If you're undecided as to whether it's worth going, and you have children under 8 - go.

We really didn't know what to expect and because it was a 150 mile round trip we even built in a visit to see friends, saying that we might be there early. It simply wasn't the case. This festival was fantastic. I'd have happily driven back there again today to try and catch up with everything we didn't manage to do on the first day.










We meant to get money on the way, but forgot, so we found ourselves without lunch or cash and our only option was the Kernel's Coffee Shop which takes payment by card. Usually we'd avoid eating out like this as it's so expensive for our large family, but luckily we only had 4 children with us.

Our bill for 6 came to just under £40, which was a lot, but reasonable as it included drinks and cakes for the grown ups. The quality of the food though was absolutely stupendous. I had a £3.60 ploughman's sandwich which was so fresh and delicious the salad must have been picked that day.

The children's meal was a box meal and you could select 5 items for £3.99. Again, everything was really fresh and healthy, with a much wider than usual selection of items including sliced cucumber, carrot batons, red or green grapes, pom bears, sandwiches, gingerbread men and several different fruit juice drinks. Even the children's sandwiches were made with 'proper' ham and cheese. I'd heartily recommend it (even though the crisps were £1.10 a bag!). 


 




 

Alex Winters, Mister Maker, Mr Bloom, Snow White

Alex Winters opened the show - in disguise!

The Dance-Off - boys v's girls

The gorgeous weather

Mister Maker makes a slice of Watermelon

We didn't have time to see half of the shows, or go on fairground rides, play in the Construction Zone or tons of other stuff, there was so much to do it was incredible. The little boys had the best day ever. The fact that everything is included in the price of your entry ticket is brilliant. My little boys are 3 and 4 and it was lovely to just be able to say "of course you can" all day long.

At £68 for a family of four, plus £18 for each additional person this full day out offers excellent value and I'd definitely go again next year. I recommend it to anyone with children between the ages of 2 and 8, although our 13 and 14 year olds also clearly had a brilliant day out!

We love Wonderworld Toys here at my house, we have the Eco House and the Wonderworld Cooking Centre which are gorgeous toys that are both in our living room and get a lot of play from our children and any visiting children.

Wonderworld have a very strong ecological message, their toys and games are made with sustainably produced wood, recycled board and all promote ecology to children without preaching, but by normalising it. Wind and solar power, water conservation and growing your own food are all part of several of their toys. 


The Eco-House has recycling bins, and the Wonderworld Recycling Game is an excellent way to teach your children about which of the things from your household rubbish can be recycled. The game is suitable for 2-4 players and ideal for children aged 3+.








Gameplay is incredibly simple and very easy for the recommended age range of 3+ to grasp. You simply drive your recycling truck around the board collecting all of the appropriate rubbish for your truck. Yellow for example collects compostable kitchen waste. You have to turn over a counter and if it's yours you can take it.


The Wonderworld Recycling Memo game is great for teaching turn-taking and really promotes memory skills and concentration as the players have to watch which counters are turned over by other players and remember where they were, so that the next time they park there in their truck they can pick them up or choose a different card accordingly.

This game is ideal for early numeracy skills. Dice games are always great for helping to teach young children to count and aren't intimidating as it only goes up to 6.

This is a rapid and fun game, with lots of 'ooooh' and 'aaaaargh' moments. It's perfect for children to play together or with adults. 


One of my favourite things about this game is that it doesn't have to be a game, it can be a plaything. My 3 year old adores the little cars and has spent far more time playing with them, driving them around the board and parking them at the little houses, than he has spent playing the actual game. I love that he gets such a lot of enjoyment from something which would usually only be useful during the game, and even if your game had 3D cars they'd likely be flimsy plastic and you'd worry that they would be broken.


 This is a really nice product. As a game I think it's okay, and my boys love it. As a toy it really fits the bill, and as an overall beautiful thing it's just lovely. It is currently available from The Toadstool online toy shop for £19.50. This is not a cheap game, but it is really well made, sustainably sourced, fairly traded. It's a beautiful game and although you may have to replace some of the cardboard counters over time, the cars and houses will last for far longer than you will need them.

Are you itching yet? Hopefully this post will answer all of your burning questions and explain what head lice look like, how head lice spread and how you catch nits. How you can tell if your child has head lice and what you can do about it.

I'm not a Health Professional, I'm a Mum who has worked in education, and what follows is mainly from 20 years experience of head lice in my own children.

Headlice scare parents until you've had your 15th experience of them and by then you are getting a bit bored of it rather than horrified. With 7 children in our house who love each other and play 'rough and tumble' and read books together all the time, when one catches head lice we have a mini outbreak and inspection will usually reveal at least 3 victims.

What Are Head Lice Really Like?

First things first, head lice do not have superpowers.
They can't leap, they don't have big strong hind legs.
They can't fly, they don't have wings.
They can't decipher between different hair colours or styles, they just wander about and if another head is touching, they might walk onto it.
They don't care if your hair is clean or dirty, gelled or sprayed, natural or coloured, curly or straight - it's your blood they want.
They're really just a relatively unintelligent bug. 

There is a new entrant into the fight against Head Lice. Hedrin have produced Protect & Go Conditioning Spray as a whole new way of beating the bugs.


Instead of waiting until you have head lice already, Protect & Go is designed for regular use when you don't have head lice, but are at risk from catching them - for example sleepovers, when school send you those 'a child in your child's form has head lice' letters or when one of your other children has head lice. 

Unlike most head lice treatments, which you apply to the hair and leave for a certain amount of time before rinsing away, Hedrin Protect & Go is applied and left. If you wash your hair, or after around 4 days, then the treatment is no longer effective and will need to be re-applied, but as long as you use it twice a week then it should kill lice as soon as they set up home on your head, before they lay any eggs and cause an infestation.

Hedrin say -

A hassle-free conditioning spray, clinically proven to help protect against head lice

• Disrupts the life cycle of head lice, preventing an infestation
• Water-based conditioner which is easy to use and can be applied to wet or dry hair after shampooing
• Apply after every hair wash or at least twice a week

What I like best about this treatment is that it contains no 'poisons' harmful to you or your children. The active ingredients are a surfactant Activdiol (1,2-Octanediol) that breaks down the waxy layer on the outside of a louse and causes it to dehydrate rapidly, and Dimeticone, which is a silicone oil and smothers the louse, affecting it's ability to get rid of excess water and rendering it unable to move. They either die from gut rupture, starvation or dehydration.

When I agreed to this product review I didn't realise just how useful it would be. As it turns out we've had head lice in my household over Summer, so I was perfectly placed to test it!



We discovered at least 3 of our children had head lice midway through the Summer holidays. After using a treatment lotion and the combing and conditioner method I have ensured the rest of my family have used the Hedrin Protect & Go to try and prevent anyone else becoming infested.

So far Hedrin Protect & Go seems great and I haven't found any lice or nits on anyone who we know didn't previously have them. With 7 children who rough and tumble and play together all of the time, head lice are swiftly passed from person to person. Even sitting together reading a book makes is a great way to allow them to pass from head to head - so I've been using the Protect & Go myself.


I've been really pleased with the results and the product. It has an orange and mango smell, which is really nice and fresh, and as it's a leave-in conditioner it has made everyone's hair lovely and soft. It doesn't make the hair greasy at all, although when you wash your hair you can tell it had something on it.

The bottle itself has a nice big lock to prevent accidental spraying, and is a good size to last a while. It has a great trigger spray, so you only take seconds to spray your child's head after washing their hair and towel drying. The price is good, around half that you would pay for the equivalent size of treatment spray or lotion, and you don't use as much. It will not remove an actual infestation, it will only knock it back as it doesn't harm the eggs (nits).

I think this is a great product for a family such as mine, but even if you only have one or two children then I can see times when it would be especially useful. I will continue to use it whenever we have an outbreak to try and minimise the spread throughout my family, and I shall use it on my youngest two whenever school issue us with a 'head lice letter'.

Hedrin Protect & Go is available at Chemists, Boots and Tesco nationwide. A 120ml bottle currently costs approx £4.29 and until 16th September is on offer in Tesco for £3.30

I've written a blog post which hopefully can tell you all you ever wanted to know about head lice - including a video and photo's. You can find my post by clicking this link.

It's a daft post, but I had to share this photo because it's so sweet. We had a trial run on uniform tonight to check everything was where it should be (and thankfully I had bigger polo shirts ready because my 4 year old  couldn't get his on or off). It's the first time the little one (age 3) has worn uniform and he was very proud.



Supersweet huh. There we were cooing over them, the proud parents, but they didn't realise the flash was going to go off on the camera, and this is what the next photo looked like....


So that's what I'll dream of tonight, and the ensuing 5 minutes of them shouting at me that I 'can't ever take their photo ever again' and 'I'm a bad Mummy' and I 'shouldn't have lights on my camera'...hahaha.....but their uniform is ready at least....

Boy no.3 starts school tomorrow and I think I'm more nervous than he is. I don't have a photo for tomorrow because it hasn't happened yet, so instead here's his first day at Nursery last September....


Our house has been awful the last couple of days as everyone starts stressing about returning. Do they have everything? Will uniform still fit? Where's my PE bag? Did I do my homework? What sort of Summer will everyone have had?

I have to wrangle the bickerers and find the missing items, sew the handle back on the bag and turn up the little one's trousers, hand out stationery and buy more black tights. I also have to get over the fact I've cried every single time one of mine has gone to nursery or school for the first time, and I'll no doubt cry tomorrow. I'll also cry on Monday when boy no.4 starts nursery, not least because he's my last one, my little baby. I'll probably also cry when boy no.1 moves out for University even though he's in no way a baby. I'm so soft it's laughable.

This time of year always marks the passage of time so clearly, and this year all of the children are mentioning it, so they're obviously feeling it too. We've taken some time out this morning looking at pictures and reminiscing.

In 2017 in only 4 years time we'll hopefully have 3 more at University and boy no.1 will have finished. This is where we were with our lot the same distance backwards 4 years ago in 2009.... I took more than 20 attempts and never got a single shot where everyone was sensibly looking at the camera. I remember taking this photo as if it were last week, I'm stunned at how little and sweet they all look, I thought they were all really grown up at the time.


And what they're up to in 2013 ~ left to right ~ GCSE Exam year, GCSE Exam year, 1st year of GCSE's, 1st year of school, GCSE Options year, 1st year of University....

For all of you just beginning your journey with children and with all those years ahead of you. Just. Don't. Blink.

This year is an epic for us academically and boy no.3 is playing a major part by starting on his first year at school, and like his bigger siblings he'll be taking a packed lunch. Over the past 15 years none of  my children have ever eaten cooked school dinners, so I've prepared around 42 gazillion packed lunches (approx).

I've always felt that sending a tiny 4 year old (even if they are very nearly 5) to school with a huge bag of crisps, a big apple and a sandwich rattling around in a big lunchbox was a bit intimidating and destined to make them get the evil eye from the dinner lady as they're still sitting there 30 minutes later wading through it.







This Bento has two small and one large compartments, and the lids are securely fitting, but still easy for a child to remove. They will keep your foods fresh and airtight, so your prepared fruit won't go brown, and your breads will stay soft. It has a clip on spoon and fork which hopefully won't get lost, and is available in 3 colours - green, blue or pink. There is even a space on the bottom for your child's name.


Bento are becoming popular and are ideal for smaller and more sensibly sized portions, and also encourage us to add more interesting and unusual items that we might not think of, or just don't include because of mess or problems with storage or transportation.

I've chosen to show lunch ingredients my children are used to, rather than a far more exotic and adventurous design like this one by ET Speaks From Home, but if it was a special occasion or an evening meal then I would definitely go more to town.