Listerine Oral Care Challenge Post 2

If you’ve read my first post on oral care and the Listerine challenge here then you’ll know that we I started my family off on this challenge that we weren’t the best, at least my children and I weren’t anyway.  When our box of supplies arrived, toothbrushes, dental floss and mouthwash my children were excited with Phineas and Ferb and other characters on their brushes and we had to commit to three weeks of brushing, flossing and rinsing twice a day.

My oldest daughter, Hannah, has always been fairly good at maintaining her brushing but the other two it’s like World War Three to get them to brush, let alone floss.  Of course, we’ve still had our share of cavities and other dental caries that we’ve had to take care of and thankfully we have a great dentist for the children.  Since doing this challenge all three of my children no longer fear me coming toward them with dental floss or the tooth brush – maybe it’s the characters or could it be that the dental floss didn’t feel like it was cutting into your gums?

I’m actually looking forward to my children’s dental check up in January as I’m thinking maybe we just might come out of it with no one having any cavities that need taken care of.  One of the things the dentist wanted me to work on with them was flossing but I never knew there was a floss on the market that wouldn’t cut our gums until I received the Reach Total Care Plus Whitening floss.  This stuff was wonderful!  My 7 year old who is VERY sensitive to things on her skin, gums, toes, etc let me floss her teeth for the first time since I tried with the other stuff that would cut her.  My 4 year old son’s favorite part of the challenge was the Batman mouth wash – the hardest part for me was making sure he spit it all out.

As for me?  Well I’m still dealing with a lot of tooth pain and I’m really thinking of seriously having it pulled since it’s causing headaches as well.  Even with my daily flossing and rinsing and brushing the sensitivity is still there and some days it’s unbearable.  We’ll see, as I’m still not sure what I want or need to do.  I also enjoyed the floss as I hated flossing but with the floss we used I could actually enjoy flossing my teeth.  My husband didn’t really change his pattern as he already was strict on his flossing and brushing routine but he did enjoy the longer fresh feeling that rinsing gave him.

Overall, my family and I were very happy to participate in the Listerine Oral Care challenge and as I said above and in my last post, I’m hoping that with the dentist visit in January we can leave with a clean bill of teeth health.  I’m glad that we’ve found some products that now work for all of us in making sure that we get the flossing in that needs done and the rinsing that keeps the mouth feeling fresher longer.

**“I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Listerine and received a sample to facilitate my review and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.”

Aldi’s Blog tour

I enjoy our local Aldi’s store, it allows me to feed my family for less than other groceries so when I had the chance to participate in the Mom Central Aldi’s Tour to try out their foods and award winning wines like Walker Napa Valley Red Wine, Landshut Sweet Red, Landshut Riesling and others I gladly applied and was accepted.

My local Aldi is very clean and customer friendly with wide aisles, prices clearly marked and there are even some name brand items occasionally thrown in at prices lower than the leading grocery store.  The wine area is easy to find and very tastefully done and like the rest of the items in the store it’s very easy to tell what the price is going to be – I found out that Ohio has higher prices for alcohol.

It’s been awhile since I have had alcohol, almost 11 years to be exact, so while I enjoyed the taste of the wine I couldn’t drink a lot of it!  We also tried the brie which I topped with brown sugar and sliced almonds (instead of cranberries as I would be the only one eating that) – I will have to revisit the brie because while it was high quality, I had never served it before so it didn’t turn out as soft as I would have liked – not Aldi’s fault, mine.

Overall, my experience with Aldi’s food and wine was superb and I recommend them to anyone who wants fine food and wine at low cost.  Their seasonal selections of food is right up there with a high end grocery without the high end store prices.  I look forward to visiting Aldi again for all my family’s grocery needs.

**“I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of ALDI and received a gift certificate to facilitate my review.”

Oral Care (or lack thereof) and a Listerine challenge

I’m joining in for the Mom Central Listerine Challenge so I’ll be posting once now, on my family’s oral care or lack of it and once again once we get our Listerine products and do the challenge.  The challenge is basically my family and I will begin a regimen of brushing, flossing and rinsing twice a day for three weeks.

I have a confession to make, I’m not a tooth brushing fanatic, now that isn’t to say that I’ll leave the house without brushing but there have been times where I forget to brush and remind my children to brush.  My parents dumped a lot of money into my teeth as a child, teen and young adult and even then I didn’t do everything the dentist and orthodontist recommended.  Yes I still chewed bubble gum and ate caramel pop corn with my braces.  I even managed to throw away a retainer at a Red’s baseball game, and which my loving dad got back for me out of the stadium’s trash can.  I hated to floss then and I still do.

Flash forwarding to now – my husband has bad teeth, he always has.  My children inherited his genes for this and no matter the amount of brushing cavities in at least one child is likely at 6 month appointments.  Me, I haven’t had a cavity in years.  So this will be something different for us and I’ll probably need to come up with a chart of some sort to remind myself and my children to commit  to the twice a day brushing, flossing, and rinsing routine.

I’ve been using a sensitivity tooth paste – my last dentist kept telling me the pain I’d get in my back jaw was related to my bite and he’d file down my teeth.  I started getting worried that eventually I’d have no more teeth to file down so I sought the opinion of another dentist who told me it’s not my bite but the fact that my gums in the back have begun to recede and she said that’s because I’ve been using a medium/hard toothbrush and I would brush to hard.  Since I’ve been using the sensitive toothpaste I haven’t had any more issues along with the change in toothbrush and brushing method.

I’m looking forward to this challenge and hoping that my children, husband (he’s much better about this than I am) and I can all get into a better tooth brushing routine and improve our dental hygiene and who knows maybe once my children have their next dental check up we’ll come out with zero, zip, nada cavities or caries!

“I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Listerine and received product samples to facilitate my review and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.”

Mom Central: Emergen-C Kidz Review (contest)

I like it when I can find vitamins that my children don’t mind taking and ones that are as close to all natural as I can find.  When I had the chance to receive Emergen-C Kidz Vitamins I couldn’t wait to make my children into guinea pigs and have them taste it (I also tasted it as well!).  I couldn’t get my oldest to try them but my almost 7 year old and my 5 year old really enjoyed them – my 5 year old actually took to begging, so I guess he enjoyed them too much.

They come in fruit punch, orange and grape flavors however the grape and fruit punch were the winners in my house.  The packs are mixed with your choice of 4, 5 or 6 ounces of water, the more water the more mild the flavor.  My children preferred the 4 ounces as did I when I tried it as we seem to enjoy more flavor.  The fun thing is these fizz up and make a neat sizzling noise and I must admit at first I didn’t think my daughter was going to like it as she absolutely can’t stand anything with fizz but this was so mild she loved it – she described it as feeling like she was drinking cotton candy.

These dietary supplements contain 250 mg Vitamin C, along with B Vitamins, antioxidants and are naturally flavored and sweetened with fructose and stevia.  Some of the other vitamins are folic acid, Calcium, zinc, manganese, and more.  For children ages 4-13 two packets a day are recommended and mix with desired amount of water.

You can find more out and take the Emergen-C pledge ($0.25 gets donated to Vitamin Angels).  The pledge can be found here: Emergen-C Facebook The pledge is simply saying that you’ll find ways to encourage your family to be healthy, including eating fresh foods and being active.  There is even a recipe using the packets that can be found on the Facebook page!

**I wrote this review while participating in a campaign by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Emergen-C and received samples to facilitate my review and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.

Contest!

If you’d like to win your own sampling of Emergen-C Kidz packets in the flavors my family got to try (grape, orange, fruit punch) then keep reading to enter my contest.  Ends 9/23/11 at 12 noon EST, open to any U.S. resident ages 18 and over.  Must complete mandatory entry #1 first!  Also be sure to leave a way to contact you if you should win.

1. Visit Emergen-C and tell me one other product you’d like to try besides the Kidz version
2. Follow my blog on Google Friend Connect (left side bar) tell me if you already do
3. Follow Emergen-C on Facebook
4. Follow my blog on Facebook (see left side bar) or tell me if you already do
5. Share on twitter, facebook, or other social media (buttons are below the post) leave me the link to your share.  One time per day.
6. Follow me on Twitter

Again the contest will run through September 23rd at 12 noon EST.  You must do #1 for any of the other options to count.  Make sure I have a way to contact you.