How To Visit An American Girl Store

07 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by Stefanie Van Aken (RSMLVTravel) in Featured, Lifestyle, USA

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Today’s post is sponsored by the American Girl Store location at Tyson’s Corner in Washington, D.C.

It was the best gift you gave and she received this year. No, you didn’t go to Jared’s, but you did research the heck out of this one special gift, deciding on the perfect American Girl Doll for your little American girl. Whether she resembles your daughter in looks, or matches her interests in history, it is the one she wanted. She had the biggest smile from ear to ear when she opened that big red box- it was the most memorable moment of the season. For the last few weeks, she’s been the center of your daughter’s world, taking her along on daily errands and joining your family for dinner. Well, that was easy. Hard part done, right? Haha…uh, no, sweetie, you are just getting started. Welcome to the world of the American Girl.

I’m not even going to mention how many dolls my daughter has, and how many more she plans to collect. We have Historical Characters, a Girl of the Year, and a couple My American Girl dolls. As much as I like to complain, the truth is that my daughter really loves these dolls. She dresses them every day, brushes their hair (that hair!), and takes them along on outings. She convinced my father to build a condominium out of plastic bins that take up a whole wall in her playroom. These dolls have travelled as much as she has, and been to as many fancy dinners, plays and special events. And, yes, they may be pricey, but they have replaced any other toy on the market for us. YouTube videos have showed her how to make her own furniture using recycled products like boxes, paper towel holders and socks. She asked for and received a sewing machine for Christmas and is learning how to make doll clothes and accessories. These dolls keep her busy and entertained for hours, and allows her to escape her reality of being the only girl out of 4 children, and into a world of girlfriends and sisters. We have spent endless amounts of time re-organizing her space to keep her items nice and neat and easy to find. Even still, it seems like we are adding new wardrobe pieces, furniture, and other accessories every month from friends, family and special occasions.

That all sounds like fun and games, right? Well, here comes the “hard part”. She is allowed one trip a year to the mecca- an American Girl store, and only receives new items based on grades, behavior and other realistic measures (like, eh-hem, budget). If you have not had the opportunity to visit one of these mega-stores, then continue reading. If you have, please read on, and add any of your favorite tips to the comments below. Our first store visit was to the Garden Grove location in Los Angeles, California. A skip, hop and a jump away from Las Vegas, Los Angeles seemed to be the perfect city for our first experience at an American Girl store, however, there are locations all around the country. Here are some tips on how to make your visits productive, fun and memorable, and still stick with your budget. This is how to visit an American Girl store like a RockStar!

Pre-Game Plan Yes, she’s your little girl and you want to give her the world, but let’s face it, you could literally blow her college savings in this one store with one visit. It’s worse odds than Vegas. Make sure you go in prepared and confident and know where you are willing or not willing to budge on your budget. Follow these easy steps for a fool-proof pre-game plan:

Order a catalog. This could take a few months to get your first one, or maybe one was sent along with the doll you just purchased. Save it. It is an integral part of the plan.
Decide on your budget.
Have a conversation with your child about the budget.
Determine the top priority items, then rank from there. This is key because sometimes not all items are available in the store. Make sure she has a back-up just in case.
Book a Personal Shopping Experience for your visit. See below.

When we know a trip is in our future, we save the latest catalog. I let my daughter devour the catalog, circling her favorite items, starring her must-haves. After my husband and I set a budget, we have this conversation with my daughter. She then goes back to her Wish List, and decides which ones she wants now, and which ones she can save for later (Christmas, birthday, special initiatives, etc.). We take that catalog directly to the Personal Shopper, and she handles the rest. If it is your first visit to the store, you may want to have a look around, but remind your little one about the items she has already selected that fit within her set budget.

Store Visit Visit the store on a Monday-Thursday if possible. If you can sneak away with your daughter during the week, the store itself will not be as crowded as it would if on a week-end or during a shared holiday like Christmas and Spring Break. This will allow you more freedom to move around the store, visit the book store and the doll museum, and book appointments for hair styles, ear piercing, or general maintenance at the doll hospital. Yes, this is all a thing.

Dining Options Decide if you are going to eat in the cafe for lunch, dinner or tea prior to your visit as sittings book up. Depending on location, each American Girl store offers either a Cafe or Bistro. Pricing is moderate and the menus offer a 3-course option with appetizer, main entree and dessert. There are specialty drinks for both mom (wine, champagne) and daughter (seasonal themed milkshakes and mocktails), and of course, the doll is treated like a super star given her own seat at the table along with place setting. If it is a special occasion, like a birthday, I would recommend considering the package options that include a cake and special gift for your daughter. We have done both- the birthday package for her first visit, and just lunch with the dolls and her friends. My honest opinion- is it world class dining at its best? No. But, the experience, at least one time, is worth it if it means that much to your daughter. It’s an adorable set-up, very girlie, and caters to the fantasy that her American Girl is her BFF. In any location I have been to, service staff has been friendly, and efficient. Rooms are clean, and food is good. Our recent trip to Washington D.C. happened to be during the holidays. We spent a Mother/Daughter Day at the American Girl Store at Tyson’s Corner, and they had the most adorable winter themed drinks for the little girls. My daughter also loved having mini-hamburgers and hot dogs and a fruit kabob. It really is like a Disneyland for dolls.

Personal Shopping This is a complimentary service provided at every American Girl store, and one I have found to be underrated. Book an appointment with a Personal Shopper for the day you plan to spend at the store. Check in at the main desk, and you will be directed to a private area with couches and tables. It is fabulous, and it is free. This is also how you will be able to stay within your budget. Once you have established your Pre-Game Plan (see above), put everything onto a list, or go through the catalog with your Personal Shopper. There are different ways the final task will be completed.

1. The Personal Shopper will go through the store and retrieve all the items for you, while you sit in the room, spending time with your little girl.

2. (my favorite option) The Personal Shopper will place your order through the computer and have everything shipped directly to you, shipping fees apply.

Of course, you could do both- let your daughter pick out a few items to bring home, and ship the rest, based on your situation. I prefer the shipping because normally we are flying or driving home with an already completely full vehicle. In addition to the easy shopping, the Personal Shopper will also escort you around the store and provide you with a tour of the store if desired. Another great component of utilizing the Personal Shopper is that you can call ahead for special things like having her set aside your daughter’s requested doll, scheduling hair appointments and suggesting additional items like books and videos. The book store is pretty impressive. Each Historical Character has her own series as well as videos of their own movies. There are also great finds in there for the ‘tween who has questions about her changing body, and fun activity books to share with her BFF or mommy (if you’re still cool like that).

OK. You can do this. You got this. Be smarter than the doll. All joking aside, a visit to an American Girl Store can really be a very enjoyable and memorable experience to share with your daughter. If you are a detailed oriented personality, you will love all the little accessories and components, and if you are a history buff, you will fall in love with the outfits and story lines. In the end, you may be the one who needs to stick to the budget! Take the time to make the experience pleasant for both of you. If you plan on incorporating more visits in the future, think of ways you can start making the visits your own and follow your inner star.

A special thank you to the American Girl Store at the Tyson’s Corner location for sponsoring today’s post. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Bing in the Classroom

27 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by Stefanie Van Aken (RSMLVTravel) in Archive It

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family, Tech

Today’s post is sponsored by Bing in the Classroom. I have been compensated to share this information with RockStarMomLV.com readers.

There is a super easy new way to help support your local schools by earning rewards for tablets. Do you know about this? Well, consider yourself now educated.

As parents, we all know the importance of technology in the classroom. It is amazing at how quickly this once trend has become a necessary staple in our children’s education. Their future is based on their knowledge of computers and technology. Like most in my generation, email was very new and very cool in 1993. When I travelled abroad, it was the quickest, cheapest and best way to stay in communication with my friends and family back in the U.S. Problem then? Not everyone had an email address, so snail mail was still very much apart of my communication. When I came home from France that winter, the internet was beginning to take hold as the quickest way to gather info, if you could hold out long enough for your dial-up to connect. I was the only person in my house full of roommates with a laptop computer. And, it was in color! That was pretty amazing as well. Otherwise, it was hours spent in the computer lab trying to get papers typed, hours in the library digging for the one book I needed out of thousands. All of that occurring by 1997.

Now? Now kids are learning how to code and manipulate the internet at 5 years old. Some might be learning even earlier. My 10 year old asks for his own Facebook page on the daily, and both he and my 8 year old daughter are constantly searching YouTube and the web for their favorite characters, stories, movies and toys. If your kids are like mine, when they are perusing the web for things like minecraft, secrets to the Disney Infinity games or American Girl Dolls, if something interesting or remotely related pops-up, they click on it without a thought. Not even considering the fact they may be inviting a virus, malware, crawlers or something else even more inappropriate into their personal space on their computer. I have already had a computer expert come out and fix these little mishaps at least three times since they received computers for Christmas a year ago. At home it is one thing to be able to monitor your child’s searches. At school it is a whole other ballgame. Imagine knowing during their computer time at school there is a search engine that keeps them from feeling curious about the pop-ups or other links they would be exposed to on one of their searches? Bing in the Classroom does that. Show support for #adfreesearch!

What is Bing in the Classroom? Launched by Microsoft, Bing in the Classroom is an ad-free tailored version of the Bing.com search engine to be used in the classroom. It is now available for all eligible K-12 grade schools in the United States. The Bing in the Classroom program also provides daily lesson plans to teachers on the home page.

We created Bing in the Classroom because we believe students deserve a search environment tailored for learning. Classrooms should be ad-free, and that should be as true online as it is offline.

Matt Wallaert, creator of Bing in the Classroom

What else makes the Bing in the Classroom program so cool? By utilizing Bing.com, yourself, on your own computer, you can earn Bing Rewards which helps earn your child’s school earn Microsoft Surface tablets. It is super easy to do, just follow these easy steps:

1. Create a Microsoft account, if you don’t already have one. You can also sign up through your Facebook page.

2. Visit your Bing Rewards everyday, and click on the different options to earn points. For example: Inviting Friends to Try Bing.com, Browsing the Web, or Making Bing.com your homepage.

3. Redeem + Donate your rewards to your school of choice to support their efforts of earning Microsoft Surface Tablets. Here’s how:

Make your donation go further by encouraging fellow parents and family members to donate their own Bing Rewards credits to get additional Surface devices for your school. When your school has 30,000 credits, we’ll ship a Surface bundle to your school within 2 months. If about 60 parents participate in Bing Rewards for a month, they can earn enough credits for a Surface. About 125 parents participating for a year can earn enough credits for Surface devices for an entire classroom. See your school’s page and credit balance.

Earn a Surface tablet for your school with Bing Rewards!

According to procon.org in regards to the topic Tablets vs. Textbooks, the pros seem to be more substantial than the cons when it comes to having tablets vs textbooks in the schools. Here a few examples of how:

Tablets help students learn more material faster. Technology-based instruction can reduce the time students take to reach a learning objective by 30-80%, according to the US Department of Education and studies by the National Training and Simulation Association. [6]
Tablets can hold hundreds of textbooks on one device, plus homework, quizzes, and other files, eliminating the need for physical storage of books and classroom materials. The average tablet contains anywhere from 8 to 64 gigabytes (GB) of storage space. On the Amazon Kindle Fire, for instance, 1,000 books take up one GB of space. [8]
E-textbooks on tablets cost on average 50-60% less than print textbooks. According to a 2012 report from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), K-12 school districts spend more than $8 billion per year on textbooks. [6] E-textbooks can save schools between $250-$1,000 per student per year. [9] Tablet prices also continue to drop, making them increasingly affordable. Tablets cost on average $489 in 2011, $386 in 2012, and are projected to cost $263 in 2015. [10][11]
On a tablet, e-textbooks can be updated instantly to get new editions or information. Schools will not have to constantly purchase new hardware, software, or new physical copies of textbooks. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that “too many students are using books that are 7-10 years old with outdated material.” Tablets are especially beneficial for subjects that constantly change, such as biology or computer science. [6]

Considering how simple it is, why not start earning Bing Rewards today, and participate in a unique opportunity to work as a community to support your local schools in achieving the goals of a technologically advanced education system.

This post was created in partnership with Bing. Thank you for sponsoring today’s post. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Fraternal or Identical

27 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Stefanie Van Aken (RSMLVTravel) in Featured

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

family, Twins

March 11, 2010 changed our lives in a way we never imagined. Not only was it the same day my grandfather passed away, but it was also the same day we learned that our third pregnancy was about about to produce 2 babies. That’s right, we were put on notice that our one last baby we planned to have before I turned 35, was indeed, going to be our last TWO babies. Thus, growing our family of 4 into 6 in a matter of a few short months. I’m not going to lie, I cried for about a month after learning this news. For many reasons, but mainly because I was scared. It was about to rock my world. Change everything I knew about being a mother, and a human being functioning on this planet. No more coffee with the girls. No more meeting my husband for cocktails in the middle of the week after work. No more full time job outside the house. No more traveling. No more anything! I had convinced myself being a mother of 4, let alone a set of twins, was going to be a house-arrest punishment until they left for college.

Further more, I knew absolutely nothing about twins. When I was younger and my friends and I would talk about how many kids we would want, at least 1 to 2 of them would say that they really hoped for twins. Those words never came out of mouth. In fact, I couldn’t understand for the life of me why they would want more than one baby at a time. During those times, I knew I wanted many children. Four was my strive for, but I would settle for two. My husband and I convinced ourselves that three was the new two, so we decided to go for it. And, I had been known to say, if it wasn’t for having to have a c-section every time, I would have gone for 4 kids, but instead, I would settle for three not wanting to undergo major surgery for a fourth time. God took me literally, and granted my childhood wish of having four babies, and was lucky enough to only have three c-sections.

I joke, but deep down inside, and even now, three and half years later, I know I am blessed. Beyond control. I could never express the amount of gratitude I have for being given the life experience of conceiving, carrying, birthing and raising twins. I also love that my family gets to experience in this unique opportunity as well. Sounds like a marketing scheme, I know, but truly, what a way to add abundance to your life. When my husband and I were told about the twins, it had already been 9 weeks into my pregnancy. At the ultra-sound, the pictures showed two eggs, with their own amniotic sack and placenta, thriving. At that point, there was no way to tell how these little creatures came into existence. My naivety forced me to believe they were fraternal since they had separate sacks and placentas. This seemed logical to me. Come to find out, this is not necessarily true. The safest way to carry twins is for them to have their own, completely separate, amniotic sack and placenta, however, it is often not the case. And, in this instance, it doesn’t always mean the twins are automatically fraternal. There is still a 20-25% chance the twins can be identical.

As you can see, there was a lot of uncertainty happening during our pregnancy. As we got further along, we made the decision to determine the sex of the babies. Having twins was surprise enough, we needed to have something that felt tangible in all of this. Haha- if only that was the case. At 20 weeks, our OB/GYN who confirmed the sex of our other two children said, “Baby A 100% boy, Baby B 80% sure its a girl.” We were elated! How fantastic that we would have two boys and two girls. My daughter would have a sister, and my son a younger brother. Over the moon we were, until we went for the official ultra-sound to measure the babies and confirm their sex. The announcement that both babies would be boys put us into an even further tailspin. We just were not prepared, it seemed, during this entire pregnancy.

Even amongst the chaos, there were some beautiful moments. Shortly after the discovery of twins, I was diagnosed with Hyperemesis Gravidarum, a condition causing extreme, persistent nausea and vomiting during pregnancy that can lead to dehydration. I was hospitalized for three days. Once out of the hospital, however, my pregnancy was very healthy. In fact, I carried my boys until they were 37 weeks. At which this time, the only reason to deliver them was that they had grown too big and there was just no more room for them to cohabitate in a safe environment. At birth, they weighed 6.5lbs and 6lbs, and did not have to spend anytime in the NICU. Also, upon discovering Baby B was in fact, a boy, my husband and I made the decision right away to name him Hugh, after my grandfather. I always think my grandpa was giving my Baby B a “high-5” that day, one leaving heaven, and the other on his way up. The personalty of Baby B has suited his namesake perfectly.

Going back to my lack of knowledge about twins, I still couldn’t understand how all of this could have happened. There are twins in our family, on both my husband’s side and mine. But, the relations were distant, nothing immediate. For the record, our twins were spontaneous, if you couldn’t tell by now, nothing to enhance our chances of conceiving, at least not intentionally. The other doozy- fraternal twins can be hereditary, but identical twins are nature’s “oops”. Being the realist that I am, I needed to make some sort of sense of all of this. The first thing that came to mind was the fact that I had been using an IUD (intrauterine device) since my daughter was born, 4 years ago. Out of curiosity, I Googled, “Mirena and multiple births,”. The results were astonishing. Apparently, this is a thing. Of course, I’m not saying if you want twins to have your IUD removed and try to conceive right away. In fact, I had been told the complete opposite, starting with, I shouldn’t use an IUD unless I wasn’t planning on having anymore babies. Or, that it could take up to a year to conceive once the IUD was removed. Apparently, God not only works in mysterious ways, but he also has a great sense of humor.

In case you are like me, and know almost nothing about twins, here are some interesting tidbits: (information courtesy of Wikipedia.com)

Zygosity: the degree of identity in genome twins
- Dizygotic = Fraternal
- Monozygotic = Identical
There are 5 common variations of twinning:
- The three most common variations are all dizygotic (fraternal):
  - Male–female twins are the most common result, 50 percent of dizygotic twins and the most common grouping of twins.
  - Female–female dizygotic twins (sometimes called “sororal twins”)
  - Male–male dizygotic twins

The other two variations are monozygotic (“identical”) twins:

It is not a super important thing for us to know if our twins were identical or fraternal. Of course, we are asked like 1,000 times a day. And, truthfully, the only real reason we would want to know would be for medical reasons or issues that might come up in the future. As of now, they are very healthy, intelligent, thriving little 3-year old boys. But alas, curiosity got the best of us. From several trusted recommendations, we went online to a genetics lab and had a DNA swab test kit sent out to us via snail mail. Before bed time, and the next morning before they ate breakfast, I took the cotton swabs determined for each boy, swiped the inside of their cheeks as directed, placed them in the test tube, and sent them on their way. Now, this company claims their results are 99.9% accurate. I’m the kind of person who bought 5 different brands of pregnancy tests to make sure one was not faulty or to confirm their accuracy. But, I’m trusting my instincts on this one, and in turn, trust the company I used. Two weeks later, the results are in…

Crazy exciting isn’t it? Well, it is for us. Admittedly, this does bring about some sense of satisfaction to know our boys are identical. And, to know the instance of having identical twin boys, who incubated in their own amniotic sack and placentas, and born at a healthy weight is pretty rare, confirms that these guys were our own little miracles. An absolutely amazing event to happen in our lives. Thanks for taking the journey with us!

You can follow along with us on Instagram search for #Twincapades.

Stefanie Van Aken

~ RSMLVTravel- Luxury Travel Design

Tag Archives: family

How To Visit An American Girl Store

Bing in the Classroom

Fraternal or Identical