Whats in my handbag?

This is an entry to Moneysupermarket whats in your handbag competition. All you need to do is write a blog post about whats in your handbag, the over all winner, which is chosen at random will win a Mulberry Bayswater shoulder handbag, purse and phone case. Six runner-ups will receive a £25 ASOS voucher. Competition closes 1st July. 

I love handbags, I don't have a huge collection, although my husband may disagree. I certainly haven't bought one for a while. The last one I got was a gift for my birthday in October, which is the one I'm using today. Its from River Island and just the right size and style for my at the moment. 

Now I'm not carrying a changing bag around I tend to make the most of it and travel light. I don't have time to re apply my make-up throughout the day so I don't carry tons of make-up.

I think the bag was about £35 and is quite large. Here's a similar version but smaller from River Island.

And this is the contents of my bag. My Prada sunglasses that I bought with my £200 selfridges win about a year ago. My diary, I am so forgetful I can not function without looking in this every day. My phone and keys, a pen. I try and always have a spare hair grip for Millie as she is always losing or pulling out her hair bobbles, so this helps to keep in out of her face. I usually have my blackberry playbook, so I can check emails, work stuff etc. while on the go. And my purse, usually with pennies in!

I got this purse about 3 years ago I think. My son gave my this toy story sticker for my birthday! It has been on there ever since he decided I must have it!

This concealer really is the best ever! It is a tester I nicked it off my stand at work when they discontinued it! I'm not sure what I will do when this one runs out.

Moneysupermarket are trying to highlight just how much people carry around with them including the cost of your handbag, so here's a little breakdown of my costs:

Handbag £35

Purse £20

phone £150 (new price)

Playbook £150

concealer £10

Sunglasses £215

Keys £100 (to replace them?)

Total £680

So there you have it, I also had a load of receipts and sainsburys £5 off your first £60 spend vouchers, (you know what I mean, please don't tell me I am the only one who gets them every time I go shopping), but you don't really need to see them.

What do you have in your bag? Anything unusual or pretty much the same?

Little Birds Nest- #Hungry2Happy Challenge entry

This post is an entry for BritMums’ Hungry to Happy Challenge sponsored by Richmond Mini Meatballs” You can find details here. 

This is another competition from Brit Mums, this time you need to come up with something quick and fun for the children to eat using Richmonds new mini meatballs. Although I did this last week as usual I'm posting on the very last minute.I really need to be more organised with blogging!

Little birds nest made with mini meatballs, this is what you will need:

• Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees
• Chop 1 large onion, 1 stick of celery and 2 cloves of garlic and heat in a pan for 2 minutes
• Add 500g of passata and half a teaspoon of mixed herbs and leave to simmer for 10 minutes
• While that is cooking put the meatballs in the oven and cook the spaghetti (or in my case if you send the husband shopping, linguine)
• After 8 minutes take the spaghetti and meatballs out. Put the spaghetti on the place in a circle to create the nest. Put a dollop of sauce in the middle. Pop a couple of slits in the meatballs and push raisins for eyes (or you can use olives -again hubby when shopping apparently they don't do olives in sainsburys!) and a small triangular piece of carrot for beak.
• Slide the celery behind the nest to create the branch.

This takes about 15 minutes to make and the kids absolutely loved it they ate it so quick and asked if they can have it the next night. They are really good eaters anyway and this is the first time we have got creative like this with food, we will definitely be making more fun things.

Yup- this is with mouthful!

I have a confession... I ate this myself! It was delish, I even put beaks on mine then though what the hell am I doing! I sat down to eat and the boys were going mad asking why my birds didn't have eyes!

#KidsGrowWild After school fun

This post is an entry for BritMums #KidsGrowWild Challenge.

Moneysupermarket.com are running another competition for bloggers - this time they want us to get out in the garden with the kids. Competition ends on the 23rd June so if you want to enter you will have to be super quick. 

We were all really impressed with the gardening kit which consisted of a green bag, nice blue gloves, watering can, lots of seeds, a trowel and a fork.

I bought some fun bright plant pots, we have just turfed our garden so these will look nice up against the fence.

They filled the pots deciding how much compost to put in...

The boys both wanted sunflowers and Millie (mainly because of the big pink flowers on the front) decided to grow pansies.

She also dropped quite a few seeds on the newly turfed. Ooops we are going to have a colourful patch!

 Best of all they liked watering! In the end the whole grass got watered.

Finally we put names in the pots so they can remember who's is who's!

We did this after school today and had a great afternoon they really enjoyed planting and talking about how big their flowers are going to grow. Although they had a pot each I think it encouraged team work aswell they helped each other and shared the tools nicely. It certainly made my job of 'photo taker' very easy!

Thank you Moneysupermarket!

Happy Father's day Daddy

To Daddy...

When we are bigger we want to be just like you....

You are caring and teach us all the best things

You are REALLY daft and pull all the best funny faces

You have lots of patience with us even when you just want 5 minutes 'peace'

You are the comfiest person EVER to fall asleep on, especially when we are doing really boring stuff.

Most of all you are our Super hero

Happy Father's day,

Love from your

Three cheeky Monkey's 

xxx

This is my entry to the John Lewis fathers day competition

Our adventure holiday

My reason for not completing the #BEDM challenge is because I went on holiday. Yes, I knew this before I signed up but I had visions of doing scheduled posts, but that didn't happen, as usual I was far too busy getting everything prepared for holiday.

We went to Brittany in France, to a place called Domaine des Ormes, I have been there many times before and I used to go yearly as a child. The weather was really nice most of the time although we did see some rain. Luckily they now have a heated indoor pool which is brilliant. The place is jam packed with activities and  my children are just about at the age where they can do most of them.

We had a busy day everyday, and made it our mission to go swimming everyday as this is what the children enjoyed best. Most days we got there for opening time and had a really quiet swim (splash) session. We went for long walks, short walks, horse riding, pedalo boats, adventure course, to the beach and to a alligator place. 

You could quite easily stay there for longer than a week but it starts to get tiring. This little fella above was just hanging around one of the ponds, we went to feed the ducks everyday after tea. We used to see alot more of them and they are called Coypu.

The children make holidays so much funner, they really are the best of friends, they are happy and are willing to try anything. I think the only paddy we had was when Millie had to come out of the swimming pool, 2hours in the pool just wasn't enough for her :) Everyone else was just wrinkling up!!

Room for improvement £50 makeover

When I saw the moneysupermarket Room for improvement challenge I had to sign up. I saw it about 2 days before I went on holiday. So I signed up just in time, we were back late Saturday night so Sunday morning I knuckled down. I decided to improvement the boys room. We have been talking about doing something in there for ages.

We have lived in our house for 7 years so it really needed some updating. The budget was £50, I wanted a practical change but I wanted the boys to have input aswell. They both decided they wanted a London room, they are so interested in London since we took them in January. Neither of them wanted Thomas the tank curtains anymore and blue was the specified colour! Also they would like a chalkboard!!

I wondered how an earth I would do all this for just £50, so before I went away I started researching all their requirements. I really wanted to put a door on their toy cupboard too.

Here's a before picture of the room. Its tired and well played in, not to mention very messy. Ahem!

Shopping List

• Blackboard paint  from Wickes £9.99
• Chipboard from Wickes  £11.19
• London sticker set from Ebay £6.99
• Chic shadow Matt emulsion from B&Q £13.33 (we bought 3 chic shadow as this is what we have decided to paint the living room in aswell. It was 3 for 2 so rather than counting this as the free one I have just spread the cost over 3)

Total £51.07

I could argue with this total as we only used half of the chic shadow paint and will use the rest of it in the living room. But I'm sure I can be let off £1.07 ;)

Saturday

First of all I gave it a good tidy up. I cleaned the walls and removed existing old peeling stickers and decorations. I taped up the wall and started to paint chic shadow on the top half of the wall. Dave set to work on making the cupboard door.

The longest job was chipping all the old, peeling paint off the radiator. I didn't actually manage to get it all off but it dark colour hid the botched job.  This is the picture before I set to work.

By time I had done this Dave had made the cupboard door, he used hinges off the old one we threw out and spare ones he found in the shed. I just painted over them so you can't see that they aren't the same kind of hinges! The door knob is from our old kitchen cupboards!

By time we fitted the door, which also took quite a while, the radiator was ready for another coat. I hung the curtains and called it a day.

Sunday

I painted  a coat of blackboard paint, I was quite nervous about doing this because its so dark, there is definately no room for error. I waited to for it dry and added the stickers.

I am so pleased with the results and it turned out so much better than I expected. The room seems so much brighter and airy. The boys love it and so do we!

Here are some before and after pictures:

We are all so pleased at how the stickers look and and the blackboard paint looks so tempting to draw on but you have to leave it 48 hours.

The new curtains really smarten the room up, although the quality isn't the best it doesn't really matter as the black out blind blocks out the light. They are more for decoration.

What do you think, are you impressed with the £50 transformation?