As you and your child prepare for Valentine’s this year, don’t forget to send some love to the children being treated at DMC Children’s Hospital.

Catching Fireflies is asking adults and children to donate unsigned handmade Valentine’s cards.  The cards will be collected, signed by DMC Children’s Hospital staff and distributed to patients.  Last year, approximately 1,500 cards brightened the day of children at the hospital.

This year, in order to help collect even more cards, Catching Fireflies will give each person donating 3 or more cards, and making a purchase at the store, a very special hand-crafted necklace.

To make a difference, bring your handmade Valentine’s cards to a local Catching Fireflies store by February 12th.

This is one of my favorite ways to make cod.  I cut this recipe off of a bag of frozen cod filets that I purchased a few years ago and have made it several times since.  To serve the fish you put a boiled potato down first on the plate and smash it with the bottom of a cup, then place the fish on top and drizzle with the sauce.  You may want to cut back on the amount of mustard if you don’t want it to have such a strong mustard flavor.

Ingredients:

1 Tablespoon Coriander Seeds

1 Tablespoon Cumin Seeds

1 teaspoon kosher salt

2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

4 Cod Filets – I use frozen ones that have thawed

2 Tablespoons Canola Oil

2 Tablespoons Whole- Grain Mustard (more or less to your liking)

¼ cup of butter (1/2 stick)

2 Tablespoons of water

Directions:

1. Crush the coriander and cumin seeds with a mortar and pestle, or use the bottom of a heavy sauce pan to smash them.
2. Combine the crushed seeds with the salt and pepper in a small bowl
3. Sprinkle the mixture over the filets – coating both sides
4. Heat one tablespoon of the oil in a non-stick skillet over moderate to high heat.
5. Sear until undersides are well browned, about two minutes
6. Turn filets over and repeat the process – cooking two to three minutes more. Set aside and keep warm.
7. In a small saucepan heat the two tablespoons of water and the mustard mixing well.  Add the butter in small chunks.  Heat until the sauce has a creamy consistency.
8. Smash one or more small potato on the plate, place fish on top and add the mustard and butter sauce.

Valentine’s is such a fun holiday for grownups and kids!  While we don’t need an excuse to say “I love you,” it’s nice to have a day dedicated to it.

Whether you’re looking for an activity to complete with your kids, or just a little something to keep them occupied while you steal a kiss from your sweetheart, here’s a list of our favorite, free, printables (we’re sneaking in some educational ones too!):

4-in-1 Activity Sheet: Word search, tic-tac-toe and more

Pirate Valentines: Argh, Matey!

Printable Jigsaws: A variety of jigsaws to print and make

Dora the Explorer Valentines: Te Amo means I Love You

Pop-Up Heart Card: Requires strong scissor skills

Valentine’s Math Maze: Solve the addition problems to reveal the message!

As January draws to an end, it’s time to reassess all those grand resolutions we made almost a month ago.  How are you doing?  Have you lost your steam?  There may be an app for that!

Here’s a few of our favorite smartphone apps to help keep motivated and stay on track:

RunKeeper lets you track your workouts and performance over time and connect with other friends with similar goals in your favorite social networks.  It offers GPS Activity Tracking, Manual Activity Tracking,  Audio Interval Cues, iPod integration, Street Team social community, Activity sharing on Twitter and Facebook and Data syncs with RunKeeper.com.  Best of all, it’s free!

If your resolution was to spend less money, check out Gas Buddy.  This app helps you find the cheapest gas on the go by locating gas stations near you and showing their current gas prices.  You can participate in the Gas Buddy community by reporting prices you find and earning points towards a prize give-away.  Of course, this app is free, otherwise it wouldn’t help with the “spend less” goal.

Trying to eat healthier?  It can be hard when you have picky eaters in the house.  Fooducate is an easy to use app that helps you really understand what’s in that cereal you’re thinking of buying and offers suggestions for healthier alternatives.  Simply download the free app to your iPhone or Android phone and start scanning what’s in your cart the next time you go shopping.

Organization can be such a daunting task!  The free Intuition app can help turn chaos into order.  Enter your tasks into a calendar, assign a category and this app will do the rest.  It can help organize errands by location, category, date – just about anything you need.  It’s highly customizable and even includes sections for notes such as wish lists, ideas and anything else you need to jot down.

If you’re trying to stress less this year, consider the Ambiance app.  This handy tool allows you to to create custom ambient sounds so you can relax, drown out the sounds of the world around you and just chill for a bit.  Ambiance Lite is free, giving you access to 5 ambient downloads.  If you’d like a larger variety, take a look at the full version for $2.99 that includes 2,500 sounds.

Detroit Mommies was recently featured on the Fox 2 Detroit Morning Show, showcasing 5 products to help make life easier, simpler and, yes, even healthier!  We love these products and think you will too.  With prices ranging from $8 – $249 there are some splurges and some steals too!

T-FAL ACTIFRY is a new low fat multi-cooker that revolutionizes cooking as it creates healthier versions of the foods we all love. It’s unique, hot air circulation technology and stirring paddle allow you to make delicious low fat meals for your family, from chicken to seafood and even French fries. Dishes are healthier as no more than one spoonful of oil is ever needed. Also, SUCH a time saver – NO preheating is necessary and your meals cook quickly, making moms’ lives easier. Oh! and it is so easy to clean……All these parts come apart and go in the dishwasher. Available for $249 at Bed Bath & Beyond.

TOTES WHISTLE KEY FINDER Never be late for soccer practice again because you can’t find your keys! This clever key ring holder allows you to find your keys simply by whistling. Just whistle and listen for the beep which will lead you to them. Along with the beep an LED light located on the Key Finder will blink to help you see your keys. This is great if your keys are in a bag, on the floor, under the bed or in any other dark place. The beeping and blinking continues until you find your keys. When found, just turn it to off to cease the chirping. You can immediately turn it back on so that it remains in find mode for next time you misplace your keys. Available at Amazon for $8.

MYTRAK Featured on this season of NBC’s hit show, The Biggest Loser, MyTrak’s The Biggest Loser Slimcoach device is now available for anyone to get this fitness tool used by every trainer and contestant to stay fit each day. And it’s simple: the Slimcoach tracks your everyday activity – once you plug it in to your computer at the end of the day, the device’s MYTRAK technology calculates how much activity you need every day to meet that. It even gives nutritional advice to keep you on track to a healthier you. Then, all you do is clip the device at your hip and live your life. At the end of every day, if your circle is green, you know you’ve burned enough calories to meet your daily weight loss goal. It’s that easy! Available at  Amazon for $129.99

FRUITZ WATCH– FRUITZ WATCHES as worn by Reese Witherspoon— are not only fun but functional! These brightly colored watches emit Natural Frequency Technology—studies show that this technology helps watch wearers sleep better and stress less! Prices start at $225 and you can visit FruitzWatches.com for more information

FREEHANDS GLOVES – Who DIDN’T get an iPhone, tablet or iPad over the holidays? Just because the chillier winter days are here doesn’t mean your hands have to freeze when using your latest touch screen technology. These knit Free Hands gloves features tips on the thumb and index fingers, allowing wearers to use their touch pad technology. Also the gloves even feature palm dots for a nice grip too. Available at FreeHands.com for $18.

Todd Oldham is launching a new line of art supplies and art kits called Kid Made Modern that are sure to inspire kids of all ages!  Everything from crazy crayons, neon-printed ducktape, jewelry kits, art papers and more.   The line launches May 20 at Target stores.

In 2004, Motorola released the first RAZR flip phone, and it quickly became one the fastest-selling phones of its time. The Droid RAZR is the third RAZR phone Motorola has released. It is a higher-end phone willing to take on any other smartphone on the market.

When you think of the RAZR name, you think of a super-slim phone, and this one does not disappoint. Measuring just 7.1mm thick (compared to 9.3mm for the iPhone 4s) and weighing just 127g, it’s very light yet manages to feel extremely solid. Typically, when I think of slim and light, the first thing that comes to mind is fragile. Such is not the case with this phone. The Droid RAZR proves that thin is no longer frail. To protect the phone from daily abuse, the Droid RAZR features a Kevlar fiber (the same thing they use for body armor!) backing and scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass display. The phone also has a water-repellent coating that protects it (including its inside components) from spills.

Even though the RAZR is one of the thinnest phones on the market, it doesn’t skimp on features. This phone has a beautiful 4.3-inch screen that spans much of its length and height, and the display is both luminous and crisp. The 4.3” Super AMOLED advanced display (960×540 resolution) on the DROID RAZR rivals resolutions found on most LCD HDTV’s! The one thing I did not like about the screen and the size of the phone is the difficultly involved for one-handed use. With a smaller screen (say 3.5”), you can easily thumb through the whole screen without needing to adjust your hand position.

The phone comes with two cameras: one front-facing and one rear-facing camera. The rear-facing camera is an 8-megapixel camera capable of shooting in 1080p format. The camera takes excellent photos and videos. The RAZR’s camera app comes with an excellent panorama mode that allows you to “stich” six shots together to get a great panorama shot. The front-facing camera is 1.3 megapixel and capable of shooting video in 720p format. The camera certainly doesn’t disappoint. It is one of the better front-facing cameras I have seen.

The RAZR comes with a 1.2 GHZ dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM that will handle just about any task you throw at it with ease. There is little-to-no delay when browsing Motorola’s custom user interface based on the Android operating system. Loading the apps and games on the phone is quick and snappy. The phone also features an HDMI port to connect it to your HDTV or anything else that accepts an HDMI input. This phone is also on Verizon’s 4GLTE network. As I stated in my previous reviews, Verizon’s LTE network is FAST! It is just as fast as many home networks, with speeds in the 10+ MPS range. Storage for the phone comes in the form of 16GB installed internally as well as a pre-installed 16GB microSD card. That should be plenty for the average day-to-day user. However, if it’s not enough, you can upgrade the microSD card to 32GB.

The battery life for the phone is average. I have seen both better and worse. However, battery life on a dual-core phone featuring the LTE network is typically poor. Both features use A LOT of power. So to say that the battery life is average is not such a bad thing. One thing I would have liked is the ability to remove the battery. Motorola decided not to allow this, which means no spare battery and no chance of a larger battery. Also, in full disclosure, I must say I did have one problem with the phone charging. One day, after the battery died completely, I tried to charge the phone from my laptop, and it would not charge at all. I also tried charging it from the desktop with no luck. It did, however, charge once I plugged it into the wall. Once it did charge, I was able to continue charging it from my computer. I am not sure why this happened, but I did some research and found that I was not the only person with this problem. Hopefully, Motorola will have this fixed in a future update.

The Droid RAZR comes with the typical apps you would expect from today’s smartphones. You probably won’t use some of them, but others are useful. The mobile hotspot app is always welcome, especially when you are on Verizon’s 4G LTE network. You’ll also find QuickOffice, which allows you to open, view and edit your Office files. Motorola also offers a ton of accessories for the RAZR, but unfortunately, the company did not send any for me to review with this phone (hint, hint).

All in all, the RAZR is a great phone for even the most demanding smartphone user. I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a feature-packed phone on Verizon’s 4G LTE network. The RAZR has some of the best Android hardware I’ve seen in a long time. It’s incredibly thin and has great build quality.

Have your kids ever asked to use your ipad to watch videos and then asked you, “Mommy, does Dora do drugs?” or some other shocking question?

Did you shockingly respond, “You are never allowed to watch videos on the iPad again.”

Instead of having to worry about the videos your child is watching while your kids are innocently trying to be entertained, you can now download an app developed by a father that contains videos that are safe and fun.

The app is called Kids Videos and is available exclusively for iPad in iTunes or here and Kindle Fire here  or in the Amazon Appstore. To find out more go to http://www.mefeedia.com/kids.  Kids can watch safe videos and like or dislike them like you can do with music on Pandora.

I personally felt that  was it my duty to share this app with Detroit Mommies readers after learning about it today.  I know for me, I don’t want to worry about the videos my children are watching when I know they really enjoy playing games and watching videos on my iPad.

The classic tale of the Beauty and the Beast is back in theatres starting January 13, 2012.  This time it is offered in 3-D, which is done ever so gently, not your typical 3-D effects of things flying and crashing all around you.  The effect does ad to the depth of the movie and pulls you in to the scenery even more.

It’s a wonderful movie with the age old message of “don’t judge a book by its cover”.  I vaguely remembered seeing this movie a while back and reminded my son that even though some of the scenes are pretty scary (remember we’re dealing with a beast here) it all turns out well in the end.  There are some great musical performances that lightening things up – my favorite is “Be Our Guest”.  We saw the movie at a special premier effect on January 7th along with a special short of Tangled Ever After which was also great. From the lively action and musical numbers, to the talking teapot and candlesticks the movie is very enjoyable.  I love how Disney is re-releasing a lot of the old favorites for a new generation of viewers to enjoy.

The movie is a Walt Disney production rated G and opens in theatres on January 13^th nationwide.  For information please visit the Disney website.

The Rochester Hills Public Library and Rochester Area Youth Assistance have teamed up to bring a three part series about children and online safety.

These sessions are open to all ages and both children and parents are encouraged to register together.  Online registration will be open one week prior to each event.

The sessions include:

Cybersafety: Tuesday, January 31 This session will focus on how to keep you, your information and reputation safe and secure.

Cyberbulling: Wednesday, February 8 This session will discuss both the bullies and the victims and what to do if your child becomes either.

Cybersmarts: Thursday, February 16 This session will discuss Internet resources cardholders have at their disposal, as well as responsible computer use at the library.

All sessions are from 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM and held in the multipurpose room.