Today Elspeth is not 18.

She won't be opening presents from her mates, or choosing what to buy with her birthday money. Her brothers won't be getting excited like little brothers do and waking everyone up early.

There won't be any post, no visitors, no giggling, no laughter.

She won't be taken out for her first legal drink by her Dad, and she won't get her first 2am passout.

She won't ever be driving us home.

She won't be starting the rest of her adult life and all that it holds onto.

She never got the chance to realise that being an adult can be great. She couldn't wait long enough.

We wish she could have waited, and we will eat cake, and we will always miss her...

This half term it seems everyone is pulling out the stops to cheer up what is likely to be yet another windy, rainy week. If you want to get out and about in Manchester this half term then here are a few places you can go which won't break the bank....

Manchester Area:

Imperial War Museum North, Salford Quays, Manchester have Potato or Pike? for half term. Pack your sandwiches and dust off your pike. Discover what life was like in the Home Guard – also known as ‘Dad’s Army’. A week of free family activities this half term at IWM North between 13 and 21 February. Entry is free.

Storytime Magazine has the aim to move away from 'free gifts' and TV tie-ins, and deliver good old fashioned tales. Myths and legends from around the world and from throughout the history of writing, side by side with brand new children's stories and poems written by unknown authors or Children's Laureates.


I love to hear my children read to me. I feel waves of pride listening to my 5 and 7 year olds put on voices, pay attention to exclamation marks and 'sound out' those tricky words as they stride through yet another story. They have a love of books and reading which started before they were even able to sit up, as we sat them on our knee and shared picture books and cloth books with them.

Just as reading together is great for babies, it's great for my children now. We read most nights, but the difference is that we take it in turns. I love hearing them read as much as they still love to hear me read. Storytime magazine is perfect for bedtime reading together for children aged 2 to 11.

Cleo is  released on DVD and Digital Download this weekend. Based on 'The Dog Who Stopped The War', the story focusses on a group of children living in a village in Canada. Snowy mountain ranges and beautiful scenery surround them as they play.

If you were expecting a cute tale about a fluffy dog named Cleo then think again. Okay, the eponymous dog might well be huge, fluffy and cute, and the movie might be full of laughs and jokes, but this is also a genuine 'coming of age' tale which covers some serious ground.


Over the school holidays the children's play gets a little competitive, they split into two groups and they take a snowball fight to it's limits, one side building the most amazing snow fortress you could imagine. As they progress through the holidays they continue the battle, led by their two leaders General Luc and Marc. Cleo is Marc's dog.

It's Pancake Day! Hurrah! And every year I stand in front of my oven for far too long cooking a mountain of pancakes for my large family, and at the end when everyone is full and the last orange has been squeezed and the chocolate sauce wiped away, we say "we should do that more often".

The UK is rare in that we eat pancakes, or crepes, but the majority of us only on one day a year. Pancakes can be part of a healthy varied diet, they're an excellent carbohydrate base and you can top them with pretty much anything you want.

The Bratz Dolls are back this Spring with 'Super Styles And Sounds', 3 different ranges with a very 'pop' feel to them! Bratz Remix, Selfie Snaps and Festival Vibes feature the regular Bratz characters (Cloe, Jade, Yasmin, Sasha and Raya) in their usual over-the-top bright and colourful style.

Over the weekend we spent a lot of time on the sofa watching movies, and one of them was Girlz 4 Life, the new DVD from LEGO Friends. We've watched quite a lot of LEGO movies over the years, and they're always pretty watchable for the whole family, with the occasional joke for the adults thrown in.


In Girlz 4 Life the LEGO Friends (featuring the regular characters - Olivia, Stephanie, Emma, Mia and Andrea) are doing well and have a great new song 'Girlz' ready to earn them fame and fortune.

A famous pop star called Livi comes to stay in Heartlake City and her manager hears Girlz. she knows that Livi will do very well with it and steals it, saying she wrote it herself. Livi's version of Girlz soars into the charts and she becomes even more famous, leaving the LEGO Friends cheated. They need to let everyone know that it's their song, they want to get it back, and they turn to Livi herself for help.

My partner and I have always marked Valentine's Day. With our large family and a lack of local relatives I actually don't think we've been out together for Valentine's Day since 2008, but we have had some lovely candlelit meals alone in the kitchen. We swap cards and small gifts and that's been our limit until now...

This year I've been asked by several companies if I wanted to have a look at their products for Valentine's Day. I felt like spoiling myself and my partner, so I picked the ones I liked and said yes. I just hope he doesn't actually read this...

Snapfish asked if I wanted to look at their personalised gifts, so I made a card for my partner and a photo mug with a nice picture of me on it. My partner saw I was making him one and he made one for me too, proving he really is just as romantic as I suspected...

When I was offered the chance to review a brand new collectible children's toy that is sticky, horrible, and called Fungus Amungus, I just knew my 2 little boys would love it. We were sent our parcel covered in yellow and black striped 'CAUTION' tape, and inside was all the protective equipment necessary to open the parcel and examine the contents.

I'm pleased to say that this year we've been chosen by Wilko to be Wild Bird Bloggers. We're really lucky in that we have a quite large garden, and although we're in a town, we have countryside very nearby. We have a lot of birds who visit and live in our garden.


Wilko sent me a multi-purpose nesting box, a wooden bird table, a cage seed feeder and a bag of wild bird seed mix. When the boys came home from school they were genuinely excited and had a lot of questions about where we were going to put everything.