chance to work with them in the past and they have always been fantastic and are truly dedicated to their cause of providing an avenue to find modest clothing that you feel and look amazing in. They are adding new items to their site all the time and if you’re looking for the perfect dress the first place you should check out is Apostolic Clothing.

Check out Apostolic Clothing for more great modest spring styles, perfect for Easter and sunny weather.

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Review – Crayola Slick Stix

February 22, 2016October 15, 2021 Brittney Leave a comment

This review is 100% my own opinion and sponsored only by myself.

I first experienced the Crayola Slick Stixs at a toddler playgroup my son and I attended. They were learning about the letter Z and coloring some Zebras. I was there, playing with and also enjoying some new kinds of art supplies, while I attempted to keep my son from painting his neighbor.

Then I picked up a slick stix and ran it across the paper. Then again. It was like magic. Ha. It was so smooth and the color was vibrant I felt like I was coloring with lip stick. I loved it! I ended up coloring a good portion of my sons neglected zebra just because these crayon/markers were so interesting to use…

And then I went home, hoped on Amazon and bought us a set. I feel like they are fairly expensive (they end up being about a $1/piece, so $5 for the set of 5 and $12/for the 12 pack) but in my opinion they are worth it. Suddenly coloring time with my son was also coloring time for mom and it’s funny but coloring with these crayons felt relaxing in a similar way to painting, they stick to the paper and slide, you’re left with a super bright colorful spaces. Pretty much they are just fun.

I love coloring with them and when our 5 pack was used up I splurged and got the 12 pack, however there are a few set backs. First, they are pretty expensive for a crayon in my book, second if you don’t have the lid on them they will dry out and lose their lipstick like feeling, though they will still color. Third, they smear, at least right after they’ve been put to paper, which meant after coloring time my son needed his hands washed from touching the paper and I needed to make sure he didn’t lean on the art work while it was still freshly done, after an hour or two of sitting the Slick Stix art work seemed to dry and smearing was less of a problem.

Pros: