You know you’re getting on a bit when you visit the Museum of Childhood and see all the toys you used to play with as a child. Seriously, am I so old now that my memories belong in a museum? Apparently so.

This week I’ve been reading the John Lewis Toy Story about train sets and it has got me thinking about my favourite childhood toys. Of course there are the classics, that all kids have, like a good ball. The back of this picture says ‘Josephine – August 1979’, making me 16 months old and, even if I do say so myself, adorable. It’s a bit of a shame that my knees haven’t got any less chubby with age, but never mind.

John Lewis Toy Story

My absolute favourite toy however, the thing that defines my early years, is anything Fisher Price.

We had all sorts over the years; the hospital, the farm, a circus train, the school, the airport and, a personal favourite, which we could take in the bath, the ferry. As time went on we gave away a lot of them, or sold them at car boot sales, but one thing has remained a constant since I was tiny – the Fisher Price Village. View Post

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I’ve not had a competition for a little while so I’m really pleased to have this awesome one to offer you, from the very lovely independent retailer The Dressing Room. The prize up for grabs is £200 to spend on their Becksondergaard range, which includes gorgeous scarves, bags, gloves, belts and purses – lovely stuff that is guaranteed to glam up any outfit.

Obviously my first thought when running competitions like this is ‘Damn it, why can’t I enter?’ as I could really do with some nice accessories. When I went for dinner with my new boyfriend a couple of weeks ago I had to borrow a bag from Belle. (Don’t tell him.)

The Dressing Room

The Collector’s Club

If you’re a fan of the brand, you may also be interested to hear about the Becksondergaard Collector’s Club. Collect a stamp for every £25 you spend and you’ll get a free £15 voucher when you have ten.

The Dressing Room

To be in with a chance to win, get stuck into the Rafflecopter widget below.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Good luck!

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You don’t want to mess with Belle at the moment.

95% of the time she is a sweet and thoughtful girl, always happy to lend a hand, caring and kind. Sometimes though, overcome by the pubescent hormones coursing through her veins, she becomes a beast. Bee and I cower in her presence. She almost seems to roar.

The beast was unleashed recently when we went to Northern Ireland and was sparked by mediocre service in the Premier Inn. If there is anything that winds Belle up like nothing else it is shoddy service. Our Butlins break  for example was blighted for her by the cutlery, which didn’t live up to her high expectations of cleanliness, being covered, as she put it, in ‘previous food’.

Fork

What the fork?

Premier Inn got off to a bad start with Belle by bringing her orange squash with her dinner rather than the fresh orange juice she had requested.

“Do they not know the difference?” She asked, appalled. “This is clearly not freshly squeezed.”

She was also not convinced that her pizza had the double helping of mozzarella she had specifically asked for. At breakfast the next morning things only got worse.

“Well that took longer than it should have done,” she spat, Victor Meldrew style. She banged her plate down onto the table. It held one hash brown and three slices of bacon.

“All I wanted to do was get some bacon. I queued for a plate, let someone into the queue before me, and then when I reached over for the bacon the chef told me off! ‘There is a queue you know’ he told me.” She was positively steaming.

I sat quietly eating my toast.

“I’d get some juice,” she snarled, lip curling, “but it’s probably squash.”

I made sure that Belle didn’t mind me writing about this so that she wouldn’t shout at me.

 

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I have a new puppy in my life.

I’ve never thought of myself as a dog person, but I may be a little bit smitten. She has been coming to see us quite a bit lately and we call her Chewy. It’s not her name, but it feels apt.

Puppy

Oh Chewy, how we love you.

A puppy is hard work, especially such a chewy one, but just like a baby they can provide hours of fun. In fact, it’s very much like Belle being small all over again; they love you unconditionally, cry when you leave, want to sleep in your bed, and can be arranged into amusing positions when they are asleep. View Post

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Do you remember that Homebase ad where they build a house out of containers?

Homebase container

I always thought it looked pretty cool. It reminded me of playing Sylvanian Families when I was little* and spending ages organising the furniture in the little box shaped houses. I never imagined that one day I would get to sleep in a real actual container.

Well, you know what’s coming don’t you?

A couple of weeks ago Belle and I did spend the night in a container, and not because we were trying to sneak across any borders, but as part of a visit to Thorpe Park and the new Shark Hotel.

“The hotel is made of containers,” I told everyone.

“Seriously though,” they said, “what was it like?”

“Like sleeping in a container,” I said, and showed them the pictures: View Post

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Dark HedgesLast week I ticked one more thing off my list of 40 things to do before 40. It’s a good job quite frankly, as time is slipping away and I’m a little behind schedule. The lemon curd may have been mastered, but I’ve yet to get anywhere near a water bed, let alone Iceland.

Last week was all about the Dark Hedges in Northern Ireland, inspired by something I cut out of a newspaper a couple of years ago. I really like cutting things out of newspapers and magazines, partly because I like the idea of trying new things but also just because I find the scissor action very satisfying.*

The Dark Hedges is an avenue of beech trees, planted in the eighteenth century by the Stuart family in a bid to impress visitors as they drove up to their home. Bee and Belle may have been fairly nonplussed – ‘Is this it? Just some trees?’ – but it certainly impressed me.  View Post

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When eBay asked me to help them put together a back to school buyers’ guide, I should probably have warned them that I know absolutely nothing at all about how to be cool at school.

As a teenager, I just never quite got to grips with what was expected of me; what trainers I was meant to have, where I was meant to hang out at lunchtime – I always got things a little bit wrong. (And by ‘a little bit’ I mean dreadfully.) On non-uniform days, when everyone else just switched to the uniform of jeans and t-shirts, I tended to think it would be rather nice to borrow a floral blouse from my mum, to jolly things up a little bit, and to perhaps wear a nice skirt.

It’s been quite hard for me then as a parent to help my own children ingratiate themselves with their peers, and more often than not, when lacking any understanding of the right sort of back pack to be seen carrying, I have resorted instead to reminding them that it’s the kids who were popular at my school that are now unemployed drug addicts, living in bedsits in Bridgwater.

It’s not ideal.

Rather than make a fool of myself then, I enlisted Belle’s help in putting together my eBay guide and between us we came up with 14 super cool backpacks that hopefully won’t make you a complete social outcast.

No promises though.

Check out my buyers’ guide here.

Super cool back packs

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I read an amazing fact the other day. It said that £1,357 was the size of the pay rise needed to make the average person as happy as a regular visit to a library.

Topsy and Tim go to the library

I can quite believe it.

I have always felt there to be something quite magical about libraries. From the excitement of reading about Topsy and Tim’s adventures at their local library – ‘the books may look higgeldy piggledy, but we do know where to find them!’ – to the joy of creating my very own library at home, libraries will always hold a special place in my heart.

I don’t remember much from my childhood, but one thing I do remember, way back when I was about six or seven and we lived in Weymouth, was driving over to Dorchester for a trip to the  library. My sister and I would always choose our books quickly, and then get impatient as my mum browsed. I remember wandering through the rows and rows of shelves, finding her with a small pile already nestled in the crook of one arm, but with a look about her that said we’d be best off just finding somewhere comfy to sit for a little while.

When we finally got to the counter, the librarian would remove the cardboard tickets from inside the books and tuck them into our individual wallets, stored at the library in large card files so they would know exactly who had what.

Nowadays of course it all self scanners, but Belle gets as much of a kick out of placing her book into the machine and seeing the title pop up on screen as I did watching the librarian organising the cardboard tickets and stamping the dates into the front of our books. Over the years the library has been a salvation to me as a parent; somewhere soothing to go with a toddler on a rainy afternoon, a place to grab a handful of books for myself, a baby asleep in a pram, to help me feel more normal.

Libraries are being closed all over the country, but if we are all going to feel £1,357 worse off as a result, surely this is a massive false economy?

How much is a regular trip to the library worth to you?

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When we were children we had two favourite car games; the left right game and the follow a car game. I think you can probably guess what was involved. My children are fans too, but my first thought always nowadays when asked to follow a car is ‘How far will it go? How much will that cost me in petrol??’ Playing in the late 80s when you could get a litre of 4* for about 40p was a slightly different prospect.

When we were away in the motorhome I even found myself doing something I have never done before – downloading an app to compare the nearest fuel prices. It was a difficult and slightly scary moment for me; you know you’ve really turned a corner age wise when you start driving past petrol stations and actually noticing and caring about a 2p increase in prices.

However expensive fuel gets though, it’s just not something I’m ever going to be able to go without. Being able to drive to visit friends and family is really important to me, as is taking Belle for days out and holidays. Fuel might be expensive, but to me it’s worth it. Our road trip was wonderful – it gave Belle and I both a much needed break from life at home, it allowed us to visit places we had never seen before, to learn new things, and most importantly, to spend time together.

Mother and daughter View Post

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As avid readers, (which you all are obviously), you’ll know that we recently went on a bit of a motorhome adventure, in a van very kindly lent to us by Bailey of Bristol.

This was it:

Bailey Approach Compact

Motorhome crush

As well as being great fun, and an opportunity for us to listen to countless mystery novels on audio book, it was actually part of a grander plan. It isn’t for nothing after all that a girl is prepared to wheel a box of her own poo across a field of holidaymakers. It was in aid of ticking off another item from my list of 40 things to do before I am 40; specifically to visit every county in England. View Post

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For the last couple of years now I have been an official blogging ambassador for the Tesco Mum of the Year Awards, and I’m very honoured to have been asked to be involved again with the 2015 awards, their 10th anniversary.

Tesco Mum of the Year Awards

The Tesco Mum of the Year Awards are about recognising and celebrating those mums who have gone the extra mile in supporting their families, communities and causes close to their heart. We’re not talking here about simply going to the effort to bake something homemade for the summer fair rather than buying something at Waitrose and roughing it up a bit around the edges, this is about amazing women doing truly amazing things. View Post

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So.

I met this man.

*grins*

I’m not going to tell you anything about him at the moment as he is my Special Secret Thing. I don’t want to ruin it all by having him realise I am the kind of girl who blabs about boys all over the internet, although of course that is exactly what I am. Don’t tell him though.

What I can tell you though is that he is doing funny things to my head. I have found myself thinking about him rather a lot, possibly around 98.6% of the time. Roughly. A friend described me as ‘giddy’. That about sums it up.

One of the side effects of meeting someone new is that you start to look at yourself and your surroundings in a new way, over-analysing every detail. You look at your mismatched crockery and wonder whether it reflects your eclectic interests and thoughts, or if it just makes you look a bit cheap. You look in your underwear draw and physically shudder. An examination of your wardrobe reveals that you are going to be a little stuck after date three, unless your date is really into old jeans and fleeces, and you start feeling the urge to spend money you don’t really have on pretty new things. Pretty new things you can casually brush off as old favourites should said date compliment you.* View Post

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