Join My 5-year Blog Birthday Giveaway!

To help me celebrate my blog's fifth year, these five lovely ladies are contributing the following prizes:

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Maggie of Gussy Sews makes fantastic handmade bags and accessories. Gussy is a colorful line of ruffled accessories. Each ruffle is machine sewn free-hand style, making each ruffle unique. Don't you just love this gorgeous ruffled laptop bag?

Maggie is giving one lucky winner a $30 gift certificate for the Gussy store, offering zipped pouches of all sizes, laptop bags, tote/diaper bags, headbands, and wristlet/clutches (all with my signature ruffle) to those that love a little flair. (The gift certificate is good for anything except baby blankets.)

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Beki Hastings, of The Rusted Chain,  began making custom jewelry in 2003.Her designs feature the best of rustic elegance and trendy looks,  with the end result being quality jewelry that will look as new and  fresh years from now as it does today. Each piece is custom made using  sterling silver, natural stones, and the finest components. I can hardly wait to receive my Family Monogram necklace - it will have all six of our family's name on it, which means a lot to me.

Beki has generously donated a $25 gift certificate to The Rusted Chain, where you can select from a variety of necklaces, bracelets, and earrings.

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Sarah Bee Creations is a beautiful Etsy store of handmade candles, soaps, and accessories. She uses soy and beeswax in her products, and loves to make custom candles for any special occasion: wedding, birthday, baby shower. Wouldn't these baby girl soaps make an adorable gift?

Sarah has donated a $10 gift certificate to the Sarah Bee Creations Etsy store!

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Beverly is an independent beauty consultant for Mary Kay. I am busy, but still like to avoid the "I just rolled out of bed" look... most days. I've been really happy with Mary Kay products - they are high quality and easy to apply. I have one of these lip glosses in my purse, my work bag, and my gym bag - they are a great way to look presentable without taking too much time.

Beverly will give one lucky winner $20 towards any Mary Kay product on her website.

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Tricia is a registered nurse and an independent distributor of Shaklee. Shaklee is a company based on real science with the goal of  improving health, working  without compromise, all while remaining gentle on the planet. I really like their simple and safe household products, especially in light of the recent research showing that many of the plastics and chemicals  used in grocery-store cleaners and air fresheners increase your risks of cancer by significant amounts. Their Basic H(2) Organic Super-cleaning concentrate is not only a great value but also my new favorite product.

Tricia is  offering $25 for one lucky winner to use for Shaklee products!

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So, how do you win won of these great giveaways? Entering is EASY!

1. Visit each of these ladies' websites, then come back and tell  me in a comment which items are your favorite. Make sure you leave me your email address, Twitter name, or website so I can get in touch with you. (If I have no way to contact you, I can't give you the prize and I'll have to draw a new name. That would be very sad.)

2. For an optional extra entries: tweet or share this on Facebook, and leave me a separate comment that you did. You can copy the following and paste it into your status if you like.
I'm helping @WritingJoy celebrate 5 years of blogging this week! Visit her blog to enter her birthday giveaways! http://ow.ly/2ktCo

You can enter for these giveaways until Friday, August 6, at 9pm EDT. At that time, I will draw five winners using a random number generator and I'll be in touch with you.

And the Winner Is...

...commenter number three! KHueil, please email me (joyinthisjourney [at] fuse [dot] net) so I can send you the code for your free copy of Voice4U! And congratulations!

If you didn't win, Voice4U is available for download for only $29.99.

Voice4U App for iPhone Review & Giveaway

Can you imagine being unable to speak? I think out loud, so I really can't imagine it. But my daughter Ellie lived her entire life without speaking. Because of a brain injury, she was never able to form words with her mouth. For the first three years of her life, she was stuck waiting for us to ask her the right yes/no questions to get at what she wanted or why she was angry or laughing or sad.

Then, she learned how to use AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) at a program run in a joint partnership with our local children's hospital and United Cerebral Palsy. It was there that we first discovered talking buttons, picture systems, touch screens, and voice-output computers. And it was there that we saw for the first time just how much she understood and how much she had to say.

AAC devices are astronomically expensive.The simplest buttons are almost $100 a piece and only allow you to say one thing. The device we finally got her was far more interactive and conversational. In 2003, it cost about $7,500. A friend of mine just purchased a different company's touch-screen device for her daughter; her price tag was just over $7,000. We were often frustrated by how often Ellie's device locked up and had to be restarted, as well. It just didn't seem to be a very stable platform for something that was a person's primary means of communication.

So I was thrilled when I learned about Voice4U, an application you can purchase through iTunes and download to your iPhone or iPod Touch. The application costs just $29.99. Even when you add the cost of the iPod Touch ($299 or $399) or iPhone ($199 or $299), the most you will pay is $428.99 (plus shipping and/or tax for the iPod). That's five percent of what my friend and I paid for voice-output touchscreen devices for our daughters.

I tested Voice4U with two different children: one preschool-aged girl with a complex medical background,  extremely delayed speech, and excellent fine motor skills, and an older pre-teen boy on the autism spectrum.

Pros:

• The price is right. You can't beat $429 with anything else out there.
  
  
• It runs on an Apple product. Apple makes a high quality, stable product. I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to reset my iPod, and I've had it for three years. This system should be much more reliable than the far more expensive options out there.
  
  
• Voice4U has visually appealing. Voice4U has built a beautiful collection of images for objects, actions, and feelings that adults and children, boys and girls, of all ages love to look at. The images are well-thought-out and gender-neutral. Everyone I showed it to loved looking at it and playing with it.
  
  Many of the images on communication systems, both electronic and basic, are, well, ugly. They are line drawings with weird color or none at all, and just don't appeal.  I think the Voice4U images would be very motivating to a child who needs some encouragement to experiment with a communication device.
  
  
• You can add photos of important people in your life. So instead of a generic female, you can have a photo of mom, grandma, sister, daughter, etc.
  
  
• You can record new words and sentences with an external mic, record their names so that it will speak them too. So in theory, you could add any image and record a word or sentence with it. This expandability is important to me, because people change and their communication needs change. We need a device that is able to change with them.

Cons

• The targets for each word are small. This is partially because of the product; the iPod Touch and iPhone are very small. But it's also partially because of the way the app is laid out: it uses vertical lists rather than a grid pattern. I don't think that Voice4U would work for a child with fine-motor delays. My daughter could not point with a single finger, so she could not have hit the small targets on the iPod screen.
  
  Voice4U is working on a version to run on the iPad, which is much larger than the iPod. This will help increase the target size. However, the list layout may still not work for people with significant challenges.
  
  
• You can't build your own sentences. You can't select a string of words and play them in one steady stream to create a complete thought. You can record a voice speaking a sentence and attach it to one symbol, but you can't build them with a sequence of images in Voice4U. So, it really works best more as flash cards than as a full-blown communication method.
  
  
• The volume seemed low, especially for use in crowds or noisy spaces. I wasn't able to test this specific thing, but I am not sure that it would be easy to hear the voice with other noise around.

All things considered, I believe this is a fantastic tool, especially for the price.

Giveaway!
Here's the best part: one of you gets to win it! (Important note: I am not giving away an iPod or iPhone, just a code to download the Voice4U  application. You must have your own iPod to use this application.)

Here's how you win:

1. One entry for leaving a comment here.
2. One extra entry for sharing this review and contest on Facebook (be sure to come back and leave me a comment that you posted it on Facebook).
3. One extra entry for tweeting about it (be sure to come back and leave me a comment that you tweeted it).

I will select one winner at random from all the entries at 8:30pm (EDT) Monday, March 29.


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Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored post.” The company or identity who sponsored it provided the product to  me for free and compensated me via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value to write it. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I can truly endorse in the belief that they will be good for my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”