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My daughter was Ariel for Halloween, so we ended up buying her this wig to finish off her costume. I don’t think it’s a Halloween-only type of purchase. It isn’t very overpriced, and my daughter, like lots of little girls, really enjoys playing dress-up with her old Halloween costumes as well as other types of costumes she’s picked up over the past couple of years.

Dressing up as all the different princesses goes on all year long.

If your daughter wants to be Ariel any time of the year, this isn’t a bad choice for a wig. It’s definitely not without its flaws, but it’s less expensive than some other options. You can see the netting, for example, through the hair in some spots.

The bangs don’t stay perfectly swooped like Ariel’s. I found myself readjusting that bunch of hair as my daughter walked around on Halloween (it doesn’t matter so much if she’s just dressing up and playing around, though). It stays on her head better than some other wigs she’s had, and one good thing about the thinner hair is that it doesn’t make her sweaty and miserable.

I think some people are picky about the color, but I don’t mind the nearly neon red. I think it’s the perfect “cartoon red” and perfectly appropriate for a kid’s Ariel costume. It could work for other characters, like Strawberry Shortcake, too, in a pinch.

It’s not the highest quality wig in the world, but it gets the job done. I recommend watching the price for a while and snagging one while it’s pretty low. I think we got it for around $11, but as I’m writing this, it’s about $18. Amazon prices fluctuate quite a bit.

Photo credit: Amazon

I bought this little compact during the summer when my skin was closer to normal than dry, and I wanted a quick and easy-to-use, all-in-one product with a healthy dose of SPF. I wasn’t wowed. First, what I don’t like:

It’s $42 but if I were to use it every day, I’d only get about a month, maybe a month and a half out of it.

After the first use, it gets this white film over the top that probably has some simple, not gross explanation, but it still doesn’t look like anything I want to swipe my sponge over and apply to my face. I’m guessing it has to do with the sunscreen.

The finished look of it was inconsistent on my skin. Some days it made my skin look absolutely flawless. Other days, it picked up on all the little flakes I couldn’t even see until I applied the makeup. It didn’t matter if I had exfoliated my face or not. I couldn’t really make sense of it.

Now for what I did like:

• I never got a sunburn while wearing it.
• It was quick and easy to use, and sometimes it did look amazing.
• The compact stays shut, so it’s easy to travel with.
• My skin didn’t feel dried out with it; it felt like a fairly moisturizing product, but I still wouldn’t wear it while my skin’s firmly in the “dry” category.
• It does a lot of the things it claims: provides natural coverage (not so sure about “buildable”), cut down on redness, cut down on dullness, and (often) gave me fresh looking skin.
• It didn’t irritate my skin, even when I wore it every day for several days in a row. With some foundations, I have to rotate them or my skin gets angry.

I’m on the fence about whether it plumped and disguised fine lines. It really did depend on the day. Sometimes the flakiness the makeup picked up seemed to outline fine lines in my forehead and make them look worse.

I think there are enough pros to recommend this to someone with oily or combination skin, but I’m not sure about recommending it to someone with normal to dry skin. If you have a Sephora near you, I do recommend giving it a try there.

Photo credit: Sephora

There’s just something about this furry little monkey named Coconut. My daughter has never latched on to a stuffed animal so much in all of her six years, unless you count the Eeyore doll we had to replace about three times when she was a baby (and even then, he didn’t go everywhere with her like Coconut the monkey does).

I have been given instructions on how to care for her (including feeding and potty training) while my daughter’s in school, and she even has her own potty chart. Coconut was also “learning” her ABC’s and math just a few days after we bought her. It’s just a simple stuffed animal, but apparently there’s something special about it.

I really like the newer Beanie Babies as opposed to the ones I hoarded as a high schooler in the late 90s. They’re cuddlier, like regular stuffed animals, and they have these big gorgeous eyes that beg you to take them home (it totally works on my daughter; then she gives me the same look and I can’t resist, either). These are still filled with beans, but they’re not as limp or “beanbag-like” as the old ones.

This one is brown, incredibly soft, and has huge lavender eyes. The tip of her tail is barely tinted lavender to match the eyes. There are a few different sizes available, but we got the medium one—the only one they had-for around $9.99 at Rite-Aid.

You can order the size you want directly from the Ty site and get free shipping if you buy two or more toys. That’s easy to do since they’re all adorable. If you’re an ex-Beanie Baby collector from a couple of decades ago, you may find yourself fighting the urge to add several to your cart—for yourself, not necessarily your kids. Or you’ll find yourself using your kids as an excuse to buy them all.

Photo credit: Ty

I love a good chubby pencil lip color because they’re easy to stick in your pocket or toss in your bag on the go, they offer precision, and they’re usually fairly pigmented.

The new one from Revlon isn’t exactly a disappointment. The colors are absolutely gorgeous, they’re vibrant, and they look just how you’d expect them to based on the colors of the tubes (a little darker and less metallic).

I picked up Flirtatious, which is the only one I have so far, but they all seem to perform the same way and it all boils down to your color preferences. This is a deep, rosy pink shade with enough shimmer to catch the light without looking like glitter.

From a distance, it just looks glossy. You really have to look for the microshimmer pieces. The product doesn’t bleed on me, and it’s as easy as expected to get a crisp line since it’s just an oversized pencil. They’re lightweight and not even really noticeable on your lips once you’ve applied it. I love that. It might as well be a regular lip balm, but with intense color.

There are only three things that annoy me about the Color Burst Lacquer Balm:

1. It smells like mint. I’m not a huge fan of mint. I get why it makes sense to make something that goes near your mouth smell like mint, but unscented would have been fine.
2. The price is $8.99. It’s not a lot, but I still prefer to pay less when I’m at a drugstore. It seems like their prices are creeping up to some of the department store brands. For example, a MAC lipstick’s $15, and when I turn in six empty tubes, I get another lipstick for free. That makes them about $13 each in the end.
3. It doesn’t last all that long, and it’ll smudge off quite a bit of you bump it or kiss someone. If I don’t eat, drink, or lick my lips much, I might get one to two hours of wear from these. I know they aren’t designed to be stains, but I don’t think another hour or two would be too much to ask. Also, I have barely brushed my hand against the corner of my lip and ended up with a streak of color on my skin. My husband was going in for a kiss one day and I warned him about the color, so he barely touched my lips and still came away looking like I’d applied the balm directly to his lips.

I like the way these feel, but I’m not sure I’d buy more bold shades. I might pick up the lightest pinkish-nude shade because it looks pretty and won’t be such a big deal if it smudges.

Photo credit: Ulta

I tend to ignore a lot of Maybelline’s lip products for some reason, but I kept seeing this one and I was intrigued by the range of purple shades. Of the 20 shades available, five of them are purplish and vary quite a bit in wearability.

Being the makeup fiend I am, I went for probably the most conventionally unwearable purple shade in the bunch, Vision in Violet. I’ve heard good things about other shades, so I’m guessing that what I say here extends across the whole line of products, but I can only review Vision in Violet.

Unless you have a coupon or there’s a sale, you’re going to end up paying about $8.99 for each one of these, which I feel is a little expensive for such a small tube of gloss.

That said, I think if you are forced to pay full price for it, you won’t be that disappointed because the product behaves like a high end lip color. It’s opaque, creamy, moisturizing, and doesn’t bleed (at least not on me). It just feels good on your lips.

I got about three or four hours of wear out of it before I needed to reapply. It really clings to your lips, and I think this formula made my lips look plumper, even though it isn’t designed to be a plumping product. It’s thick, but doesn’t feel gooey. It feels more like a thick balm, or like if you put a light layer of Vaseline on your lips.

The packaging is pretty and no-frills. Because the interior of the tube is slanted at the bottom, when you first pick it up, it looks like a regular lipstick, as if you can see the tip of the lipstick through the tube. When you open it, though, there’s an unusual applicator that makes it easy to spread the product and follow the shape of your lip. It’s a plush, spade-shaped angora brush.

If I were to see these on sale, I would probably pick up a few more colors. The purple shade I have is very obviously violet, with blue undertones, but there are purples that veer more toward pink, as well as nudes, reds, pinks, and even an orange.

Photo credit: Ulta

I have a bad habit of taking tons and tons of photos and then never doing anything with them. I upload them to my computer on occasion or share them on Facebook or Instagram, but I’m terrible about actually printing out hard copies.

The Free Prints app for iPhone makes the prospect of doing that a little more appealing. The app itself is free, and you can print up to 85 4×6 pictures per month or 1000 per year for free (you pay for shipping). If you want copies of one photo or a different size, you have to pay a little extra, but free 4×6 photos? Yes, please!

I was given a coupon code that covered 20 photos and shipping. The photos I sent from my photo roll came out as clear as expected, on par with other photo printing stores and services I’ve used before. The shipping was very fast. I think they said it could take up to 13 days, but mine shipped within a day or so, and I had them within a week.

If you send more than 20 photos at a time to be printed, you may face a little bit more of a wait time. I wasn’t charged for shipping, but it’s $1.99 to $9.99.

Is it worth it? Well, it depends on what the shipping costs are for you when you use this app, as well as your proximity to say, a Walgreens, where you can send your pictures from your photo roll to the store, have them printed, and then save on shipping costs by going to pick them up yourself.

As far as I know, you can’t send Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, or Picasa photos anywhere the same way you can send them from your photo roll, but Free Prints allows you to send those, too.

You’ll need iOS 6.0 or higher and live in the United States to use the app. It’s optimized for iPhone 5 and will work on iPhones, iPads, or iPod Touch.

I highly recommend giving this a try.

Photo credit: iTunes

The Pocksie Temporary Sticky Pockets seem like the perfect solution when you don’t want to carry a big bag (or an extra one) and don’t have enough pockets on your outfit.

When I had to carry around a diaper bag, I hated carrying my purse, too. I didn’t want to toss my wallet and everything else into the diaper bag, either. Something like this would have made it easy to keep my debit card, ID, and a key handy.

They won’t hold much since they’re only 4.1” by 3.35”, but sometimes you don’t need a lot when you’re on the go. The only real problem seems to be that they are only good for one use (you can’t leave them attached and wash the clothing they’re attached to), so if you like to use them very often it could get expensive. Six of them cost $9.95.

They’re also all beige, so they may not look so great when worn on the outside. Inside a jacket or on a pair of pants, hidden under a long shirt, are probably the best bet in most cases. You can also use them to add a convenient pocket inside of a bag or boot.

You can use these to go for a run or stick one inside a reusable grocery bag. They’re also good when you know you’ll be juggling a lot of other items (or a kid) but at least need your ID, debit card, and key. I think it’d be nice to see these in different designs that look cute on the outside of clothing, too.

Photo credit: Fashion First Aid

Warning: Only use this in the evenings because the scent will lull you into a fantastic, relaxed state that will inevitably end in sleep, and you don’t want that to happen at your desk. I guess if you’re incredibly stressed out, this might lower you down to a level where you can function more easily without face-planting on the keyboard.

Right now, I’m trying to finish up some work after slathering this lotion all over my legs and hands, and it’s getting tougher to concentrate. I didn’t start out stressed; I just started out itchy. It’s good for that, too.

This version of the Aveeno lotion so many of us with chronically dry or dehydrated and sensitive skin have come to know and love is quite the improvement. The regular Aveeno has “no” scent that’s actually a faint, slightly unpleasant smell.

This one has a mix of lavender, ylang-ylang, and chamomile that I can only describe as divine. It’s a sweet, floral type of scent rather than the masculine, herbal type some lavender products tend to take on. The moisturizing and itch-relief capabilities are the same as they are with the regular Aveeno lotion. I got almost instant relief. There’s still colloidal oatmeal, just like there is in the original, and the consistency feels about the same.

Twelve ounces is around $8.50 and 18 ounces will cost about $11.00. If you struggle with eczema or just relentlessly dry, itchy skin, you’ll soon find that this is worth every penny (you’ll probably say the same if you’re stressed or often have trouble sleeping, too).

If you’re familiar with that intense stinging sensation that happens when you put other lotions on dry, irritated or chapped skin, you’ll want to try this. I can only speak from my own experiences, but the stinging—when there is stinging—is much less intense and lasts a lot less time with Aveeno lotions. I use this on my daughter, who was “lucky” enough to get skin like mine (we hate winter), and she loves it.

Photo credit: Aveeno

The Kid Made Modern line is available at Target, and it’s difficult to choose where to start because everything looks so appealing (to my daughter and me, at least). We ended up with the pipe cleaner and wooden bead set because she loves to make jewelry, and the pipe cleaners are easy to work with that way.

There are 398 pieces in this set between the collection of beads and pipe cleaners. Both types of items come in a wide variety of colors, including bold, pastel, and neon colors.

The beads come in a variety of sizes and some of the smaller ones are cube-shaped rather than spheres. You could teach your kids about patterns with these, since there are so many different options. You could also use the set to teach addition and subtraction.

My daughter just really wanted to make jewelry with this kit, and though everything’s beautiful and as high-quality as fuzzy pipe cleaners and wooden beads can be, I was a little disappointed in a couple of things.

The pipe cleaners are so short, it takes at least two to make a bracelet. I would have liked there to be more beads, since putting five or six beads on each pipe cleaner means you’ll run out of beads before you’re done with the kit. Those are just minor complaints, though, and they’re mine and not hers. She doesn’t seem to mind twisting together different colored pipe cleaners to make things, and she hasn’t complained about the lack of beads even though she’s running low.

I think it’s cute, and if you’re looking for something along these lines for your kids to play with, it’s not a bad set. You could probably put together your own at a craft store for less money, though, by picking up a few packets of multi-colored pipe cleaners and a bucket of beads.

This set is $8.99. The color scheme won’t be the same, but if that doesn’t matter, I recommend trying to piece something together on your own.

Photo credit: Kid Made Modern