Have you heard of Bake Me A Wish! before? Bake Me A Wish! provides freshly baked occasional cakes for all seasons and celebrations. They deliver the cakes overnight in an elegant box with a personalized gift card. Now, you cannot leave their site without being hungry. I know that I wouldn’t mind a few of those cakes being sent to my house! They all look so good.  Granted, I may need to walk on a treadmill after that, but it’s all in the name of research, right?

The reason I am including them in my gift guide this year is because of what else they do.  When you order a cake from them, they send an identical cake to a soldier in Iraq for their birthday.  5% of all their orders is used to assist their efforts in sending gourmet occasion cakes to soldiers overseas.  Now, if you know someone over in Iraq who wouldn’t mind a gourmet birthday cake, make sure you forward their name to them.  I found myself tearing up just reading all the thank yous from soldiers receiving their cakes.

If you need a birthday cake, make sure you check out Bake Me A Wish! and see if you can help send a soldier a cake!

One of the top items this Christmas is going to be the Parrot Minikit Slim Limited Edition.  If you need a handsfree speakerphone for your car, this is the one you should get.  Granted if you want something that looks a little less girly, don’t the limited edition.  The other ones are just black, but work just as good.  This sleek speakerphone works great in your car.  You can easily put it on the visor of your car and forget about it.  It easily adapts to your environment and can even easily fit into your pocket.  Now, this is so easy to use.  As long as your phone as bluetooth, the Parrot will automatically synchronize its phonebook with your mobile phone.  Now, it has an awesome text to speech function which allows you to just say who you want to call.  You don’t even need to train it!  If there are several numbers for that person, you just need to specify by saying home, mobile, etc.  You can even record a shortcut for your contacts, so you can call them even quicker.  I love that it is extremely hard to tell where the microphone is, and it doesn’t have any speakers!  The sound from this is awesome.  The other really cool thing is that you can use up to 5 phones with this, and it has multi speaker voice recognition.

If you know anyone without a bluetooth handsfree speakerphone, you have to buy them this for Christmas.  It is so much easier to use than a headset and it looks nice too.

Teddy Bear’s Fun to Learn First 1000 Words is book that is great for all little ones. My 4 year old enjoys it just as much as my 1 year old. Granted, you won’t find las vegas hotels in here. However, there is pretty much everything else. Each page in the book has a theme (like the beach). It lists the theme and a ton of items to go with it (for example, the beach pages show things like sunscreen, water wings, sailboat, beachball, etc). There is also a picture in the center of the page with all the miscellaneous items.  There is also a short poem asking you questions about the theme.  Will (my one year old) just likes to look at everything and go “ohhhh”.  Madison (my 4 year old) enjoys looking at the pictures and telling us what each thing is.  She likes to answer the questions for us too.  My only complaint is that the pages are paper which are a little to easy for Will to rip.

This book is great because your little ones can use it as they grow older.  I would definitely purchase it a birthday, baby shower, and/or Christmas gift.  The little ones who you are getting for will get a lot of use out of it!

Over the past week or so, I have been reading an awesome book called The Secret of Wellington’s Map.  Granted, this isn’t my normal reading genre (usually if I can get a few minutes away I pick up Stephen King or Dean R Koontz book), but you know what?  I enjoyed this book just as much as I do books by those authors (though I think this book would be considered in either the sci-fi or mystery genre).  I would say that The Secret of Wellington’s Map is probably geared towards the ten and up crowd.  However, as an adult, I truly enjoyed the book too.  I found the author’s style a joy to read, and she really caught the essence of teenage girls in this book.  I also enjoyed finding a book that girls are the heroines.  The other thing I liked is that even though the main characters are teenage girls, they weren’t boy crazy.  Granted, there were a few boy mentions, but their lives didn’t revolve around boys.  The author had the girls talking, acting, and dressing like teenage girls, so I found them very believable.  There is also a bit of real life history intertwined into the story.

The story centers around two girls, Jaime and Nicole, that had expected a carefree summer.  However, after they come across a magic map, they go on an adventure of a lifetime.  I hate to go into more of a synopsis of the book, because I don’t want to spoil any part of it for you.  I will tell you that the map is somewhat of a time space portal, and they do go through it and end up in 1885.  However, if you want to find out why and if they make it back, you have to go read the book!