Reviews

On yer bike.

May 3, 2013 by Merry 2 Comments

Max and I don’t do a brilliant job of switching off from work; our weekends usually involve something, either sat at a computer in snatched moments between dancing runs or stock uploads or sorting out something or other while passing the unit. I work partly every day if I’m home in the week and even if we decide to do a days work together from home, it can be a bit unsatisfactory, snatched between working and doing family stuff. We both work a lot of hours, whether at the unit or from home and we don’t leave enough proper switch off time. When you add 4 of 5 weeknights taking kids to things, all Saturday driving to dancing and gym and back and Sunday involving rugby training (seriously), we don’t get enough quality family time. It could be far worse but I do miss a day out together. Or even a day in!

Anyway, yesterday we decided that the 5 homebirds would have a proper day off, once the business essentials were done in the morning.

We decided to do this. It’s been ages since we all went on a bike ride together. For ages I would use it as an excuse to work while Max and the girls went and then there was pregnancies and then Bene and all in all, we haven’t. But a few weeks ago we got sent the bike seat you can see for review and that’s made it possible. To start with Max just took him out with the girls, but yesterday we all hopped back on our bikes and went off to Ferry Meadows.

We are lucky to have a long, flat, road free place to run and cycle right by us and so a quick trip out with a picnic is far more possible than we regularly achieve. Granted I don’t really like it, it’s all a bit moanufactured and new, but it is there. While I was taking Bene for his jabs, Max and Joey got a picnic ready, Maddy grabbed a ball and when we got back, off we went.

Having been out on it a few times, Bene has really fallen in love with riding. He brings us his helmet all the time and chunters away excitedly when he’s in the seat. We stopped for picnic lunch and to play with a ball but basically he just wanted to be off again, as you can see.

He rides with Max as I’m just not confident enough to have him on mine (I never have with any of them) and just loves it. I must admit I was really dubious about a front carry bike seat, it just felt wrong, but having seen it now, I’ve completely changed my mind. Back is more conventional but truthfully, if there is any chance of an accident, wouldn’t you rather be curling yourself around you child in that split second than hoping they survived behind you?

He’s even fallen asleep in it and Max could hold his head gently with one upper arm.

We had such a nice couple of hours, really restorative. Goodness I’ve missed the sun.

I hadn’t really intended to do the review in this post but since I’ve waxed about the guppy seat anyway, I’ll finish off. We love it. It’s freedom, it feels companionable and safe, it is incredibly easy to slot on and off the bike on the front (and will fit on the back too at a squeeze, there wasn’t masses of leg room on Max’s bike) and because it is light and quite upright it doesn’t take a lot of space to store either and at £50, it feels well worth the money and will take him till he’s 2 1/2 stone, which should be when he’s around 3 I think.

He was pretty tired afterwards too. All that riding and thinking you are in charge takes it’s toll 😉 And we all had smiles on our faces. It was one of those perfect family moments we’ve not had enough of recently.

Disclosure: We were sent 1 Polisport Guppy Bike Seat and 2 helmets for the purpose of this review.

This post first appeared on Patch of Puddles.

How not to eat a large box of chocolates.

March 6, 2013 by Merry 5 Comments

You might have seen these pop up on my instagram feed?

Hotel Chocolat very kindly sent them too me to review. I was very grateful (very hormonal, very over tired and so VERY grateful!)

The children were thrilled. They really like chocolate. Very much.

But.

Erm….

I like it more.

And I was VERY hormonal.

So I ate them. Quite a lot of them. With Max's help and I did save four for the girls.

But… Well, it was a Mother's Day selection.

For mothers.

With blueberry chocolates and some salted pralines and an extremely nice champagne one.

Not really child chocolate. Would have been a shame to waste them on minors.

UNFORTUNATELY…

Two of the girls have instagram accounts.

And so I got busted.

Big time.

…

I even ate the four I saved.

And told Facebook.

Oops.

Ps. You absolutely HAVE TO TRY THE LEMON ONE.

I was sent these chocolates free for review. All social media bloopers in regards to my daughters lost innocence about their mother and her sweetie greed were my own. As are my views.

Review: Puzzler World 2013 DS Game

March 2, 2013 by Merry 1 Comment

This review is brought to you by Maddy.

Puzzler world 2013 is unlike professor Layton and those kind of games, the puzzles in this game are things like sudoku and word searches and spot-the-difference. So it’s what you need if you’re, say, in front of the telly but would really rather do some brain challenging puzzles.

In the main menu there are three files (so the game can be shared by three different people), when you create a file to mark it as your own you can write your initials or draw a little patten like I did, then it’s time to start puzzling!

Once your on your file there are five opinions, puzzle mode (where you can do puzzles), challenge mode (where you do the same puzzles but much, much harder!), the trophy room (well, I hope you can guess that one), saved puzzles (where you can put puzzles you saved in the middle of doing the so you can finish them later) and the fruit machine (where you can try to win coins).

In puzzle mode there are 560 puzzles! There is Sudoku, Spot the Difference, Hangman, Wordsearches, Chain Letters, silhouette games, maze and linking games to name a few. I really liked Wordsearch and Sudoku. It makes a great set of games for the car and to help you make your brain work faster.

The only down side I find in it is that there are only brief instructions so its hard to understand some of it but apart from that its a great game! 8.5/10!

Review: Maddy tries out the ZU3D Animation Pack

January 7, 2013 by Merry 1 Comment

You may remember that Maddy loves to model and animate. A while back she created her first Lego animation using my iphone and windows movie maker. That prompted us to buy her a camera and small tripod but she’s a bit of a perfectionist and could never get it as accurate as she wanted it to be. Then she saw an animation pack she quite liked at a friends and was desperate for something similar. SO when ZU3D asked us try out their pack, which includes webcam, software which editing and tutorials, plasticine, a jungle scene and a green screen, I had a feeling she was going to love it. Read on to hear what Maddy thought as this is her review.

What Maddy Did – dictated by Maddy herself.

When I first got the software set up, I thought it looked so easy to use that I wouldn’t need to use the tutorial videos so I made a smurf video. It’s a smurf rock band performing. I didn’t know how to use the green screen because I hadn’t watched the tutorials so I just used it as a background. The models are plastic models. It was easy to work out how to take the pictures and I moved each model a bit at a time. I hadn’t done the sound tutorial so I didn’t add music. After I had done this one I wanted to use the tutorials to find out how to do the things I didn’t know how to do.

So I watched the green screen tutorial and decided to make the pokemon plasticine video; this was an idea from something I did with a cousin a while back. With this software you can use any cloth as a background in any colour; this was a good thing because my model had some of the bright green colour in it and it would have made part of it disappear! Once you’ve shot the screen you can edit the ‘green screen’ and rub out some of the effect. You can even rub some of your disappeared picture back in! Then you can add any background you want.

With the green Pokemon I reused quite a few frames; this is really easy to do in the software. With this software if you break or knock over your model you can use a ghost of the previous frame so you can get everything back into the right place.This was easy to do. I had to use something to hold up the red Pokemon on his hind legs but I could rub that out afterwards. I also edited a leg back in, using a lump of plasticine as one of his legs didn’t show up right!

On to the Lego animation. I came up with the idea for this after watching the sound recording tutorial and after watching a couple of other videos. Previous movies have been hard to keep still and get the lighting right but the camera in this pack makes it easy to keep things still and the lighting works really well. The ghosting helps lots but I also stuck everything, including the camera, down with sellotape. There are several hundred frames in the film and it was much quicker and more effective than anything I have done before. You can overlap sounds and record into the software and I did my own sound effects with thew piano and recorded all the voices.

Also, my actual Lego room was very small, but I made it look much bigger by moving the camera angle around!

Maddy gives the ZU3D 9/10 and it’s only not 10/10 because she hasn’t done all the tutorials yet. There is loads to learn, the tutorials are really clear and inspired her lots. We are really grateful to them and I think a new career is on it’s way! We think the ZU3D (that’s an affiliate link) is well worth the £59.99 but you know, don’t buy it through the affiliate link unless you have to, go direct to their own shop and save them the 3rd party fees and the country the corporation tax 😉

Disclosure: we were sent this software free for review but opinions are our own. Maddy, who is 12, used the software and hardware entirely on her own and my help was confined only to helping her activate the external webcam on the computer. The words above are her dictated own, typed by me and with a bit of editing for written word help.

Review: Mini Club Baby Clothes from Boots

November 25, 2012 by Merry 3 Comments

Last time I had small children, the Mini Club range from Boots had not really begun; it came in just as they were all getting older and had turned feral, making only cheap and cheerful throwaway clothes worth while. I’ve been eyeing up some of the outfits recently and so I was thrilled that Bene was offered some outfits to try out. He’s not often over dressed but I have enjoyed indulging up him occasionally.

We had to wait for him to grow into the out split I optimistically sized him up as needing and then had to wait for 2 lots of sneezy, snotty, squirty germs to pass. But here he is, sporting his jeans and top.

He doesn’t get to wear shoes often and was slightly bemused by these, though he thought trying to get them off again an excellent game 😉 (not the entirely intentional, well placed, product brand placement in the photo there, I took ages setting that up. Ahem.)

The shoes have a semi solid sole and a fluffy insides, easy to adjust hook and loop closing s and a lovely checked lumberjack design. They go with this hat (which is £7).

He did not approve of the hat. I liked it but as Bene has the family ‘enormous bonce’ he may get away without wearing it for long. It’s quite snug, so if your children are similarly big headed, you should go for a size up too 🙂

The jeans are great, fit a cloth bum under them and stay up through much climbing, clambering, crawling and wriggling. I had an overwhelming moment of melt at the dinosaur top too, which is just very sweet. The fabric is lovely quality and well stitched and at £6, a quality world away from similarly priced supermarket clothing.

We were also sent this lovely dungarees set for when he’s bigger. It’s similarly great quality, with lovely detail and a sturdy feel to the fabric. We will need to find a posh date to go on to wear it.

I have to say, the boys in this family get the best review products… I think it is time the girls had some fun 🙂

Disclosure: we were sent these items for review. All opinions are my own, as is the very nice box they came in. The girls stole the pretty ribbon it was tied up with.