Tag: fun

10 Reasons To Love the Houston Aeros

This coming weekend I’m super excited to be joining the Houston Aeroes ice hockey as they face the Grand Rapids Griffens at the Toyota Center. It also happens to be the Houston Aeros Breast Cancer Awareness Game! I lost two very very close friends to breast cancer this year so this is near and dear to my heart. I’m so glad to be participating in this great event.

If you’re local to Houston, you should join me! I’ve been given a special discount code just for my readers who want to come to the game, support the cause and enjoy some awesome hockey action. If you are interested in going to the Houston Aeros game on March 11th at 5:05pm you can go to their website to purchase tickets or call the phone number listed on the flyer below. If you purchase online and use the promo code: pink12 you’ll get the discount. Tickets start at only $10.

So here are ten reasons to love the Houston Aeros!

1. Ice hockey is non-stop action!
2. The Aeros are a minor league farm team of the NHL’s Minnesota Wild!
3. The often have musical entertainment in between periods…like when Forlorn Hope played last year!
4. Chilly the mascot is adorable.
5. Kids LOVE ice hockey. Mine sure do. Check out this video from one of the games we went to last year.

6. The Aeros have joined the fight against breast cancer!
7. Hockey fights are fun to watch.
8. There aren’t a ton of rules to learn like there are in football, so anyone can enjoy watching.
9. Have I mentioned that kids LOVE ice hockey?
10. The Houston Aeros made it ALL THE WAY to the Calder Cup finals last year!!!

Ok here are some details about the Breast Cancer Awareness Game.

I hope you’ll join us!!
This post is linked up at Angies’s Top Ten Tuesday.

Smurf The Earth? Yep!

My family loves McDonalds. They are everywhere and we count on them when we’re traveling. We rely on McDonalds a fair amount at home too when life gets a little crazy and the kids often request we go there when we’re celebrating something with them like a birthday or a great report card.

This summer our visits to the golden arches got a bit more frequent due to two things:

  1.  Mike being in class and missing family dinner four nights a week
  2. The McDonalds Smurf promotion.

We started seeing TV commercials for The Smurfs movie and for McDonalds with Smurfs in them and the kids became pretty interested. So one Saturday when Mike was in class all day I decided to take the kids to see the movie. We all LOVED it. Mike and I told the kids about how we used to love watching The Smurfs as kids on Saturday mornings. They were hooked.

So we got a couple of Smurf toys in their Happy Meals and they played with them constantly. Nathan’s first and favorite Smurf was Brainy, which is highly apropos. Brainy Smurf took baths with Nathan and even sat next to his bed at night. Alex got Handy Smurf and the boys had an awful lot of imaginative play with the toys for awhile. So we started collecting the Happy Meal toys, but they never seemed to have Smurfette (my favorite…naturally!).

Then my friends at McDonalds were kind enough to send me an entire set of the Smurfs toys for my kiddos. Yay! Seriously aren’t they adorable?! Thank you so much, McDonalds.

Here’s another cool piece of info…now thru August 25, 2011, McDonald’s has teamed with national nonprofit Keep America Beautiful to plant up to 100,000 trees in needed or devastated areas within national forests across the country. If you choose Apple Dippers as your Happy Meal side item, the package includes a code that is the key to planting a tree when entered on HappyMeal.com.

Along with 16 different Smurf toys to collect, the Happy Meals are accompanied by an exciting interactive online game – Stage M, that features new Smurf’d content focused on sustainability to motivate and encourage kids to be a friend of the planet, and to enjoy fruits and vegetables.

So yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. Plus I just love those little Smurfs!

Tell me…who was YOUR favorite Smurf character? 


The awesome people at McDonalds were kind enough to send me a set of Smurf toys but I received no other compensation and my opinions are my own. Of course!