Autumn Garden Tips

It's fair to say, I am not the most organised of people. I try, honest I do, but I always seem to be five steps behind. This year, though, I have been determined to get the garden sorted and keep it that way. It took me six weeks this summer to plant a border to match the one on the other side and that just left my nemisis; the back of our garden. It resembles marshland for most of the year, as it collects a lot of rain water and gets barely any sun, so it is hard to get anything to grow. Except bindweed. That stuff grows like, well, a weed.

Children Fuel with Cheestrings and Yollies

I don't know if it's a boy thing, but my son always seems to have his head in the fridge these days. He can be quite a fussy eater, but that doesn't mean he doesn't want to be eating something most of the time. I try to keep sweets and chocolate to a minimum, so its always handy to have snacks around that will have a nutritious benefit to him instead. I also understand that busy boys need a lot of refuelling in order to be the best at football, exploring, climbing, den building or other important occupations synonymous with a well-spent childhood!

Which School Mum Are You?

The first term of the school year is already half over and it has given us all six long weeks of making small talk at the school gates. During this time, it is likely we will have established who's who in this year's line up of mums. Who do we envy, who has us rolling our eyes and, most importantly, who is the one who makes us all look a little bit more together than we feel? If you are new to drop off and pick up time, you may already have come to recognise some of the stereotypes that crop up year after year. Here's a few to jog your memory.

My Sunday Photo: Years of Horsing Around!

 Not one photo today, but several. I've been sorting through photos and trying to organise them on  my laptop. As technology has become a bigger part of our lives, taking photos has become almost too easy, and I've ended up with thousands. So I thought the time had come to organise them into files, one for each year, since I got my first camera phone in 2006! It makes it so much quicker for blogging purposes, as I often recall photos I took at some stage in the past that would be just perfect to illustrate a particular post. It has actually been a lot of fun and really interesting to bring together photos from previous years in one place.

An Enderman Costume for World Book Day!

This post was originally published for World Book Day, but I thought it might make a cool last minute Halloween costume for a Minecraft lover. Minecraft continues to be very popular with children of all ages and is equally appreciated by boys and girls, so this easy costume could be the answer to your costume concerns. All you need is a good size cardboard box, some black binliners and black clothes for them to wear. You will also need the head, but if you can't buy an official Enderman head, you can always paint a cardboard box. Also, before you say it, yes Minecraft does count as a book! Ok, maybe not in the traditional sense, but L is happy and it's meant to be fun, so there!

Win £50 Cash

Does anyone else find that, after the summer holidays, it's a slippery slope towards Christmas? Don't get me wrong, I'm not being a Scroogey old Grinch, or a Grinchey old Scrooge, whichever is grammatically correct. It just seems to get more expensive every year and it's such a worry for a lot of parents, when ends aren't always meeting anyway. So after, the children go back to school, it's a time to start stockpiling, bargain hunting and trying to squirrel away some pennies! However, Christmas shouldn't be all about money, or material things, it's important to try to make time to appreciate what you do have. Like friends and family. I am lucky enough to have made some amazing friends since I started blogging and they have all been a big support to me one way or another.

Mueller Spiral-Pro Review

The Husband loves playing with his food, namely making it look pretty, or funny, or different. So when the people at Mueller offered me a Spiral-Pro to review, I was keen to take part, as I knew he would gleefully put it through its paces. He was initially a bit concerned by the lack of instructions, but it turns out it is so straightforward to use, even he didn't need too many directions to put it together or start spiralling. The box tells you what each different attachment does and it's very easy to put together. Not to be played with by children, it's strictly adults-only, due to the extremely (but necessary!) sharp attachments.