Hey, wanna win a copy of your very own Mia-Reading: The Bugaboo Bugs? All you have to do is leave a comment here telling me why you love reading and I will then randomly choose a winner and KUTOKA will send you a copy of this game free of charge.

You are allowed 1 entry only, however, if you post a link to this contest on your blog AND a link to the review below you will be eligible for 2 more entries. Good Luck and Have Fun!!!! Contest ends June 11, 2008.

I am always interested in games that promote literacy skills. Mia-Reading: The Bugaboo Bugs is a great computer adventure game focused on helping your child develop his/her reading skills. The game is made by Kutoka, an innovative company that strives to provide children with a fun and exciting ways to learn math and reading. As a teacher it is great to see that there are some good computer games for children. I am absolutely sick of the shoot-em-up games that are thrown in our faces on a daily basis.

Kutoka lists this game as appropriate for ages 5-9. However, I would have to say that children even younger can benefit from it’s easy to follow story and simplistic activities when accompanied by an adult and used on the least-advanced setting. After all, it is never to early to begin teaching your child computer skills and what better way to do so than using an educational game that practices sight-words, phonics, comprehension, and following directions.

My biggest complaint about the Mia-Reading: The Bugaboo Bugs game is that it is a memory and resources hog. I have a Powerbook G4 (Mac) and the game does not run well on my computer. I had to use it on my work computer (a Windows PC) because my home computer did not have enough available resources. That fact that it is so graphically-dependent also explains the somewhat long installation time and the fact that my computer did freeze while trying to start-up the game. On the positive side, the game is compatible with both Macs and PCs.

My husband and I eat fast food way more than I usually like to admit (which pretty much explains why we are so overweight). But despite our busy schedules, we have made a promise to cook more for ourselves in order to save money and how health. My sister-in-law has long been a fan of her crock pot, so when she found out that we did not have one, she bough us a Crock-Pot® 5.5 Quart Slow Cooker w/ Little Dipper for Christmas this past December.

And we love it.

We use it for stews chili, gravy (what non-Italians call sauce), roast beef, pot roast, and so much more. And, because my husband works the second-shift, he puts meals on in the morning and by the time I get home around 4:00 pm, dinner is ready for both me and my daughter. I love walking into the house and smelling the great fragrance of a one pot meal.

We signed up for Verizon FiOS in November of 2007. We are still trying to get it right. Everything started out so well- we signed up and they sent a tech out on a Sunday to hook us up. He was there about 4 hours and when he left we had a better phone service and a faster internet connection. And the cable, well let’s just say that I now know what the Backyardigins actually look like. We were told that our free HDTV Television would be in our possession in 6 weeks. I thought all was well.

But then the trouble began.

Around December 15, 2007 I noticed that we were getting an obscene number of calls, all around 2-5 in the morning. They were for a “Nya Perez”. During the day we were getting even more calls for “Seven Brothers Video Store”. Now the calls for Ms. Perez did not bother me much because with the recycling of numbers, someone is bound to be receiving calls from Columbia House for Kristina Brooke. But the calls for the video store seemed weird because they had been out of business for a good 2 years. a Quick search using Verizon’s website Yellow Pages showed me that my phone number was registered to this video store even in the updated 2008 list of numbers.
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