Citrus Lane Review: March2014

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 subscriptions your cost is $29.00 per month, or $24.00 per month for a three month subscription, 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 twenty month old box with a neutral gender selection.

1. You Are My Baby from Chronicle Books
Price: $8.99
Status: Good
Comments: Always love to get books in the box, especially sturdy board books. This one is different in that it has the “two books in one” feature, which both fascinates and frustrates Baby Girl. I like it, but I wish I had gotten the safari, garden, or ocean variety, because I am thoroughly sick of making farm animal noises.
Use code MYCB-CITRUS for 30% off all personalized items at mychroniclebooks.com through 07/31/14.

2. City Planner Blocks from Hape
Price: $9.99
Status: Good
Comments: We love Hape toys around here, and the elephant she previously got is fantastic. That said, Baby Girl has yet to figure out how to play with blocks, and it seems like her block collection is growing. I really don’t mind having a ton of blocks, since they can pretty much be mixed and matched, but I’m just not sure how much use we’ll get out of them.
Use code HAPECITRUS for 10% off and free shipping on orders of $40+ at hapetoys.com through 05/15/14.

3. Citrus Hydrating Body Lotion from Weleda
Price: $16.50
Status: Good
Comments: Wow, Citrus Lane must think that Baby Girl has ridiculously dry skin. She actually does, but we still have several unopened tubes of lotion in the closet that we’ve received from subscription boxes. The only reason this rates a “good” instead of a “meh” is that I really love the Weleda brand.

4. Medi Buddy from Me4Kidz
Price: $5.25
Status: Awesome
Comments: Every time I’ve gotten one of the Me4Kidz Cool Buddies in my subscription box (which has been twice so far), I have been wishing it was one of these instead! So excited to finally get one! These are the perfect size to throw in a diaper bag when you head to the park or grandma’s house, or to keep in the glove compartment of your car. They most everything you might need to patch your kid up and send them back out to play. The only item that’s missing are insect bite relief pads, which would be an awesome addition…anybody listening? But there’s no reason you couldn’t buy some of those and stick them in yourself. This is awesome. Now I want the full MediBag!
Use code CL314 for 25% off at me4kidz.com through 12/31/14

Final Thoughts:
This time I really didn’t mind at all that we only got four items. The items we got were a good value, and awesome quality, so I’m beyond happy with this box.

By the Numbers:
Total value of the box items: $40.73
Total value of items I will use: $40.73
Is the value greater than the cost? YES
Best usable box value I have ever had, and thanks for leaving out the mommy items!

Looking for my previous Citrus Lane reviews? CLICK HERE!

CLICK HERE TO SAVE 50% OFF YOUR FIRST BOX!

Why I Hate My Address

I never thought in my whole life that I would be able to make a statement this silly, but here it is. I hate my address. It isn’t about the house, though the longer we live here the more I want to move. It isn’t about the neighborhood either. It isn’t even about the proximity to the giant weird flatland that used to be a GM plant. My hatred for our address is just that. The address. The number. This hatred all comes from one thing.

MAIL

I know that most people don’t get that much snail mail anymore, everything’s electronic, bla bla bla. I love mail. I love getting mail. I love getting packages. I love ordering packages. I know it’s shallow and materialistic, and I don’t care. I love mail. My love of mail is the reason I hate my address.

You see, in the area where I live, there are several outlying cities surrounding one larger city. A kind of “metro area”, but smaller than most of the big ones people think of. We live in one of those outlying cities. Unlike the “metro area” where I grew up, there is zero separation between these outlying cities. No farmland, no distinctive border. Our outlying city is only about half a mile from the border with the next outlying city. In fact, we are so close that we have the same zipcode. Different city, same zipcode. The only difference is our +4 code at the end. Do you even know your zipcode +4? Most people don’t. I do. I have it memorized.

There are several streets in our neighborhood that cross the city border, ours is one of them. The only identifier other than the +4 part of our zipcode is that our end of the street is labeled “SW”, while their end is labeled “SE”. How many times have you left something like that off when addressing an envelope? Probably more times than you even know. Now for the fun part of the story.

Our house number is the only one that repeats itself on both ends of the street. Nobody else on this street has a counterpart on SE or vice versa. We’re the only ones. This results in chaos. Because we are on the shorter, dead end part of the street, our SE counterpart gets a lot of our mail and packages. I’m always calling the post office and making them send the mail man to go take back our mail and redeliver it. Not only does it get misdelivered, our SE counterparts see this as an opportunity for free stuff and try to get us to file claims on the packages with the post office to have them replaced. Uh, no. I’m not waiting a month for something I was supposed to have yesterday because you feel like keeping my delivery of daisy seeds. Ridiculous.

Just last week an order for my small business went to our SE counterpart via FedEx (not even FedEx can get it right, really? It’s the same driver on both ends of the street!). After determining that they didn’t want something so personal to someone else, they gave it back to the FedEx driver, who took it back to the warehouse to send it back to the vendor. I was on the phone for an hour and a half explaining to them their mistake while they insisted that I didn’t live at the address on the label anymore, even though it said SW, and had the +4 code on it. Bah.

When we move (which will hopefully be within a year), I am so not disclosing this mess to the people after us (unless we rent the house, then I’ll leave a note explaining to always use the SW and +4 code identifiers on their mail). What a mess. I wish there was a way to file a legal form with the city and change our house number.