Citrus Lane Review: November 2013

It’s that time of the month again! Time to review another Citrus Lane box and see if it was worth it’s purchase price! See my reviews for previous months here.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with how Citrus Lane works, it is a subscription service that sends you age appropriate items for your child aged 0-5 years every month. The cost of the subscription depends on how long you are willing to commit to. For month to month or three month subscriptions, your cost is $25.00 per month, while it goes down to $21.00 per month if you sign up for a six month or one year subscription. To personalize the box, you choose the child’s age and gender (or neutral) and receive items appropriate to those selections.

In my reviews, I can only review what my daughter receives in her box. I will always tell you what my age and gender selections were, give you a description of the items, what I think of them, pricing, etc.

This month my daughter received a sixteen month old box with a neutral gender selection.

1. Tugboat from Green Toys
Price: $14.99
Status: Awesome
Comments: Yay! I was so excited to see a Green Toys item in the box this month. Their products are always a huge hit with Baby Girl, and the company is awesome too. I would have preferred a toy that wasn’t primarily for the bathtub, but this was awesome.

2. Zootensils from Skip Hop
Price: $6.00
Status: Awesome!
Comments: Another product that basically hit the nail on the head! We’ve just started working with Baby Girl on using utensils, and were looking at what to purchase. What a timely arrival! Not only that, but we are big fans of the Skip Hop brand in our house, and own many of their products, so we know these will hold up to Baby Girl’s abuse.

3. Reusable Snack Bags from Bumkins
Price: $6.95
Status: Useful
Comments: To be honest, I’m a Bumkins fan, and I was super-duper hopeful when I saw the Bumkins logo that it would be a pack of their absolutely awesome toddler bibs. It wasn’t, it was reusable snack bags, but I’m sure we’ll get some use out of these. Although, we have received a lot of different snack containers in our Citrus Lane boxes, and I’m not really sure how many of these we really need.

4. Lip Comfort from Pur~lisse
Price: $16.00
Status: Meh
Comments: Uh, how much chap stick/lip balm type items do they think I need? And why are these things all so freaking expensive? Crazy! I’ll probably use it, or give it away, but not the best item in the box.

5. Second Blends Pouch from Plum Organics
Price: $1.99
Status: Disappointing
Comments: I love Plum Organics products, and I was so happy to see Citrus Lane finally include a food item that my daughter could actually eat. Then I found out about the voluntary recall issued on this product and that I have to throw it out! Such a bummer. CL says that they will be sending us all vouchers, but I have yet to see it.

6. TinyPrints Coupon
Price: N/A
Status: Not even worth including.
Comments: I hate this item. Especially because if it hadn’t been included in the box it probably would have been a super satisfying month. This coupon is for four sets of address labels and free shipping…on an order of $99+. This is not a gift, or an item. It is a glorified coupon. Not cool Citrus Lane, not cool.

Final Thoughts:
I’m very excited to be amped up about a box again! This box was pretty awesome, and made me glad to be a Citrus Lane subscriber!

Optional Add-to-Box:
Citrus Lane has just opened their new Holiday shop, where you can buy things like a normal store, or use your Citrus Lane credits, and they will ship the items in your next box. I did purchase an item I was pretty excited about and had it added to my December box.

By the Numbers:
Total value of the box items: $45.93
Total value of items I will use: $27.94
Is the value greater than the cost? YES
The value in this box would have been even greater if they hadn’t used the super expensive lip treatment to bump up the value! I was/am in love with this box, and while the recall (which CL had no control over) was a dampener, if the Bumkins product had been bibs instead of snack bags, I would be doing a completely embarrassing happy dance.

Looking for my previous Citrus Lane reviews? CLICK HERE!

CLICK HERE TO SAVE $10 ON YOUR CITRUS LANE SUBSCRIPTION!

Citrus Lane Review: June 2013

It’s that time of the month again! Time to review another Citrus Lane box and see if it was worth it’s purchase price!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with how Citrus Lane works, it is a subscription service that sends you age appropriate items for your child aged 0-5 years every month. The cost of the subscription depends on how long you are willing to commit to. For month to month or three month subscriptions, your cost is $25.00 per month, while it goes down to $21.00 per month if you sign up for a six month or one year subscription. To personalize the box, you choose the child’s age and gender (or neutral) and receive items appropriate to those selections.

In my reviews, I can only review what my daughter receives in her box. I will always tell you what my age and gender selections were, give you a description of the items, what I think of them, pricing, etc.

This month my daughter received an eleven month old box with a neutral gender selection.

1. Sun Protection Hat from iPlay
Price: $12.00
Status: Useful
Comments: This is one of those times when I’m really glad I designated gender neutral. I received a solid white hat, but there are many colors and patterns offered, and I’m sure had I chosen one gender or the other we would have ended up with one of those. We already had a sun hat, but this one is sized larger with a larger brim, so there’s a good chance we’ll be able to use it next summer when the one I purchased back in May has been retired. It’s also always a good idea to have spares of certain things. As far as the company as a whole, we own a few iPlay brand items, and we are pretty happy with them overall. I wish they were a little sturdier (one of the swim diapers I purchased started to lose it’s elastic casing after only one wash), but they’ve been useful and comfy for baby, so I can’t complain.

2. Water Toy Set from Haba
Price: $6.00 (approximate)
Status: Nothing Special
Comments: It’s times like this that the way Citrus Lane does things can sometimes be a bummer. While the water toys we got were great, both of them are part of a larger set that would have been more fun, and more valuable, to receive as a whole. We received a boat from the Joining Boats set, which is cool, but a little sad when it has no boats to join to, and a squirter octopus from the Water Fun Set, and with the popularity of squirters right now, we have seven of them already in the bathtub, and six of them in just her normal toys that we were talking about putting in her wading pool. The octopus is certainly a cute squirter, it could have been worse, but I don’t feel like it’s anything to be excited about. The reason the price I’ve listed is approximate is because the items I received aren’t available individually, so I guessed at the value based on the price of the full sets. Mild disappointment aside, the toys are of a high quality and will make good wading pool/bath toys.

3. Stage 2 Homestyle Meal from Happy Family
Price: $1.79
Status: Not Useful
Comments: I have to say that I wasn’t thrilled with the size of three out of four of the items in this month’s box. This is another one. I really hate it when they send us a single food pouch. They aren’t worth much value wise, and I make a lot of Baby Girl’s food, so I just keep them in case of emergencies. This one I will be giving away though, as it is made with chicken broth. I’m a vegetarian, and while I’m not going to force that choice on my daughter, I’m also not going to give her meat until she is old enough to ask for it. It’s a personal choice, which coincidentally makes this food pouch useless to me. Maybe my nephew will like it. But what if it wasn’t chicken and she loved it? She would eat that entire thing in one sitting and then it would be gone. I hate that.

4. Sunny Sunscreen SPF35 from Episencial
Price: $8.34 (approximate)
Status: Nothing Special
Comments: I am actually disappointed in this item for a couple of reasons. One is just a little silly, and that is that I was hoping to get some baby sunscreen in last month’s box before it got hot outside. As a consequence, I had already purchased some sunscreen. The other major reason is because I would have been over the moon that this was in the box if it had been a full 2.7 oz. tube. It is not. It is a 2.7 oz. tube filled with only 1.5 oz. and marked as a “Citrus Lane Exclusive”. Annoying. 1.5 oz. of sunscreen certainly doesn’t get you very far. It feels like they’re just trying to bait you into buying more, which annoys me since this box is supposed to be worth $25 or more, and I’ve already purchased Episencial products as a result of trying the ones sent to me by Citrus Lane. This item makes me feel a little gipped to tell the truth. I love Episencial products. I wish they had sent me a full tube.

Final Thoughts:
This may be the most disappointing box I’ve received so far. Usually I receive one item I’m crazy about (or more), one or two nothing specials, and one I’m not a fan of, but the quantity of product in this box left me a little sad. Half a tube of sunscreen? Lonely toys from sets that have been picked a part? A single food pouch? Not exactly impressive.

I should also mention that Citrus Lane did give me the option to purchase additional Episencial products at an additional cost to be added to my box this month at a discount. They do this occasionally. I didn’t take them up on it this month because I didn’t need any of the products they were offering, having already purchased them a couple of months ago from Episencial.

By the Numbers:
Total value of the box items: $28.13
Total value of items I will use: $26.34
Is the value greater than the cost? YES

Just a hint to Citrus Lane, as a loyal customer I think you should know that “value” is not just a game of numbers, but one of perception. While I looked up the dollar value of the items in my box, not everyone will do that, and the perceived value of this box was much lower than the ones we have received in the past. You may be better off splurging on a full tube of sunscreen (or at least putting the 1.5 oz. exclusive in a 1.5 oz. tube rather than a half full 2.7 oz tube with a sticker over the volume…) in terms of building brand loyalty. Just a suggestion.

CLICK HERE TO SAVE $10 ON YOUR CITRUS LANE SUBSCRIPTION!

Word of the Day: Waffeting

Two words of the day in a row?! I know I said that I rarely come across words in my reading that I don’t know, and even rarer is the word that I can’t figure out from context clues. Well, here’s the next word (found in the very next sentence after the last one):

Waffeting

Normally, this is where I would give you the dictionary definition of the word. I have none to give. This was a unique situation for me, as I’ve never really come across an honest to goodness made up word (that I didn’t already know was a made up word – like most of the ones that make up Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky“). It appears in no dictionary. This was an especially unique situation for me since the context in which the word was used actually gave me a pretty good indication of its meaning. The context and usage were perfect, and the passage written so vividly that the only reason I noticed that I didn’t know it at all was that it seemed so simple and obvious sitting there, that it stuck out like a sore thumb as a word I had never heard before. The context is as follows:

Cavendish says, wide-eyed, “Look at all these little boats, waffeting up and down.”

It, like the last word, is from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. From the context, I would say the word is describing the rising and falling of the boats on the water when they are tied up. I am no linguist, and I am certainly no historian, so luckily after some searching, I was able to find the BooksPlease blog, and their awesome “Wondrous Words Wednesday” feature. The author of the blog just happens to have done a post on the word waffeting. If you’re interested, you can read the whole post.

Basically, it is a made up word. You can find it in all of, count them, two places anywhere other than this book. The first is the most notable, as it seems to be the very original source. That is in the book The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, written by none other than George Cavendish, Wolsey’s usher, and the very man referred to in the sentence above. When I found this, I laughed. How clever of Hilary Mantel to use Cavendish’s own made up (but very properly descriptive) word in her novel as his own dialogue! Especially since the above sentence is very close to how Cavendish himself describes the situation that Mantel is herself writing in The Life of Cardinal Wolsey. The original text is as follows:

And at the taking of his barge there was no less than a thousand boats full of men and women of the city of London, waffeting up and down in Thames, expecting my lord’s departing, supposing that he should have gone directly from thence to the Tower, whereat they rejoiced, and I dare be bold to say that the most part never received damage at his hands.

What a great word. The edition of Cavendish’s book that I have linked to was originally published in 1908 (it is originally believed to be written in the 1550’s, with the first reliable edition being released in the 1800’s) with notes and a rather thorough and informative introduction by Mary Tout, who takes a great stab at defining our word in the glossary of this edition. She also marks it with an asterisk to indicate that is an obsolete word, and you can get a good laugh if you check out some of the other words she’s determined to be obsolete as of 1908… like advertise. In any case, she defines waffeting as:

floating (from waft, to float)

That isn’t really correct though, is it? Obviously the boats are floating, but if they were just floating, they could be completely still, and the word we are trying to define doesn’t give you that feeling. It has a greater sense of movement than just floating. This is why I’m so glad I found the post on BooksPlease. Here the author gives three words as possible sources from which waffeting probably evolved, (including waft, so let’s not give Ms. Tout too hard a time) and I like a combination of all three of them for the definition. They are waff, a verb meaning to wave, flap or flutter, waft, a verb meaning to float or sail in air (making it not entirely appropriate as the sole word choice Ms. Tout), and waftage, a noun meaning the act of wafting or waving, which is derived from wafter, a word for a convoying vessel…or, you know, a boat. Like mentioned in both of these texts. Put them all together and what have you got? Waffeting!

Some of you might now be wondering about the second source that I mentioned above and never brought up again. Funnily enough, it is actually a history book that quotes the first source, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey. It is Froude’s History of England, The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3). When discussing the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, Froude quotes the biography, including our spotlighted word.

He was ordered to retire to Esher; and, “at the taking of his barge,” Cavendish saw no less than a thousand boats full of men and women of the city of London, “waffeting up and down in Thames,” to see him sent, as they expected, to the Tower.

Reading this, I think it’s kind of funny that he included the word waffeting. It isn’t really necessary to his historical description of the events. The quotes themselves seem a bit arbitrary and the word itself may have been included either as a curiosity, or to give the passage a type of authenticity by using such a unique word in its original phrasing.

In any case, bravo to Hilary Mantel. I learned lots of new things today!