If you follow The Brick Castle on Instagram or Twitter then you may have noticed we're having a bit of fun this Summer using the #MysteryMachineOnTour hashtag, taking photo's of our LEGO Scooby Doo Mystery Machine and Shaggy, Scooby, Fred and the Zombie. We did lose part of The Mystery Machine in the process, but it's been well worth it.


If you missed my review of The Mystery Machine, that went live just before we went on our holiday to the Isle Of Wight. It's the perfect handbag sized model to take on tour..

The Spellbound Forest

I love festivals, my family love festivals. We've been to a fair few between us and we thought we had a good idea of what to expect. We underestimated. It's absolutely brilliant back-to-basics simple fun. Just So Festival is like taking the best bits from the kids field at a grown up festival and multiplying it by 73.


Just So is about playing battleships and pillow fights, balancing stones and plates and people. It's about passing pirate training in the morning and learning the ukelele in the afternoon. Just So is making faces from clay and drying them on trees in the sun, finding fairy houses in the woods and making 3D monsters to scare your brother. Just So is about song and story and magic and music. Poetry and chants and tribes. Just So is about being allowed to be a child.

Autumn will see the return of the Disney On Ice UK tour. The Worlds Of Enchantment Tour will run from 25th September, arriving in Manchester on October 14th. This year for the first time characters from Frozen will be included in the show, alongside Cars, The Little Mermaid and Toy Story.


To celebrate Frozen joining the show we were invited to join some other blogger and journalists and their families and we were asked "do you wanna build a snowman?". It turns out snowman building on a rooftop in Manchester in August is even more fun than it sounds!

It's August, barbeque season is in full swing. Up and down the UK there are people who haven't created anything more complex than 'toast for 2' in the last year, attempting to sufficiently cook a full meal for 30 in the pouring rain, using nothing more than a small fire, a large fork and a comedy apron. But somehow, it's always good...


Drumond Park's Barbeque Party thankfully has weather-resistant plastic food - which isn't burnt to a crisp on the outside and raw in the middle. The barbeque itself is also somewhat cuter...

The latest series of Power Rangers is Power Rangers Dino Charge and the first episode will air on POP on Monday 31st August. In Dino Charge the Power Rangers have to protect the Earth from intergalactic bounty hunters searching for the ancient Energems that were left in the care of dinosaurs. When an asteriod wiped out the dinosaurs the Energems were lost, and it's up to the Power Rangers to find them first. We've been sent some of the new Dino Charge toys to review.

Bandai sure know how to make a parcel look exciting - and although I knew they were sending us Power Ranger Dino Charge Toys to test, I couldn't help but be excited myself when I saw the box....I wasn't quite as excited as my 2 young boys though when they saw it!

We have a young man here who will soon be 7, so it was very handy when I was given the opportunity to work again with Party Bags And Supplies. They do exactly as you'd expect, and save you the job of going to multiple places to find your themed party bag fillings and tableware.

We are reviewing a Themed Party Pack. When it arrives your parcel is really neatly wrapped, with 4 party bags in each brown bag, and tableware below.


Even though Party Bags And Supplies have an immense range of TV and movie themed products ranging from Frozen, Transformers or Jurassic World to Angry Birds, Barbie and Peppa Pig, my son went for one of the non-franchised themes - he chose 'Space Blast'.

The AirMotion Pro has to be the hairbrush with the most exciting name in the world - and it really does deliver a virtually snag-free brushing experience, even when your children brush their own hair. The special design aims to relieve the tension brushing causes, and be much more gentle than traditional brushes. This isn't only good for children, it's good for anyone's hair.


This is a technically advanced hairbrush, and is nicely packaged to reflect that. Inside the box the brush itself is quite different. The handle has a soft touch rubberised coating, and the shape fits really nicely into any size of hand and is quite small, so ideal for children.

A year ago today I woke up to find one of our children was dead. This morning when I woke up, Elspeth was still dead.

She's still dead every morning, so you'd think I'd be used to it by now, but I don't think you can ever get used to it.

My second thought each morning is 'are the other children alive?' and I have to go and check. I dread having to actually go into someone's bedroom to see if they're alive. I hope that if I haven't heard them already, they'll be snoring so loudly that I can hear them through the door, or they'll answer audibly when I shout. I check on the little boys in the night whenever I wake, and I'm pleased if I've seen them in the early hours because I know there's less chance anything happened.

Losing a family member to suicide robs you of so much more than that child. It takes your sleep, your daydreams, your confidence, your trust in things you knew to be true. It takes your understanding of what is normal and moves it to another level. A parent crying is normal, a child screaming because someone has left him alone in the bathroom is normal, counselling is normal, feeling a failure is normal, and having no confidence in anything is normal.

I was asked if I'd like to write a blog post listing the top 10 essentials in my bag. This is a fairly easy job for me right now because I'm still travelling light after my hernia operation and keeping my handbag contents to a minimum - yep, you heard right. My handbag currently weighs less than a small bison. It's a miracle....

1. Phone. It has to be. It's my camera, my contact with all of our kids, my social media, my email, my torch, my news and my GPS - plus I'm sure around 400 other things. Just occasionally I make a call on it too...


2. Purse. Teenagers can smell from 40 metres whether a purse is empty or not. Try to change all of your notes into small coins as quickly as possible because they've actually been known to refuse shrapnel on the grounds that it's 'too heavy' or 'I'm not taking a wallet'. This does leave you with a massively full purse, but you always have change for parking and shopkeepers love you when you pay for your shopping in 20p's......maybe.

3. Keys. Don't leave home without them...

Scruffs are makers of hardwearing clothes that are ideal for workwear. They're also ideal for camping, gardening, home mechanics and whatever else you want to get up to. Plenty of pockets, reinforced material and easy to wash.


We've reviewed Scruffs clothes before, a brilliant sweater that looks as good today as it did then, and it's had a heck of a lot of wear and wash, and a lovely bright blue t-shirt. It seemed only right to bring out my eldest son as model again...