Being Mrs C

Hand in Hand: Crafting with Kids - Jenny Doh

Some days things just work out right. Little Miss C goes down for her nap without any problems and just as you're about to sit down with your feet up and a cuppa the postman appears with some perfectly timed reading material. That's exactly what happened when my review copy of Hand in Hand arrived. I'd been eying this up on amazon for a while and it was already on my wish list, so being asked to review it was an added bonus.

As soon as I opened the book I just knew I was going to love it. The simple reason being that the first section is written by Amanda Blake Soule whose SouleMama blog was probably the first that I started reading many years ago and one that I still go to everyday to see Amanda's updates. In total this wonderful book contains sections by twenty top parenting bloggers and in each they explain what creativity and crafting means to them as well as presenting a project to work on with your children.

Reading about all these experiences in one book is wonderful and gives the reader a great overview of the different blogs that each of these women write and the creative inspiration behind them. The only problem I have with discovering new blogs is that often you want to get a feel of the person behind them and that can sometimes be hard to do without reading back through months or years of posts. This book fills the gap and helps you feel like you know what makes these women tick creatively. I've already discovered some lovely new blogs through this book and I'm yet to finish looking at all of them.

The projects included range from a quilt for a new baby, through to fabric ornaments and an ABC photobook for a toddler. Some of them suit older children, but many of them contain crafty ideas which could be easily adapted for children of different ages or just provide inspiration for another project. The ABC photobook idea is one which I plan to do a variant of with LMC soon to help her learn the alphabet and is incredibly simple to do. The projects in general have a very polished quality feel to them and they are very much a step up from some of the things I do with LMC at the moment.

If you enjoy craft blogs and want inspiration for projects that would work with children then this is definitely the book for you. Admittedly many of the projects may have appeared on blogs in one form or another in the past, but having them all in one place and bringing together this wonderful collection of women makes the book very worth reading.

Hand in Hand: Crafting with Kids - Jenny Doh

ISBN - 9781454702405

Price - £12.99

Publisher - Lark

Publication Date - June 2012

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of Hand in Hand to review by GMC Distribution.

Featured Post: Best British Summer Toys for 2012

Today, a featured guest post from Karl at MoneySupermarket.com

Some of my favourite childhood memories are of being with my family in the garden at one of our first family homes – playing in my paddling pool or with my enormous Tonka truck, my dad sitting under the parasol reading the paper with my mum carrying out trays of ice cold drinks, sandwiches and ice lollies. Despite the UK’s distinct lack of sunshine, the summer months are a great opportunity to create such wonderful memories. So as we’re stoking up the barbeque in Summer 2012 what’s keeping our children occupied, and more importantly what are the latest and greatest toys that we can enjoy with our children, creating those memories that one day they will cherish?...

Here’s a run-down of some of my favourite summer 2012 toys for children aged 1-5. Most of these toys are relatively inexpensive but if you are thinking about splashing out for summer 2013, it’d be worth checking out a selection of the best savings accounts at MoneySupermarket.com to start saving for those rainy, and sunny days!

Oskar & Ellen Soft Play Hamper

Children love to mimic what mummy & daddy are doing, and this adorable hamper filled with plush food, drinks, plates and glasses will keep them entertained for hours. Be warned though, if you were hoping for an afternoon of peace, you’ll be expected to enjoy several make believe meals that the children have lovingly prepared!

Union Jack Cozy Coupe

With 2012 being the year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Olympics in London and England playing in the Euros, this is possibly my favourite toy of the year. The iconic Little Tikes foot-powered Cosy Coupe has been given a 2012 make-over, complete with Union Jack on the roof. Truly British toddlers will play with it in the rain…That’s the spirit!

The Smart Trike Recliner Stroller

This award winning best-seller is a great first step towards a bigger bike. It features an adjustable reclining seat, detachable steering handle-bars, safety belt, shopping basket and even a rain cover for those summer downpours… Perfect for a stroll down to the pub beer-garden.

Gazillion Bubbles Machine

This easy to use, robust and low cost toy is perfect for keeping the children occupied while you concentrate on not burning the burgers. Simply add the bubble solution and switch it on to blow ‘gazillions’ of colourful bubbles. A snip at less than £8 too.

Little Tikes 2 in 1 Garden Cart

This toy was among the young tester’s top picks in the 2011 Best Toy Awards. The mini traditional garden cart features a fabric shade roof, wheel barrow, gardening tools, potted plants, flower tray and working water spray – Perfect for keeping the rest of the family cool in the summer heat! As a low cost alternative, try the Pepper Pig Garden Caddy at less than £10.

ELC Sand and Water Table

Bring the beach to your garden, complete with 2 separate compartments for sand and water respectively and 10 accessories for the children to experiment and play with. This comes with a waterproof lid (that has a toy car track on it) to keep the sand cool and dry, and is also available in pink!

Keeping it simple

Things at home have been a bit manic lately. Our builders are two weeks into our loft conversion and as we're still living at home that means that there's noise, dust and a change of routine to get used to.

As the builders start just after 8am I need to make sure all three of us are up, dressed and downstairs by then which doesn't really fit in with the lazy morning routine that Little Miss C and I developed over the last couple of years. Daytime naps have also had to be downstairs in a travel cot in a not very dark front room and playtime in the garden isn't always possible depending on what the builders are doing. This means that there have been loads more trips to the park than usual, numerous trips round the shops and imposing ourselves on friends just to keep us out of the house.

When I woke this morning the first thing I said to Mr C was that I needed a lazy morning at home. All this going out can be exhausting - even without being 6 months pregnant. She wasn't even awake at the time, but LMC must have been listening as that's exactly what I've had today and my mood has improved so much as a result.

No planned activities at all, but lots of spontaneous crafting, drawing, jigsaw puzzles and music making. I've even managed to get some work done and some chores ticked off the list too. Eleven o'clock I put the kettle on, had a cuppa and a biscuit and LMC sat and ate her snack with me. No complaints and for once I actually manage to drink a whole cup of tea straight after making it. LMC has been as happy as anything all morning and I've had great fun too. Quite why she's been so happy to let mummy indulge in a day at home today and not on other days I have no idea, but I'm making the most of it while I can!

Pintoy Table Top Magnetic Easel and Chalk Board

I'm pretty sure I can't be the only mum who has lists of things that they would buy their children if they had the money and space to do so. Beautiful children's toys, especially wooden ones, that you see in magazine pictures and on other people's Pinterest Boards. Our budget doesn't stretch to all the things I'd like to buy Little Miss C though so I keep a keen eye on the companies that I like on social media so that I can try to take advantage of special offers and competitions where possible. I've made some great savings by doing this and I'm delighted that all my competition entering has finally paid off too!

WoodenToyShop.co.uk is one such company with a website full of beautiful wooden toys and some great competitions on their Facebook page in particular. I was thrilled to win a recent competition (by bizarrely guessing the weight of a Kilner jar full of pasta) to win a Pintoy Table Top Magnetic Easel and Chalkboard as it was exactly what had been at the top of my wish-list for a while. As I've written about many times, LMC loves all things crafty and can spend hours drawing or painting. At her nursery they have some great chalkboards on the walls for them to draw on and I had been on the lookout for something similar for home, but was lacking appropriate wall space. The beauty of this table top easel is that it collapses for storage, yet when assembled it works perfectly on top of her small Ikea table where she does most of her drawing. The non-slip bits on the base mean that it doesn't easily move once on the table top making it nice and safe.

One side is a simple chalkboard, whilst the other one is both a whiteboard and magnetic. There's space to hang a roll of paper (which comes with the easel) and a handy clip to keep a child's artwork in place whilst they work on it. Both sides have a deep ledge section for pens or chalk and the easel also comes with an eraser which seems to have given LMC as much enjoyment as drawing does!

The addition of a box of chalk and our existing fridge magnets mean that she has been kept amused for hours with it already. She almost sees it as three toys in one as she can do her "chalking" on it, play with magnets or do "colours and painting". Depending on what mood she's in and what I'm doing at the time it can either be on her little table where she can stand at it, or on the main kitchen table where I work and she can sit on the chair next to me. It takes up so much less floorspace than a floor standing easel and I can also move it outside easily and have it stood on our patio table to allow her to do things out in the garden too. The easel is beautifully made in high quality wood and appears to be very hard wearing too. If you had more than one child and set things up right you could also have both sides in use at once - probably something that I will find useful a year or so down the line.

I'm absolutely thrilled with my prize, as is Little Miss C. In the time it's taken for me to write this review she has been perfectly content drawing and playing with magnets - pretty impressive for a little girl who had spent much of the morning running round and insisting that she needed to go out to play!

Disclaimer: I won this easel when I entered a competition on the WoodenToyShop.co.uk Facebook page. After winning I was asked if I would also review it in exchange for some gift vouchers for their online shop. Loving their products I readily agreed, but the contents of this review are not swayed by this.

Gin O'Clock - The Queen (of Twitter)

If you're on Twitter and not already following The Queen then there is no doubt that you're missing out big time. In this her Diamond Jubilee year her tweets give you a fantastic background to all the visits and events that are going on around the country. You also get a great insight into what she really thinks of some of the people she meets and the politicians in Westminster. If you've ever wondered how she manages to keep control of her family, run the Commonwealth and manage to look serene on all occassions then the secrets are here.

One of Her Majesty's most important jobs has to be declaring the daily "Gin O'Clock" at the end of the working day - or whenever she deems fit (unless your name is Mr Clegg in which case it's back to work!) This daily command from on high also gives it's name to Her Majesty's diaries. Gin O'clock presents you with a year's worth of diary entries from the country's most famous woman. If you're a loyal subject then it's your duty to make sure you know what the woman in charge thinks.

Funny, controvertial and always right Gin O'clock is a fantastic read and a must for anyone who follows HM on Twitter.

Mega Bloks Play N Go Table

Ever since she first discovered Mega Bloks (or "towers" as she likes to call them) Little Miss C has been a great fan. The nice chunky shape and light weight means that they're incredibly easy for little hands to push together and they also stay together amazingly well no matter how high a tower you try to build. 

I was therefore delighted when we were asked to review the Mega Bloks 3-in-1 Play n Go Table mainly as I saw it as a way of trying to get LMC to concentrate all her building in one place rather than scattering it all across the living room floor!

The table has fold up legs meaning that when not in use as a table you can simply fold them up and slot it away somewhere, or it can sit on a table top itself. The built in carrying handle also makes it easy to move around the house or garden depending on where your little one is playing at the time. There's a bit of a knack to getting the legs to lock into position, but once they do it provides a really stable playing surface. 

There are four quadrant pieces that provide a road and building surface, but also lock into place when you want them too. With it unlocked (easy to do with a toddler friendly twisting bit in the middle of the table) you can lift the pieces out and there is a storage area underneath for the Mega Bloks themselves. As soon as LMC saw the table she got very very excited about the road surface and the first thing she did once we had un-boxed it all was start driving the car round the road.

The table comes with an assortment of building blocks of different shapes, two archways that fit across the road, a car and a little man that sits inside the car. There is also a sheet of stickers which can be stuck on the blocks so that when some of them are put together they form things like a tree or a door, whilst some of them are a bit more random (a teddy bear and a moon). The only problem I see with the stickers coming like this is that if you put them on in front of a toddler (as I ended up doing as I unpacked it all in front of her) then they understand that the stickers come off too, so LMC has spent a while moving the stickers around and putting them on different things meaning that some of them are already losing a bit of their stickiness. Not the end of the world, but it might be worth putting them out of sight of your little ones!

The Mega Bloks Play N Go Table works well for us as a focus for Little Miss C's tower building and the simple road seems to be her favourite bit by far. It's also great to be able to put it all away at the end of a play session easily rather than crawling all over the floor looking for blocks that have gone under the coffee table and sofa.

Disclaimer: Little Miss C was sent a Mega Bloks Play N Go Table to review. Mega Bloks are also on Twitter and Facebook

Parenting Tips #617

Don't leave a toddler alone with a felt-tip pen the day after they've sat in on four women having their make up professionally done. If you do, this may be the result.

Yesterday the three of us ventured north for a make-up trial for my sister's wedding next month. LMC was fascinated to watch the bride and bridesmaids have their make up done and kept asking what they were having done. The phrase "having their make up done" didn't seem to mean much to her, so someone instead said that we were having our "faces painted". That she seemed to understand. So much so that today she did her own version with a felt-tip. I was busy in the kitchen preparing her tea when she suddenly went quiet. I sensed something might be going on so asked what she was doing, only to be told "I painting my face like mummy"!

It's not clear from the photo, but both eye lids had been coloured in quite well and when I questioned her a bit more it seems that she only had time to do her "eye painting in brown". Looks like I'm going to have to keep a closer eye on her in future!

Down on the (Lego Duplo) Farm

Just a quick heads up about a little guest review I have over on Being a Mummy of the My Furst Lego Duplo Farm Set. 

There's a baby in mummy's tummy...

A swift karate kick to my stomach was how Little Miss C responded when we first told her that there was a baby in there. I was three months pregnant and she was 21 months old at the time. It wasn't quite the reaction we expected, but then again you just can't always guess how children are going to respond to things.

She's always been very inquisitive and picks up on lots that is going on around her so we decided to tell her as soon as we'd had the 12 week scan. A simple sentence of "there's a baby in mummy's tummy" seemed to be enough for her to realise what was going on. She kept coming back to it over the next few days and we also had to remind her when she was getting a bit violent with her legs during nappy changes and tantrums. Sometimes it made things worse, but on other occasions she did stop when we said it.

Now that we're a three months on her general understanding and language has come on huge amounts and the physical change in my tummy also means that it's much more obvious what is going on. She still needs reminding when she gets a bit too physical when playing, but she is also starting to get annoyed when I'm finding it hard to do things with her like get on the floor and play with her trains, or push her round the garden in her car.

There are a few things around the house that I've set aside and told her are for the baby. In particular a little comforter teddy bear and hand-knitted cardigan that a friend gave me and she seems to understand that concept quite well. She's even brought the cardigan to me one day, lifted my top and put it on my tummy saying "I put cardigan on baby now". I'm trying to involve her in conversations about what we'll do when the baby comes and tell her about things that she can help me with - like changing nappies, bath time and getting the baby dressed. 

I spent a while looking for books that might help her understand what is happening, but actually drew a blank until LMC randomly picked something up in the library a few weeks back. There's a House Inside My Mummy struck me as being a strange way of writing about pregnancy, but actually it seems to have really clicked with LMC. The rhyming story gives it a lovely rhythm and the illustrations seem to make it clear to little ones as to what is happening. The bit about how the dad has seen inside the baby's house on the hospital's TV makes sense to LMC as she came to the hospital with me for my 20 week scan and I explained that to her at the time as seeing the baby on the hospital's special television. She does seem to have it in her head that she should be able to see the baby through my belly button now and is a tad disappointed when she can't, but then some days she claims she can!

The baby's arrival is going to mean some big changes at home. Not just in there being another person in the household, but we're building another bedroom in the attic, meaning that there will be some bedroom shuffling coming up. We'll move into a new master bedroom, whilst I explained to LMC that she will get our big bedroom so that there was room for all her toys, and then the baby can have her little room. At first she wasn't sure and after walking into our room, looking around she declared that it was too small. Yet two days later she walked in whilst Mr C was getting dressed and announced that it was "my room now"!

I've already had requests to "get the baby out now" from her so I think frustration levels may rise as the final three months pass, but at the same time I'm also intrigued to see if she gets more excited or concerned as we get closer to my due date. I'm hoping to involve her in getting the baby's room ready and getting clothes and equipment ready for them.

The other morning we sat in bed together reading books whilst Mr C got himself ready for work. Suddenly she jumped up and said "Daddy, Daddy, there's a baby in Mummy's tummy" thinking that he obviously needed to know this. She probably wasn't expecting the response of "I know, I put it there" but she certainly went away looking puzzled. Her next round of questions could be interesting...

How did you prepare your toddler for a new baby's arrival? Any tips or pitfalls that you want to share please?

Mini Micro 3in1 Scooter

If you live anywhere where there are a large number of children you can't help but notice the little scooters that all of them whizz around the park and pavements on. When Little Miss C and I visited our local primary school recently I was amused to see that the bike park had more scooters than bikes in it! LMC has been starting with scooter envy recently which increased when she was given a quick go on a friend's scooter whilst on a trip to feed the ducks in the park. With a second birthday approaching it seemed an obvious gift idea and everyone I spoke to instantly said that we should go for a Micro Scooter rather than one of the cheaper alternatives.

Not being familiar with the range I dispatched Mr C down to our local toy shop one Saturday afternoon with strict instructions that he had to come back having decided which one we should get. The Mini Micro 3in1 Scooter had been mentioned on Twitter as a possibly being most suitable for Little Miss C's age and having looked at them all that's exactly what we decided to go for.

The 3in1 is the newest scooter in the Micro Scooter range and really does help in those families where a younger sibling has scooter envy, but isn't quite big enough to go for the full Mini Micro Scooter. With a recommended age range of just 1+, the 3in1 consists of a Mini Micro Scooter (in either blue or pink), plus a seat and an o-bar handle.

The idea is that for the youngest children you attach the o-bar handle rather than the usual T-bar one and also clip onto this the seat. This turns the scooter into a simple ride-on for those less confident on their feet and there are two different height positions in which you can clip the seat depending on the size of your child. The o-bar handle is easier for little hands to hold onto, and most importantly to keep hold of whilst moving along! LMC also finds it really useful for picking up the handle to reposition the scooter in the direction she wants to go.

When a child is old enough to start scooting along on their own you can just remove the seat and you have a small scooter. We initially attached the seat when we gave the scooter to LMC, but within a couple of hours she'd asked us to remove it as she had worked out that it was just stopping her from scooting properly! Since then, especially when tired, she has asked for it to be put back on several times.

Even without the seat LMC has quickly mastered how to scoot along - in straight lines. Watching other children do similar means that it hasn't taken her long at all, but steering is another matter entirely! For now we're concentrating on straight lines and ensuring that mum or dad is close enough to help out before a collision happens. The speed she can already get up to on it is quite impressive and shows just how easy it is to get to grips with - even for someone so young.

What is obvious from the start is the quality of the Micro Scooter itself. Designed and manufactured to withstand plenty of abuse from little children the scooter is very solidly built so that you feel very confident that it's completely safe for your little ones and that you're not going to have to be constantly fixing it. Having seen the dangerous ways that some other scooters have broken in I definitely agree with the recommendation that everyone gave of going for a quality brand.

Once LMC gets older and bigger all we need to do now is replace the o-bar handle with the T-bar one and then you've got a regular Mini Micro Scooter. I think it's great to have something that will last for such a long time and that too definitely makes it worth the cost investment until a child moves up to a Maxi Scooter (approximately when they are 5 or 6 years old). If you already have a Mini Micro Scooter you can buy a pack containing just the o-bar handle and seat.

So, all we need to do now is master turning corners and then I won't need to run quite so close behind when Little Miss C whizzes along!

Disclaimer: After providing us with lots of help in choosing which scooter to go for, Cuthberts Toys kindly gave us a Mini Micro 3in1 Scooter to review. Although they don't sell them online, you can buy Micro Scooters in their shops in St Albans and Letchworth, and also in their new shop in the Hatfield Galleria. Their staff know all about the range and are happy to provide advice on which scooter would be best for your child. A pack containing the o-bar handle and seat costs £29.99 and this is also available in all three Cuthberts stores.