Finding the perfect summer dress for my beach getaway

I am, quite literally, counting down the days until I will be escaping work, school, swimming lessons, meal times, after school clubs, nursery runs, supermarket trips and more. Bring on the pools, the seaside, the restaurants and the cocktails. I NEED this holiday!

This summer we are taking the girls to the Algarve in Portugal - a first for all of us. We don't very often escape to the beach so we've had to do quite a bit of shopping to choose a summery beach wardrobe for me, for Mr. B. and for the girls.

To find the perfect summer dress for my beach getaway to Portugal, I browsed the holiday dresses and maxi dresses online at JD Williams who assured me that there was something to suit every taste - and they weren't wrong. I hadn't really considered a maxi-dress until I started browsing and then I decided that this blue tile print dress would suit the occasion perfectly, and I'll tell you why.

• I want to pack light. I really don't like having to take a bazillion heavy suitcases on a family holiday so all of my holiday clothes are things I think I can wear equally well in the evening, as in the day. This layer-top maxi dress is smart-casual so I can wear it with a cardigan in the evenings to cover up, or with sandals during the day to keep cool. No need to pack two different dresses for two different occasions!
• This blue maxi dress pairs perfectly with my brand new sunhat which has a streak of blue on it. When I've worn the two together in the sunshine this afternoon, I've almost felt as if I am on my hols already!
• The layer top is naturally slimming. There is a thin line of elastic under the bust to hold the dress in and allow the layer to fall naturally over the chest and it makes what is an otherwise long, straight dress into something more noticeable.
• A strappy dress with no zips or buttons is perfect for pulling on over the top of a swimsuit on your way between pool and apartment. I have a funny feeling I may just live in this dress on holiday!  The straps are adjustable too which means you can make it a perfect fit for you.

I'm sure I'll be sharing lots of holiday snaps over on Facebook and Instagram so watch out for how I style and wear this JD Williams dress this summer.

Disclosure: I was sent this dress in return for my thoughts on summer dresses.

Peppa Pig Summer Holiday Fun

We're getting ready for the long bank holiday weekend and trying to make the most of the last week of our school summer holidays with a sneaky trip abroad.  Holly, who is a big Peppa Pig fan is fully kitted out with Peppa Pig holiday gear to help her enjoy the sunshine.

Check out these fun Peppa and George passport covers and luggage tags to help bring a little bit of magic to the stresses of travelling abroad. Holly and Lara don't yet know we're going away on holiday so we're saving these as a surprise for our journey.

Holly loves her new sunglasses with Peppa on either side and they are perfectly finished off with this hard glasses case which has handles so that Holly can carry it around with her, a bit like a handbag or purse.

If your little one is a water baby then you'll find lots of new toys and accessories in the Peppa Pig range.  At Argos you can find the new Peppa "tweet" design on beach towels and this VERY CUTE hooded poncho towel - Peppa and George can be with you by the poolside.  Holly is very proud of her new goggles and can't wait to play with Peppa and George water squirters, water soakers, both from Zoggs; I think these toys are just as much fun in the bath, or a water tray as they are in the pool.

If you are looking for some frugal holiday activities to fill the bank holiday weekend, you can find lots of printables and craft ideas on the Peppa Pig website at www.peppapig.co.uk/make.

Roald Dahl - My Messy Adventure

If you are looking for a fun idea to entertain the children over the summer holidays, why not let them try making up their own free 'My Messy Adventure' story using the handy online story-creator from Persil at www.persil.co.uk/Roald-Dahl

For the first time ever, some of the best loved  Roald Dahl characters have been brought together in a brand new interactive adventure by Persil, the Roald Dahl Literary Estate and the illustrator, Quentin Blake.

The ‘My Messy Adventure’ story is a tool which helps your child to create their very own Roald Dahl story featuring themselves as one of the main characters who stars alongside The Witches, Matilda or James (of Giant Peach fame).  Each story evolves with your child as they choose options and take photos to fill the story in their own way.  The story is interactive and prompts your child to get up and take photos of things they can see and collect both indoors and outdoors.  Lara found the reading manageable but I think I would recommend it for assisted reading from about 4 years old and self-reading from about 6 or 7.

Making her own My Messy Adventure

The ‘My Messy Adventure’ story can be accessed on a smartphone or tablet or you can access it from a laptop or PC as long as you have access to some stored photos to use as you go along.  Lara preferred using it on the big screen so she used my phone to take the photos she needed to, then emailed them to herself for use from the laptop.

From the very start of the process, Lara was enthralled.  First up, she had to choose a Quentin Blake illustration that looked like her, so that she could appear throughout the story.  Then she set to work taking photos of places, faces and people as the story unfolded.  She kept disappearing out into the garden to collect things for her story - but that's OK, dirt is good, isn't it?

 

We very much enjoyed making a Messy Adventure with Persil and I imagine Lara will want to create a few more over the summer!

Look out for special limited edition Persil Small and Mighty wash packs in store!

20 Kitchen Activities for The Summer Holidays - Part 2

Last week I shared with you the first ten of the Betta Living summer holiday activities from the Kids in the Kitchen guide - lots of different activities that can be done in your own kitchen for as little as 99p. This week features some of the activities that we have most enjoyed doing, and all for a matter of pounds (and no need to worry about the weather).

11. Set Up Shop And Become A Kitchen Retailer
My Girls LOVE to play with their toy food in their toy kitchen and they have a handy "market stall" / puppet theatre but I had never thought about letting the girls set up their own "shop" using the food from our cupboards. The role play and imagination was great to watch and Lara has started showing signs of understanding money; these days she is also able to read the labels of all of the things she sells in her shop. Great rainy day fun that could last for hours!

12. Make Some Papier Mache Mini-Beasts
All you need to make these is a balloon, some ripped up paper and some papier mache glue (that you can make from flour and water, or diluted PVA).  Paste the ripped up paper onto the inflated balloon and leave to dry.  A few days later, come back and paint and decorate your balloon as a bumble bee, ladybird or any other creature you can think of.

13. Play Some Outdoor Games Indoor

Our kitchen is a galley kitchen which makes it rather handy for playing skittles! Who knew?

14. Cool Down With Homemade Ice Lollies

Holly had SO MUCH FUN making homemade ice lollies.  All you need is a flavoured juice or, in our case, Angel Delight and milk!  Our ice lolly moulds (supplied by Betta Living) cost less than £2.50 from Aldi and you can use the moulds again and again.

15. Make Your Own Bunting

Making bunting is a great activity for learning shapes and measurement.  For older children you can get them to sew the bunting.  We cut out paper and card, used a hole punch to make holes to thread through a ribbon and then decorated our triangles with brightly coloured tissue paper as part of our Elmer the elephant parade.  Bunting can make an indoor space seem more bright and fun.

16. Hold Your Own Wacky Races
Place straws in two long lines to create a race track.  Each player puts a ping pong ball or cotton wool ball on the track and then has to blow the ball, using a straw, over the finish line.  Very silly fun for all of the family.

17. Make Your Own Dough

 

What better way to make the most of your kitchen this summer than to get your kids cooking?  My girls love to help in the kitchen.  Making your own dough doesn't have to be complicated, in fact there are some great ready-made bread mixes out there that don't even need proving.  Making dough is messy and fun!  But most fun of all is turning your dough into a pizza afterwards and it is a great way to use up left-overs of lots of different healthy toppings.

18. Time To Scrub And Do The Washing Up
After all that cooking, let the kids do the washing up!  You'll be surprised how much fun washing up can seem to a tiny person who doesn't usually get to do it.

19. Build A Marshmallow Tower
Children of all ages love to build towers.  Build an edible tower using mini marshmallows and cocktail sticks and see how high you can make it!  You can make towers out of all sorts of kitchen equipment such as plastic cups, paper plates and cutlery.

20. Make A Junk Model
I have been collecting toilet rolls, boxes and food trays for a couple of months before the holidays started so that we would have a stash of junk for modelling with.  Lara loves making robots, rockets and boats from junk and then painting them after she has built her creation.

20 Kitchen Activities for The Summer Holidays - Part 1

With our very first 6-week school summer holiday starting today I'm keen to find lots of fun ideas for my 5 year old, Lara, busy and inspired over the long summer break. Kitchen retailer Betta Living has put together a Kids in the Kitchen guide with lots of different activities that can be done in your own kitchen for as little as 99p. We have been trying out a few of the activities and so we though we would share our top ten with you today (don't worry, the rest will come next week!).

Betta Living have found that the cost of entertaining a child over the six week summer holiday can cost over £1000 with family tickets to theme parks and attractions taking up a sizeable chunk of this. For us, as a working family, the cost of childcare over the holidays means that when we aren't working, we need to find fun things to do as a family that don't cost too much. We love some of these fab Kids in the Kitchen ideas which can all be done for around £50 in total and all within the comfort of your own home (so no need to worry about the weather!)

1. Create A Kitchen Garden
As you may know, my girls need little encouragement to get growing but we loved the idea of making a little kitchen garden to live on our window ledge. The girls decorated some little pots with craft materials and we planted a few new seeds - some lavender which should be lovely and fragrant next summer and some salad leaves. We have brought in a couple of our smaller tomato plants, chilli plants and young bean plants to live on the kitchen window too. The girls love the sense of responsibility and ownership of having plants of their own that they have to tend each day.

2. Create Weetabix Friends And Faces
Holly LOVES her Weetabix and she is also a fruit-monster so you should have seen the look on her face when her big sister made her a Weetabix face from fruit!

3. Play The Memory Game
The memory game brings back lots of brilliant memories for me. I'm sure my Mum used to play this at our birthday parties! Place lots of everyday items from the kitchen on a tray and let everyone take a look. Then cover with a tea-towel and remove an item. Remove the tea towel and see who is first to remember which item is missing.

4. Hold a Teddy Bear Tea Party
Lara is very practiced in the art of tea parties. On a sunny day you could host your tea party in the garden on a picnic mat.


5. Weetabix Jenga
Not as easy as it sounds!

6. Cut Out And Decorate Paper Dolls Or Robots

The Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson and Rebecca Cobb is a beautiful book that both of my girls love.  It inspired this activity of downloading a printable paper doll template to colour in and cut out.  If dolls aren't your think then why not make paper robots instead?  You can decorate your dolls with sparkly craft items to make this activity even more fun.

7. Be A Kitchen Scientist
Make your own exploding volcano in your own kitchen.  Sprinkle some baking powder into the base of the container and slowly poured in the vinegar.  Watch the chemical reaction unfold with wonder.  Amazeballs!

8. Create Wooden Spoon Characters
With a few bargain wooden spoons you can create a whole host of puppet characters.  Add paint, wool, ribbon or fabric to really bring your characters to life.

9. Create A Saucepan Band
This is an activity that children of all ages enjoy.  Raid the cupboards for pots and pans of different shapes and materials that will make a range of groovy noises.  Supply your children with two wooden spoons each.  Apply earplugs.  Enjoy.

10. Play Dress Up And Put On A Play
At 5 years old, Lara's imagination is unstoppable. While her younger sister hasn't quite grasped the concept of putting on a show, Lara loved dressing up in all of her dressing up outfits to choose a character and put her drama-club skills to good use with a show for us. We used simple masks from starcutouts.com to allow the girls to create new characters for their show (the story was a little hard to understand but they had great fun.

Follow us on our Summer Road Trip!

A few weeks ago, when Boots challenged me to "say yes to summer", the weather was grey and miserable and I wasn't sure I was ever going to be in the mood for long summer days in the sun but today is a happy day; today we are going on holiday and most definitely saying YES to the summer.  I really hope you will join me and the mellow family over the next 10 days as we share photos and stories from our summer road trip.

Lara saying "yes" to summer !

For those of you who don't already know, Lara, Holly, myself and Mr. B. this evening will be embarking on an epic family summer holiday.  We are driving across France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany to Poland and back over a period of 10 days.  The weather is set to be fine for the next week or so and I'm hoping we will get to see Europe at its best and will have some time to get out and enjoy the sunshine.  Lara can't wait.  Holly has no idea what is about to happen and me... well, I'm really looking forward to it but the excitement is tempered somewhat with a little trepidation.  What have we let ourselves in for?

Tonight we are staying in Ashford near Dover so that we don't have to rush for our channel ferry in the morning.  We are taking a leisurely ferry crossing to Dunkirk and then heading off through northern France and Belgium into the Netherlands (a first for me and the girls) to Eindhoven.  As the week progresses we have plans to visit Celle in northern Germany, the town where I was born. We are spending a long weekend relaxing and attending a family wedding in a fairy tale castle in Walbryzch, Poland before heading back next week via Bavaria and Bonn.

umm... which one shall I take?

There is no doubt that a 2,000 mile round trip over 10 days with an impatient 3 year old and a hungry 3 month old is going to be a challenge.  This is exactly why I'm planning on sharing our travels on the blog and on ParentWheels - to demystify some of the challenges of travelling with kids.  I'll be blogging as often as I can (mobile roaming wifi permitting!) and sharing our tales on twitter as @jumblyMummy and @parentWheels.  Not only will we be pushing our own sanity to the limits with between 4 and 8 hours a day in the car but we will also be putting the brand new Toyota Prius+ 7-seater hybrid car to the ultimate family test.  The Prius+ launches later this month in the UK and we have been asked to put it through its paces on our epic trip across the continent.  Stay tuned to Parentwheels to find out whether it can cope with the demands we place on it!

The biggest demand on the car so far is luggage space.  Have you any idea how much stuff you need to take on holiday for hotel stays with two girls this age???  On the list so far

• Two million changes of outfit for Holly
• Two million changes of outfit for Lara
• Two million nappies, 6 million baby wipes
• As few changes of clothes as we can get away with for me and Mr. B
• Long-lasting suncream, sunhats, umbrellas, raincoats
• Travel first aid kit
• Travel steriliser and bottle (in case of over-indulgence on my part at the wedding)
• Travel cot, inflatable toddler bed, lightweight buggy
• Wedding outfits for us all
• Camera to capture all of our family holiday moments
• Road atlas and phrase books (my polish needs a bit of polishing!)
• Travel money

Boots and St. Johns Ambulance Travel First Aid Kit

To top it off, several of the countries we are visiting have surprising laws about what it is you have to take with you in your car when travelling - I blogged about European Driving Law this week on ParentWheels.  And so to top it all off we have our breakdown kit, breathalyser (?!) and our trusty Boots travel first aid kit which I have supplemented with a few natural first aid products of my own.

So, are you and your family ready for the summer holidays?  Will you be saying "yes" to summer? Have you got a trip you are planning that is more bonkers than ours?  I'd love to hear about your summer plans in the comments below.