Peppa Pig's Sports Day App - Review

 

 

NEW PEPPA PIG APP BECOMES AN INSTANT BEST SELLER ON THE APP STORE

Just as London is still in the grip of sport fever with the Olympics just finished and the Para Olympics starting a new Peppa Pig app has come out and it's a sporty one! Peppa Pig's Sports Day allows Peppa fans to join the sporting fun by competing in their very own Sports Day event this summer.

Now available to download for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch from the iTunes App Store, this fun sporting app offers Peppa Pig fans a variety of action-packed and fun-filled activities - guaranteeing hours of interactive family fun.

With single and multiplayer game play options; young players can participate in SIX different sporting and creative games, which include an Obstacle Race, Long Jump, Tug of War and Making Rosettes.

The app also features an additional bonus sticker book where players collect virtual stickers of their favourite characters throughout each game and can arrange them in a Gymnasium, Football Pitch or Basketball Court scene. Featuring original characters, music and sound effects from the smash hit TV show – Peppa Pig’s Sports Day is a must have addition for any Peppa Pig fan’s app collection!

 

 

What did Isla think? She's played it a lot since we got it but unsurprisingly she's more into the making ice-cream game (she'd obviously rather that it was real ice-cream!) and making rosettes! She loves it - it's like the Peppa's Party app - she likes making the birthday cake most over playing the party games. She also likes the bonus sticker book so she can make her own Peppa Pig scenes. I think these apps are fairly priced - this one is £2.99 and I can guarantee that it will keep Isla quiet while I'm cooking dinner or in the car for instance. The only thing I would say is that it's making me really wish we had an iPad as the games would be so much better played on one of those for the bigger screen that you could play it on. It doesn't spoil Isla's enjoyment though as she doesn't know what an iPad is - it's only her mummy that knows and would really love one! She's only played it on her own so far so we've yet to play it as more of a competition, which might make it more fun for her. All in all this game gets the thumbs up.

The Peppa Pig’s Sports Day app is now available for £2.99 from the App Store or at www.itunes.com/appstore 

 

 

 

We were sent a code in order to download this app free of charge, but this review was written honestly. 

 

 

 

Counting our Pennies

In the last couple of weeks I've realised we need to try not to spend as much money. I don't mean that I'm out shopping all the time but there a couple of cost saving exercises I've been meaning to put in place since I went back to work in April and I've decided enough is enough. The two things I mean to tackle this week are my train fares and stopping buying lunches.

Train fares: since I went back to work I've been buying daily travel cards. This is very stupid. A daily card costs £15.80. A weekly card costs £53.40. I travel to London 4 days a week so you can see I'm over spending by £9.80 a week if i buy daily ticket. What are my reasons for doing this? Well there aren't any good ones. Simply I lost my photocard that I'd had for 15 years and I haven't gone and got a new one! Excuses like I keep forgetting or I don't want to be late back to the kids for sorting it out. Pure idiocy so I plan to get the photocard tomorrow and then buy the more economical travel card. It might turn out a monthly or annual season ticket will be better but if I do that I need to think things through in terms of taking holiday and therefore not using it or the other thing with season tickets is it may not be good economy if the kids get ill and I'm not using it. Getting to work used to be so simple pre-kids there were never these ifs and buts. I got a annual season ticket and that was that. Don't even get me started on the cost of train travel. How rail companies can justify price hikes I have no idea, I don't see vast improvements in the service and we're not all getting pay rises (certainly no pay rise for me this year).

Lunches: another frivolous use of money. Lunch from a sandwich shop can cost £5 a day. £3/£3.50 for a sarnie, £1.50 for a drink. £5 gone in the blink of an eye. It's Pret a Manger's fault for making sandwiches that are TOO NICE and there are 5 of their shops within 2 minutes of my office! London is one big sandwich shop these days, thing is it's really hard not to buy lunch everyday as everyone else does it, I'll be surrounded by everyone with their delicious Indian Summer wrap or my favourite Falafel sandwich and I'll be drooling. It has to stop though. And actually it was meant to stop today, but I left the frigging homemade sandwich at home on the table. Grrr! I blame Noah for making me wake up too early and not be alert enough to remember the sandwich! Anyway, enough of blaming my defenceless 1 year old. Its not his fault I'm spending £20 a week on lunch (£80 a month, £900 a year - gasp that is too shocking to ignore) and its going to stop this week. Thank goodness I've knocked the morning coffee habit on the head as well, or I'd be adding another £10 a week to my work day refreshment bills!

So these are my two most pressing cost saving exercises and I'll give a little update on how they go next week, if I've done what I promise then we'll start to be quids in!

Hello Canvas - Review

Our living room has had a welcome addition to the walls this week. We received the offer of putting any photo on to canvas from a company called HelloCanvas. I’d wanted to do this for sometime so I said yes and didn’t take long to decide that I would use one from our family photo shoot when Noah was 6 months old. It’s so easy these days to just leave our photos on our laptops and do nothing with them, they sit in a digital prison almost, so it felt nice to set this one free!

The canvas is 20 x 28 inches and would cost £39, the delivery is free, and it comes super quick, within 3 working days if you order before 4pm. I love our canvas and will definitely look into getting more, maybe some smaller ones to accompany it. The quality is 100% and it's already received compliments. The kids are also rather taken at being up on the wall!

If you want to check out HelloCanvas, go to www.hellocanvas.co.uk

They are also on twitter @hellocanvas

We were sent this canvas for free in exchange for this post, but I can 100% vouch for the quality of this product and would recommend HelloCanvas if you're considering getting one of your photo memories transformed on to canvas.

We ♥ Lollibop (Review)

We LOVE Lollibop. This was Isla the day before Lollibop getting exicted about going.....

It definitely lived up to hers and my expectations. I was sure that it was going to be a better day than last year when we went with Noah who was only 3 weeks old and it poured with rain the whole 3 hours we were there. I think we were a little ambitious that day and I decided this time round that we would leave the OH and Noah at home and go with Isla and my best friend and her son Samuel. I felt a bit guilty but I know that Noah will have a top time next year. With both the kids being 3, they were old enough to enjoy the shows and also meant we didn't have to lug all the baby bits if we'd brought the littlies with us.

We were really relaxed about what we saw and what we tried to do there. I think going with the flow of the day is the best policy really as you will never be disappointed. We didn't queue for anything, we bypassed anything that had one as there were so many other things to do that didn't require waiting. The only thing we didn't do that I know Isla loves is get her face painted, because we didn't want to wait but there were lots of face painters and to be fair the queue was never really that long.

First up, we saw Waybuloo in the Lollipalladium. Lau Lau and Yo Jo Jo were busy on the stage showing the Cheebies some top Yoga moves. It was really packed full of fans of these big eyed Piplings! We also were pleased to see that Samuel seemed to be no longer scared of big characters as he knows it's only a person in there - all the prepping the previous week by his mum paid off!

After Waybuloo we came across a big tent where the kids could make things. Isla and I sat down at a table being run by The Little Angel Theatre Company and she made an owl puppet from a brown paper bag. It required her to use glue. This is good in her book. The more glue the better. It was hard to actually get her to leave the table and stop applying glue and more decoration to her owl. Finally I got her to STEP AWAY FROM THE GLUE....this is her creation

At that point the rain started! It had got so humid that it had to happen but it was only for 15 minutes or so and it meant that we ducked into a couple of tents that we probably wouldn't have done otherwise, Samuel had great fun doing 3 circuits of a track on a balance bike and then we were in time to see Dee-Li and Nok Tok from Waybuloo and listen to a story in the Lollibook tent. It was lovely. All the kids rushed to see them at the front and then settled down on the rugs to hear the story.

My friend's eye got caught by the tent selling juggling, plate spinning and diablo equipment and in the past she was a dab hand at 'poi' - even doing it with fire sometimes - I caught her on film, she thinks she was a bit rusty but I could never master it and I think she looks pretty cool! What do you think?

Next we caught a bit of Stavros Flatly on the main stage, they were getting a party atmosphere going for sure! From there we went to the 3ft and under area and the kids had a bit of a run around on the soft play. Again this was great to get them (and us) out of the sun.

We headed back to the Lollipalladium next and watched The Gruffalo, both kids were captivated by it and were joining in with the shouting out in the audience. The actors in it were brilliant and I thought the way it has been adapted with songs is great. Isla and I are going to see the show in September in Guildford so I can't wait to see it again in the comfort of a theatre (i.e. without Isla sitting on my legs making them go dead!).

We had top fun at The Village Green, a brilliant area with a steady flow of great street entertainers. There were bean bags and deck chairs and some much needed shade. This was towards the end of our day and we needed a sit down. We saw Mr Armitage and Mr Shanks, a great act centred around all things toilet humour. Isla particularly liked when they made a member of the audience wear a potty on his head, she could not stop giggling. One of the guys also blew up a rubber glove over his head - a trick I've not seen since my Uni days and the inflatable of choice then was a condom....

Fun with a Marigold glove and spot the guy with the potty on his head...

Our final Lollibop moments were watching Mister Maker. The kids love this bloke and as far as I could tell from over hearing a couple of mums, so do the ladies, hahahaha! After that all we had to do was buy a promised helium balloon for each of them and head off tired and happy homewards.

Thanks Lollibop, we had a super time, hope to see you next year!


We were given a free family ticket to attend Lollibop, but this has in no way influenced my review - we did indeed have an excellent time.

Plum Baby Cookery School - Stage 3

Check out this Plum Baby Cookery School Video to see Beverly Glock making the recipe for the fabulous Sweet Cape Curry Recipe! It really is delicious and easy to make.

London 2012 - Do You Feel Inspired?

I've really felt the lack of Olympics on the TV. It's awful actually – the return of Eastenders and a load of other dreary shite. I’m sorry but it is. It’s meant to be entertainment. Anyway I digress. Before the Olympics started, right back when the tickets were released I was very cynical about the whole thing, all the things that were publicised about being irritating about it I did indeed find irritating, you could only purchase tickets with a Visa credit card, you had to put yourself down for untold number of events or you didn’t have a chance of getting a ticket, London would be unbearable with all the visitors, the cost escalating etc etc. As it happened I registered and then just couldn’t be bothered to buy any. Boy do I regret that decision now!

I can pinpoint exactly when my interest in the Olympics started and it was literally the day before the opening ceremony. I’d seen almost everyone I knew on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram capturing photos of the Olympic Torch. Up until that day I could not see the point. Why bother turning up to see a flame?? What’s the excitement in that? But then on a Friday afternoon I found myself tracking the torch online – watching a little dot travel around a map of London and I realised that I WANTED TO SEE IT! It was coming nearby to work and I set off with my laptop on my back, handbag and a bag of groceries. I got to Shaftsbury Avenue and……IT HAD JUST PASSED!!! I was a bit disappointed and made to walk to the train station and then I changed my mind and decided that I REALLY WANTED TO SEE IT. So I made like a hare and chased down Charing Cross Road and made it to Trafalgar Square where I saw……THE TIP OF THE FLAME. Not the torch, just the very hint of fire amongst a huge crowd, and this was with me standing on tip toes. Trafalgar Square was as you can imagine, very crowded. I tried to convince myself that this was enough, but realised it still wasn’t so I continued to be a torch stalker and ran down Whitehall where I eventually caught up with it just outside Downing Street. I was so happy and I couldn’t really explain why. My legs were like jelly (probably from carrying 2 stones in luggage) and my grin was from ear to ear, I looked like a proper lunatic. And from the moment that I captured my torch photo I really couldn’t wait for the games to start.

I paid homage to Box Hill and took photos of the road!

The opening ceremony was AMAZEBALLS and the first sport I watched was the men’s cycling road race where I was so disappointed for Mark Cavendish (I've got a bit of a crush on him...) and our team, I loved watching it though as it went all through the Surrey Hills which is close to where my parents live The pace picked up a few days on and we started winning medals and every evening there were just new and amazing things to watch. People who train and work so hard to accomplish their dreams were on our screens. Day after day I saw and heard of people going to the Olympic venues and having such fun and I really wished that I’d realised what a big deal this was for London way back when everyone else did! The venues looked so brilliantly crafted on our screens, the British weather held out most of the time and the vibe of our country was unbeatable, it felt like everyone was behind Team GB.

I have to say that when the kids were around it was pretty hard for myself or the OH to watch very much of it as Isla kept saying ‘it’s boring’ – she’s only 3 and she’s already saying that! However she did like the ‘nastics’ and we have that saved on the Sky planner so she can watch Beth Tweddle and do her own version of it – very funny as well I might add. I love that she found one sport that she connected with even at her very young age and I think that goes to show how far a reach the London 2012 games had and how perhaps it will inspire younger generations. The over-riding message I gathered from these Games is that hard work and dedication will help you to realise your dreams.

Now the Games are over but we now have the Para Olympics to look forward to and I’m very excited to be able to say that I’m going. I can’t wait to soak up some of the Olympic atmosphere and check out the venues that I saw on TV for 2 weeks. My hope is that this feel good feeling we have in Great Britain right now is for the longhaul and we don’t slip back to the doom and gloom, only we have the power to harness the positivity and make it last.

Silent Sunday