We’ve been so busy working on our #BarktoSchool Twitter party with our pet sites…and now it’s time for the third pre-party giveaway in advance of our #BarktoSchool Twitter party on August 12! By just following the party sponsors and hosts, you’ll be entered to win all the goodies above from sponsors Nature’s Logic, Walk In Sync, author Peggy Frezon and the Event Barkers team, CatTipper (and DogTipper) and All Things Dog Blog! This is a great package of prizes with some really quality products. Nature’s Logic is 100 percent natural dry, canned and raw frozen foods provide everything your dog or cat needs for optimal nutrition. Walk In Sync is the creator of the Get-a-Grip leash, a comfortable, ergonomic way to walk your dog. And Peggy Frezon is the author of a piece in the Chicken Soup for the Soul My Dog’s Life. Plus we’ll have goodies from your Event Barkers hosts…all for some quick Facebook and Twitter follows!

How to Enter

We’ve got lots of ways to enter in the Rafflecopter below! No purchase is necessary to win. Must be age 18 or older. This prize is available only to U.S. & Canadian residents.

Everyone worldwide is welcome to join in #EBTweets for fun. Prizes designated to a rescue by their winners may go **only to U.S. rescues**. Thank you for your understanding! While this Rafflecopter will remain open through midnight 5/28/12, prize entries will be cut off at the end of the #EBTweets Twitter Party at 10 PM ET.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure: #BarktoSchool sponsors are working with Event Barkers to promote their products and to provide prizes for the #BarktoSchool giveaways.

We’re covering it all in our #BarktoSchool party that told you about in our RSVP giveaway post…and today we’re announcing the PreTweet Giveaway! All of these giveaways will feature prizes from each of our sponsors: Nature’s Logic, author Peggy Frezon, Walk In Sync, and Event Barkers!

We’re getting high-tech this time and we’ve got a super easy pretweet for you below. (You’re always welcome to write your own tweet, too…just be sure to link to the RSVP post and to use the #BarktoSchool hashtag so we can find your tweet to enter it in the giveaway!)

To enter

To enter this giveaway, just hit the Retweet link in the Tweet below and send it out to your followers! You can enter once per day. Good luck!

RSVP for the #BarktoSchool party! #Win pet prizes from @NaturesLogic @WalkInSync @peggyfrezon @EventBarkers! ow.ly/cx8sv

— Paris & John (@parisandjohn) July 27, 2012

Disclosure: #BarktoSchool sponsors are working with Event Barkers to promote their products and to provide prizes for the #BarktoSchool giveaways.

To celebrate the excitement of Back to School for pet families, we’re co-hosting the #BarktoSchool Twitter party on August 12. From 8-9:30pm ET, this Twitter party will showcase Back to School fun and fashion for Fidos! As with our other Event Barkers events, we’ll be co-hosting this event with All Things Dog Blog — plus we’re also bringing some of our other sites into the fun! Watch for reviews, giveaways, and party chatter on all of our sites including from our DogTipper, CatTipper, and My Pet Allergies sites; All Things Dog Blog will also be posting from her 5 Minutes for Fido and Organic Journey Online sites.

We’ll be bringing you lots more on our sponsors but, for now, it’s time to call roll! The #BarktoSchool sponsors are:

Nature’s Logic. You’re probably familiar with Nature’s Logic as well, thanks to previous giveaways on DogTipper and CatTipper! The creators of the first and only full-line kibble, canned, and raw frozen pet food in the world will be providing nutritional tips during #BarktoSchool! (Nature’s Logic holds the proud distinction of being a food that has NEVER been recalled!)

Walk In Sync. Many of you know Walk in Sync and founder Alecia Evans from the “Ask Alecia” column on our DogTipper site. This holistic dog trainer will be providing expert tips on everything from training to avoiding separation anxiety.

Peggy Frezon. We announced Peggy as the winner of the blog sponsorship yesterday on DogTipper. You’re probably familiar with Peggy from her Dieting with My Dog book that we reviewed earlier in the year; she’s also the author of the new Heart to Heart, Hand in Paw book as well as numerous stories in Chicken Soup and other books. We look forward to learning more about Peggy and her work and sharing it with you!

Event Barkers. And, with our partner All Things Dog Blog, Event Barkers will be joining in the back to school fun, too, with plenty of prizes (and some future party announcements…stay tuned!)

Entering for Prizes

As with our other parties, the first step to winning prizes is to RSVP. We’ll select one name from the RSVP list to win a prize package of sponsor goodies…plus you also must be on the RSVP list to win prizes during the #BarktoSchool party itself.

How to RSVP

RSVPing is quick and easy…just go down to the linky below and leave your Twitter handle. (If you don’t have a Twitter account, visit http://twitter.com to get your free account then return here and sign up.)

Just click on “Click here to enter” at the bottom of this post and you’ll see a new screen open; in the field that says “Link Title or Blog Title,” just enter your Twitter handle. In the “Link” field, add the link to your Twitter account. You aren’t required to add your email address but it will give us a way to notify you other than Twitter if you’re a winner. (We won’t use it for any other purpose.) That’s it…you’re entered!

RSVP and Enter Our Giveaway Below

Disclosure: #BarktoSchool sponsors are working with Event Barkers to promote their products and to provide prizes for the #BarktoSchool giveaways.

Today we had a rare, rare treat for July: we were able to burn brush. July is typical drier than dry here so brush burning usually has to wait until late fall or winter. Because of days of rain, though, the almost always present summer burn ban was lifted and it was safe for us to burn brush. We’ve got a LOT of brush to get through after last year’s catastrophic drought but at least this allowed us to clear out some of the brush we’d piled up from trimming back dead growth around the house.

It may be damp outside but it’s still hot, even in the early morning hours when we started the brush fire…

John had the hottest job, continuing to shovel and rake brush into the fire…

It’s hot, tiring, dirty work.

I, on the other hand, had the easy job: notify the few neighbors in our area and make some breakfast tacos.

If you don’t live in Texas, you might think breakfast tacos are a little unusual but, once you try them, you’ll be hooked. They’re super easy to make and perfect “on the go” breakfast food for days like today. Like regular tacos, you can get as fancy as you like but I keep mine simple and easy. I scrambled eggs and cooked some bacon. I also microwaved some flour tortillas. (They taste better if they’re cooked in a hot skillet or on the grill, just until slightly browned, but I was in a hurry.)

Once that’s all done, it’s just a matter of assembling the taco. You can add refried beans and salsa, which I would if I were ordering at a restaurant, but for today, I just put eggs, bacon, and cheese inside the tortilla and folded it up in foil. I loaded up an insulated lunch cooler, grabbed some drinks and the dogs, and I was then on my way down to the burn site.

Nothing tastes better than a breakfast taco enjoyed outside by an early morning brush fire!

To enter, we’d like to see YOUR pet photography, especially entries that will make us smile! (And, if you don’t have a pet, you can enter any wildlife photo, from a songbird to a lizard!) From beautiful to comic, we’d like you to share your photos. You can go back through the special photo series here on CatTipper or visit DogTipper’s 365 Photo Project for photo ideas! We look forward to sharing all the entries in a slide show at the end of the giveaway period!

How to Enter

We’ve got lots of ways to enter this giveaway and, as always, it’s up to you how many or few entry methods you’d like to use. This giveaway is open to US and Canada readers (except for Quebec due to giveaway regulations…sorry!) and void where prohibited. This giveaway ends at 12:01am ET on August 15, 2012. The winner will be selected at random by Rafflecopter using Random.org. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

We hadn’t planned to renovate our laundry room…then along came these two lovely ladies into our lives…

Just yesterday we learned that our DogTipper will be a new Maytag Ambassador, part of the #MaytagMoms campaign! For the next four months, we’ll be writing about the Maytag Bravos XL high-efficiency top-load washer and dryer on that site. With two dogs and four cats in our house, we do a lot of laundry so it’s going to be put to the test!

But here on Paris and John’s Country Home, we’re going to be writing about the renovation of the laundry room! Right now, the laundry room is, well, pretty sad. The room originally was a small back porch and we closed it off…with the dryer in place. The old dryer won’t fit out the door so John will be removing a portion of the back of the house to get the old dryer out and the new machines in. (He constructed it with this plan in mind so it’s not going to involve tearing off the back of the house or anything…I hope.)

Besides serving as a laundry room and storage place for all our cleaning products, the room also serves as home to our cats’ litter boxes and storage of unused litter, too. Needless to say, this room gets a lot of use.

So please follow along as we work on our laundry room makeover! I’ll be bringing you all the steps of the project. Yes, I’ll get brave enough to shoot some “before” photos (brace yourself) and then I’ll be writing up each step, from the paint selection (including the floor) to the reorganization. It’s going to be fun!

Last week, I woke up and, half asleep, walked into the kitchen to find this fellow waiting in the pet food scoop that I’d left out on the countertop:

Not what you want to see first thing in the morning! Fortunately this guy was on the counter and not down in a sack of pet food (where we’ve found them before).

Of course, life in the country also means ants, especially this time of year. I’ve just started seeing them on the countertop if I don’t wipe up every last trace of a crumb.

Because of this, I’ve been really looking for ways to keep pet food out of reach of the pests that might otherwise be encouraged to come indoors for a little dinner. Over on DogTipper and CatTipper, we’ve been reviewing the Vittles Vault Jr., one of a large line of pet food container products by Gamma2. We really like several features of these:

• they’re food-grade plastic that’s BPA free
• there are no dyes to worry about leaching into your pet’s food
• they have an air-tight closure to keep food fresh (and keep those bugs OUT)
• they’re all made in the USA
• they all have rounded corners; if you have a problem with country mice, they can’t get a bite on those round corners.

The Vittles Vault Jr. would also make a good storage solution for your bird seed, too!

We think the Vittles Vault Jr. is a well-built, safe product which will be the perfect storage solution for our pet foods!

Video:

Price: The Vittles Vault Jr. retails for about $10 – $15 from various online vendors.

For More Information:

• visit www.gamma2.net
• call (800) 842-6543
• follow Gamma2 on Facebook
• follow @Gamma2inc on Twitter
• subscribe to Gamma2′s YouTube channel

Disclosure: We received a Vittles Vault Jr. to review; we were not paid to conduct this review and all opinions are entirely our own.

Welcome to the Dyson Housewarming Giveaway event. This took months in the making and Mom to Bed by 8, the Iowa Mom is proud to bring you this fantastic home essential and offer you the chance to win one too! Big thank you to our lovely co-hosts How to Have It All, Mark Your Savings and GiveAway Bandit.

Dyson DC23 TurbineHead Canister Vacuum

As everyone that lives in the country know (especially those, like us, that live in the country with a pack of pets), country living = dust and dirt. Last year I blamed in on our historic drought but this year the dirt factor is just about as bad. All in all, I vacuum just about every day (and could do so more frequently, to be honest!)

One of my favorite cleaning tools is our Dyson vacuum. As readers of our My Pet Allergies site know, I have asthma and allergies and I really like the Dyson because of that. This unit, the Dyson DC23 TurbineHead Canister Vacuum delivers 220 airwatts of suction power with advanced Level 3 Root Cyclone technology (no clogging or loss of suction) and it is certified asthma and allergy friendly by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. The vacuum expels air that contains up to 150 times less mold and bacteria than common breathing air thanks to the HEPA filter (which can be washed throughout its lifetime, a real money-saver). Dyson’s Bactisafe screen also traps and kills bacteria, mold and allergens on contact, preventing them from re-entering the air.

And, if you’re short on space like we are, the Telescopic Wrap System allows the hose and wand to be compressed, and ensures that the Dyson DC23 can be stored away neatly and compactly, with no loose components or wires to get tangled. This vacuum also has a stair tool, a brush tool with long bristles to dislodge cobwebs (another joy of country living!), and a high-velocity airflow crevice tool for baseboards, picture frames and in-between furniture.

One lucky reader in this giveaway will win a Dyson DC23 TurbineHead Canister Vacuum of their own!

How to Enter

You’ll find numerous ways to enter in the Rafflecopter below. This giveaway is open to readers worldwide, ages 18+. Giveaway ends on June 15, 2012.  Please use the Rafflecopter form below to enter. Good luck to all!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure: I received no compensation for this publication. My opinions are my own and may differ from those of your own. Paris and John’s Country Home is not responsible for sponsor prize shipment.

We have had SO many wild turkeys around our house lately; almost every time I step out on the front porch, I hear them in the woods. Earlier this week, John saw one in the creek, strolling up the creek and turning at our drive, then sauntering up the drive and finally into the woods.

I didn’t get any photos of this week’s visitor but it reminded me of this turkey who visited two springs ago. She came into our fenced yard every night for three or four evenings, wisely waiting until our dogs were inside, and enjoyed dining on the insects in our yard before heading off for the night!

As professional bloggers since 2000 when we launched Lovetripper.com, our romantic travel blog, we’ve spent a LOT of time figuring out ways to improve traffic to our blogs. In a nutshell, you can’t expect to make money unless you have traffic. If it’s targeted traffic, you don’t necessarily have to have huge numbers but you do need good, consistent numbers before you can expect to make money. Don’t make the mistake of feeling like “build it and they will come”…you have to get out and get that traffic!

• Fresh Content. Fresh articles and photos bring blog visitors back. You can alternate between long and short posts (even something super short like a Wordless Wednesday post that’s primarily a photo) but make sure you have something new when return visitors arrive. How often should you post? That will depend a lot on your time and your traffic numbers. Our DogTipper.com site is updated at least half a dozen times every DAY but that’s our most frequent posting. We update CatTipper one to two times daily then Lovetripper and Texas Tripper about an average of three times a week.

• Article Marketing and Guest Blogging. Especially when your blog is new, it’s important to build the reputation of your blog within its niche. Create content not only for your blog but also to be submitted to article directories, using the resource box to advertise your blog so people can find you.

• Social Networking. Social networking sites are traffic options that weren’t available to us when we first started blogging but ones that we use–a lot– these days. So you don’t spend all your time managing your social networking sites, start with just a couple of accounts at first and grow them, interacting with the community you build.  We’ve built large communities for our DogTipper site on Facebook and on Twitter and both are important traffic sources for us. Be sure to interconnect all your accounts so visitors to your blog can subscribe to your Facebook or Twitter updates.

• SEO Marketing. Without trying to stay ahead of the latest search engine tweaks (because you won’t), be sure to write content that utilizes keywords in a natural way. Use keywords no more than a few times in your posts so your post doesn’t look like it has been written for a search engine rather than a reader. On the other hand, be sure that the words you’d like a searcher to come in on are in the article. If you want someone searching for “low cost dog treat recipes” to come to a page on your site, make sure those exact words are in your post, not just “cheap treat recipes”.