Last week Bee and I met in London at a random house in a residential street. Inside we found a hyena chatting casually to a grizzly bear and a small child with curly hair dressed up as a crab.

“This is my daughter Bee,” I say, introducing ourselves to a man dressed as a bee. He looks briefly confused but takes it in his stride. “Bee is here to be an elephant.”

Confused?

Let me explain.

We are taking part in some filming for WWF’s new Wear it Wild day on Friday June 5th. The house is full of animals representing different letters of the alphabet and the aim is to create a video to raise awareness of their latest campaign to raise awareness and much needed funds for vulnerable animals around the world.

In fact, here it is! Look out for Bee with a trunk made from some plastic tubing: View Post

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Well, just about, but there are a couple days left in May so just chance to squeeze in a four lovely things.

So, May, what’s the weather been doing? Surely it’s meant to be getting a bit warmer now? I have a festival to go to this weekend after all, and a tan to be worked on. OK, perhaps not the tan bit, I’m more of a burnt scalp sort of girl, but it would be nice at least to have the feeling that summer was going to be with us soon. I shall never be beach body ready, but I’d like to get into flip flops at least.

On the ‘getting ready for summer’ theme then…

May favourite things View Post

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Living in a rented house has a lot of benefits – rent doesn’t fluctuate with interest rates, I’ve never had to pay huge legal costs when I move and if, heaven forbid, the boiler breaks down, I don’t need to pay to fix it. I wrote a long time ago about my attitude to car maintenance, (it involves satsumas), and I’m not sure I’d be very good at being in charge of a house.

The downside though is that it can be hard to really stamp your mark on your home. All of the walls in our last three houses have been white and I’ve had to resist the urge to splash the pink paint around. Instead, I try to inject splashes of colour through furnishings and accessories. I am basically Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen in a dress.

I thought I would give you a little tour of some of my favourite colourful spots in my home, to prove that renting doesn’t have to mean boring. View Post

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It’s not a trick, every single one of you can get a free copy of Big Hero 6 right now, when you sign up to TopCashback.

It works on a 100% cash back basis – you click on the link to buy the DVD from Amazon, and you get 100% of your money back. I’ve used the site before for similar offers and it’s brilliant – you can get money back on all sorts of things that you’d purchase every day, meaning that over the course of a year you can save an awful lot of money.

Having been through plenty of periods in my life when cash in scarce, to say the least, I know how important it is to save money wherever you can. I’m that person, the one who buys cards and wrapping paper in the sales in January, ready for next Christmas. Sure, I often forget I’ve done it and buy it again in November, but the thought is definitely there. View Post

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Looking for ways to get children to eat vegetables? You’ve come to the right place…


ways to get children to eat vegetables

“I’m not eating that,” says Belle, practically spitting as she speaks. She is pointing with her fork at some broccoli, as though we have heaped actual excrement onto her plate alongside the fish fingers.

“It’s fine!” I say, with forced good humour. “Just eat it with something else and you won’t even taste it.”

She looks at me as though I’m possibly the stupidest creature that’s ever been allowed to roam the earth, let alone be in charge of meal planning. “It’s disgusting,” she says, with a look of genuine repulsion.

This is how I have spent almost every meal time for at least the last 12 years – coming up with new ways to get children to eat vegetables has become the bane of my life and to be quite honest I am just about done. I am teetering on the brink of not giving a toss. “It’s only your health and well being,” I want to say, “have Poptarts for every meal for all I care.” View Post

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Having shared my own thoughts on The Point at Polzeath last week, you can now read my fiancé’s version of events.

Golf at The Point at Polzeath

I’m rather wary of coming across as smug at the moment.

There is nothing worse than watching couples on social media gloating about how chuffed they are with their relationship, especially after they’ve got engaged. It doesn’t help either when they throw in how great the rest of their lives are, so it is with a certain amount of apprehension that I drop into conversation that so far this year, Jo and I have had no fewer than seven mini breaks.

I should point out that this is purely through good fortune and is circumstantial. The ‘me’ twelve months ago would have ranted about how nice it would have been to have a day off, let alone a series of mini breaks. Going away that much does start to get tricky. Don’t get me wrong, I’m utterly grateful that fate has dealt the holidaying equivalent of the royal flush, but the more time you spend away in lovely locations, the greater the expectations and higher your standards are for the next destination.

I have to admit to having done no forward research on The Point before we got there. For all I knew, we could have been going to another campsite, the previous weekend having been spent listening to the familiar and moral-sappingly English sound of rain on canvas. View Post

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increase blog traffic

First of all, let’s get one thing clear, content really is the key here. You can do every single thing on this list but if what you’re writing is essentially shite then it’s pointless. What are you playing at? Just take some time to write something decent.

Right, now that’s out of the way, let’s get down to the business of how to promote your blog.

So, you’ve written something ace. Maybe you have an amazing product to tell me about. Perhaps you’ve taken the best picture of a pig in wellies that anyone has ever seen. Good work. Now comes the tricky bit – getting people interested.

Unfortunately there isn’t one easy peasy way to get millions of people visiting your website or blog, but there are lots of little things that you can do, that if done regularly and as a package of activity, can help boost traffic.

Here ‘s a by no means comprehensive list of 43 ideas to get you started, in no particular order: View Post

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I’ve had a bit of a realisation over the last couple of weeks. As I’ve started thinking about wedding planning it occurred to me that I very rarely spend any sort of money on anything. That sounds a bit silly, because I do spend quite a bit of money generally, but it’s always on little things like books or magazines or meals out; impulse buys rather than projects.

Thinking about a wedding though I’ve realised how enjoyable it is to actually plan to spend money, to research things you like and don’t like, to consider colours and themes. It’s jolly good fun and has opened up a whole new avenue of cutting and sticking to me – now, at last, I understand why people get excited about interiors and renovations rather than just adopting my approach of buying cushions randomly.

It’s got me thinking then about my home, the bits of it I like and the bits that make me curl my mouth up and quickly look away. If I can potentially plan a wedding, revamping a room in my house is going to be a piece of cake surely?

Here are five things I think it’s important to consider when planning a living room makeover: View Post

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We had a big clearout of Belle’s room this month. If you have ever seen Belle’s room you will understand why this is a big deal.

Picture a bric-a-brac shop, run by one of the those people from the programme about obsessive compulsive hoarding. Then take a tray of old cups and place them at strategic intervals around the room. Now mix everything up, as though you are playing a game where you try to get people to remember what was there in the first place.

There you go, that’s it.

The tally of things we took out of her room in the end stands at:

  • Two items of furniture
  • One bin liner of clothes
  • Four bags of books
  • Two bin liners of rubbish and recycling
  • Six bags for the charity shop

You’d not imagine a child would have that much stuff in the first place, but even with all of that gone her room is still nicely full. View Post

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At last!

It’s going to be a whole year in June since we moved to Taunton and I’ve finally got round to finishing the unpacking. (I refer here only to indoors unpacking. My car port still resembles a poor quality car boot sale.) Although we physically moved everything in in record time, and my new pastel wine glasses were looking pretty on the kitchen shelves within days, (priorities), there have been other areas of the house that have been rather neglected.

Take the under stairs cupboard for instance, (which isn’t actually under the stairs, but has a similar vibe.) When we moved in, because the flat is so small, I had several boxes of miscellaneous gubbins that I just didn’t have space for. This included countless leads for appliances I’m not sure I ever owned, suspect shoes that really should have been donated to charity some years ago, and some old bits of wood that I’m sure I once intended to make into shelves. Said items stayed in a heap in this cupboard for a good eight months before I decided to sort them out. View Post

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As you know, I recently got engaged. You might not have noticed, perhaps I didn’t mention it? Oh no, hang on, I did. A MILLION TIMES.

I’ve actually had the ring on my finger for nearly a month now, I just didn’t tell the internet straight away as I wanted to milk the whole ‘face to face announcement’ thing. I wanted to be able to turn up at book group and shove my hand in people’s faces and have them be actually excited rather than just saying ‘oh yeah, I saw on Facebook’. That’s definitely not as much fun.

Engagement ring

Oh whoops, how did that get there? I must have accidentally taken a picture of my own hand while typing this post.

So, a month in, and I have yet to have that moment where I refer to my ‘fiancé’ in a random conversation with a stranger OR on a blog post. Boyfriend is easy to say, but somehow I feel like fiancé doesn’t fit as casually into a sentence. Especially as I know I would put way to much emphasis on the last syllable and end up just sounding a bit of a knob. View Post

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When I asked the lovely people of Twitter for their top tip for travelling with kids, several people advised that the best thing to do was to leave them at home. This may often feel like the sensible option, but actually there are a lot of benefits to travelling with children.

  • You get to pack lots of fun snacks, take regular toilet breaks and go to bed early, all with the excuse that it’s ‘for the kids’.
  • You can do fun things like ride on steam trains, build sandcastles, play crazy golf and eat candy floss, because you’re selfless like that, and always thinking of the children.
  • Travelling with children actually gives you a completely new and fascinating view of the world because they notice all the little, fun things that grown-ups always miss.

travelling with kids

Travelling with kids also means you end up at some really weird places. Would I ever have visited the Portreath Bee Centre for example if I hadn’t been looking for something to keep us amused in the rain? Or the National Wool Museum? I don’t even want to think about how my life might have turned out differently had I never visited Williton’s Bakelite Museum. View Post

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