We're embracing the 1970s on this week's Ladybird Tuesday. Bedtime Rhymes was published in 1977 and even the illustrations in the inside cover and really take you back to the era of flares and platform shoes. The book is a collection of rhymes and poems, some of which have a bedtime or night theme to them, and others which just don't at all! Rather than the standard nursery rhymes you instead get a mix of well known poems from the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and others where I've not heard of either the poem or poet before. One of my favourite poems of all time is also ... read more
Making Red Ted Art’s Halloween Jam Jar Lanterns
It may not happen as often as I'd like it to, but the days on which I'm organised enough to do some proper crafting with Little Miss C are days that I do just love. Nothing beats her excitement in seeing something being created in front of her eyes, and when it actually looks like the picture in the book or on my laptop then she's jumping up and down fit to burst. There are so many great blogs featuring kids' craft projects, but the one I go back to time and time again is Red Ted Art. I've blogged before about the book version of Red Ted Art and this is what I turned ... read more
Octupus’s Garden – Ringo Starr and Ben Cort
When I first heard that there was going to be a children's book version of the Beatles song Octopus's Garden I was a little bit sceptical as to quite how it was going to work. I mean, we all know the song, but just how would a child relate to the lyrics in printed form? It was back in 1968 when Ringo Starr first composed Octopus's Garden after the captain of Peter Sellers' yacht told him about how octopuses trawl the sea bed looking for shiny stones and other objects that they then put in front of their caves, like a front garden. The idea is rather cute ... read more
Ladybird Tuesday: Tales of King Arthur
A bit of a change on Ladybird Tuesday this week as rather than focus on a single book, I'm actually featuring a couple of books from series 740 (Classics) which are both from the Tales of King Arthur sub-series. I recently came across The Deeds of the Nameless Knight and The Knight of the Golden Falcon and other stories in a charity shop and to be honest I'd not seen these books at all before and wasn't really sure how they fit in with the Ladybird series. Written by Desmond Dunkerley, who was also responsible for other books in series 740 about Robin Hood, the King Arthur ... read more
September Tassimo Challenge – and grab yourself a machine for just £45
As part of the Tassimo blogger network I get sent a monthly blogger challenge and September's was one quite close to my heart. Kenco teamed up with Macmillan Cancer Support on the 27th September to stage the World's Largest Coffee morning and Tassimo challenged their bloggers to put on a Tassimo coffee party. They even sent us a lovely box of goodies to help us. If you're wondering about the tea spoons and sprinkles then they also sent us a link to a brilliantly simple set of instructions for making chocolate spoons. Now, I don't know if it's just a ... read more
Shiny Pennies & Grubby Pinafores – Winifred Foley
A bit of a mad week means that I'm a bit behind where I want to be on book reviews right now. Children sleeping a bit better (hope I've not just jinxed that!) and a need to shut my brain off from thinking about other stuff before going to sleep means that I'm actually reading more that I have done in ages. Back for my birthday I was lucky enough to be given some National Trust gift vouchers and as I always love the selection of books they have in their gift shops that's exactly what I headed towards. I picked up a copy of Shiny Pennies And Grubby Pinafores to go ... read more
A fishy update…
It's just over a month now since I wrote about setting up our new aquarium from Swell, so I thought it about time to let you know how we are getting on and tell the tale of finally getting some aquatic residents in our tank. Mr C has become the main fish keeper in the house (whilst I'm just in charge of feeding them!) so I'll let him do the story-telling this time... We took a sample of water (in a baby food jar) with us to our local trusted fish shop, where they tested it for free and declared it fit for fishy habitation. Water testing is important, and becomes more so once ... read more
Little Miss C’s interpretation of the Kid’s Capture the Colour Competition
Little Miss C has always enjoyed having a go at taking photographs with our camera or phone. Nearly a year ago I even published on here some of the photos she took whilst in the doctor's waiting room. Letting a three year old have free run with a camera is still something slightly scary though, especially when she's insisting on taking hold of your phone to take a photo of the ducks at the park - especially as she seems to insist on holding the phone out over the water to get a better picture. I was therefore delighted when I heard about the TravelSupermarket.com Kid's Capture the ... read more
Ladybird Tuesday: British Wild Animals
I regularly talk to people about my vintage Ladybird collection and one subject that seems to come up time and time again are the natural history books that they used to publish. Loads of people seem to remember not only the Natural History series (number 536) but also the later Conservation series (number 727). Strangely I don't seem to have written about many of there here on Ladybird Tuesday yet, but I hope to rectrify that by this week looking at British Wild Animals from series 536. Originally published in 1958 British Wild Animals was written by George Cansdale and the ... read more
One Thousand
I'm not one for marking blog anniversaries in any big way, but when I noticed via my blog dashboard earlier this week that I'd published by 1000th post here on Being Mrs C it did make me stop and think. A huge amount has happened in my life since I started this blog over five years ago, and I find it really interesting when I look back at some of my earlier posts to see what I was doing then, and what was making me smile back then. Over that time I've stopped working and devoted my time to looking after our family, but the economic situation here has also changed a huge amount ... read more