Party Bags & Supplies: Review & Giveaway (Closed)

We're at the start of party season in my house. Over the next 3 months we will celebrate my birthday, my husbands birthday, wishing my brothers happy birthdays from across the pond and we will be celebrating many special little people's birthdays all the way up until Baby Girl's 2nd birthday on August 21st.

I do love an event. So being that it's the lead up to summer and we have so many special occasions to celebrate I really do look forward to this time of the year.

It was great timing when Party Bags & Supplies got in touch and asked me if I wanted to check out some of their products. After having a browse through their website I loved the look of their huge range. They cater for all kinds of parties from baby showers, kids, teens and adults. There's so many options for different themes and you can get anything from invites, tableware, balloons, filled party bags and so much more.

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Sunday Mini Styles #50

This is the 50th edition of Sunday Mini Styles. Fifty! That's over a year of blogging about Baby Girl's favourite outfit of the week, nearly every single week. That's a lot!

I've decided that this week is going to be the last week of Sunday Mini Styles. Next time I post a mini outfit it will be #MinisWardrobe. Nothing much will change but I decided that I didn't want to limit Baby Girl's outfit posts for Sunday so I felt this a fitting name change to tie in with a few changes coming up on the blog. Here's this week's outfit:

H&M body suit  |  Zara jeans  |  Cotton On Bag  |  River Island Sandals 

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A #MinisMeals Update

Welcome back to #MinisMeals. This little weekly meeting place designed to offer you the inspiration you may need to feed your family with good food. I can hardly believe that last week was already the fourth instalment.

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My Talking Toddler At 21 Months

My little girl is exactly three months off two years old. I've written before about the emotions that I feel when facing the reality that my baby is growing up. And let me tell you, it hasn't got any easier. I don't think it ever will.

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Sunday Mini Styles #49

Today's outfit is one of those ones where I had to stop and consider if it felt a little too 'old' for Baby Girl. However when I put the pleather jeggings on her and she absolutely loved them (I think it was the texture), I decided it was a winner. The combo of the threads, the sandals, the sunnies and her little fro bunched at the top of her head is just too cute.

River Island leather jeggings  |  H&M long sleeve top  |  River Island glasses & sandals  |  Hunter & Rose waistcoat 

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A Day With: Dear Bear And Beany

A Day With: Is a fun series I am running on the blog. I love 'day in the life' style mummy posts. They are fun to read and interesting to see the way different mums manage their days. I think all mummies are superheroes  We all have our own challenges with managing our lives and running our households, but we get through it and that should be celebrated.

Today's guest is the very sweet Laura from Dear Bear And Beany. Laura is married to her love Andy and together they have two gorgeous girls a three and one year old both who have birthdays coming up. You could be mistaken for thinking Laura is a veteran when reading her fabulous blog but in reality she only just began it in Jan 2016. Laura writes about being a mum, pregnancy, family life and their adventures and loads more.

Laura's day starts super early and she tells me this is a regular thing. It's so lovely to hear how the two sisters interact with each other, especially as they are so close in age. I'm sure they are going to be best friends for life. It makes me feel like I want a sister for Baby Girl. Thank you for sharing your day with us Laura, you nailed it! :) 

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Minis Meals #4 A Whole Lotta Meal Inspiration The Kiddies Will Love

Welcome back to #MinisMeals - a weekly meeting place creating inspiration for family meal planning, cooking and feeding your little ones.

Here you will find recipes, food ideas, cooking with kids posts, weaning support, lunchbox ideas, meal plans, grocery hauls, family friendly food inspiration, restaurant reviews and more. There will be a new post every Thursday with fresh ideas and recipes.

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Recipe: Strawberry Ice Pops With A Twist

Today I'm going to let you in on one of my secrets.

A recipe so simple that anyone could follow it. An ice pop that creates a flavour explosion in your mouth AND it's healthy.

I started my mission to create the perfect ice lolly recipe when they became something that would soothe Baby Girls teething pain. There were couple of nights when her molars were coming through and no amount of bonjella, anbesol, nurofen or calpol would ease her pain, stop her screaming and get her back to bed. I decided to try something cold to numb the pain and pulled an ice lolly from the back of the freezer. This offered her instant relief so I decided I needed to make my own sugar free, healthy ice treats to heave some healthy ones at hand whenever we need it.

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Minis Meals #3 BLW Ideas The Whole Family Will Love

Welcome back to #MinisMeals - a weekly meeting place creating inspiration for family meal planning, cooking and feeding your little ones.

Here you will find recipes, food ideas, cooking with kids posts, weaning support, lunchbox ideas, meal plans, grocery hauls, family friendly food inspiration, restaurant reviews and more. There will be a new post every Thursday with fresh ideas and recipes.

We're into week 3 of this little linky and I'm so pleased. You guys are just so creative and inspiring. I especially need to give an extra special shout out to Emma from me and b make tea for her fabulous going on a bear hunt meal idea. #MumGoals right there :) 

You're all such a talented bunch and I hope to see you all back again this week. The community is loving your recipes.

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Hello Fresh: Meal Subscription Box Review

Feeding my family wholesome meals is really important to me. As is cooking from scratch. As is sitting down all together at the table at the end of our busy days to bond over a delicious meal.

It's all so important to me but it also takes time. There's the meal planning, grocery shopping, preparation and cooking and a toddler who would much prefer we play tea parties together rather than do any of that.

I don't mind doing it. It's important to me so I do, but in a world where there's a shortcut for everything, I was keen to see how I could cut some time out of all of those things and at the same time not cut out the important bits. There's been loads of different recipe and meal subscription boxes popping up on my radar recently and I was very interested to see how it worked.

A couple of weeks ago my husband J came home with a Hello Fresh voucher he'd received at Liverpool Street Tube station for £20 off your first two boxes.

Here's how Hello Fresh works:

Chose your weekly subscription box option. There is a classic selection which includes meat, a veggie box and also a family meal box catering for larger families.
Chose your delivery date and time slot
You have the option to pick from the following weeks selection of meals or have them send you a surprise if you fancy some adventure
The box arrives with detailed recipes for your chosen meals and the exact ingredients for all of them meaning minimal food wastage.
Keep your subscription box going and this will run like clockwork on a weekly rotation

I did some further research and a classic box for us and with the discount it ended up being £19 each for the first two weeks with the option to cancel the subscription at any time so I felt like it was a no brainer to try out.

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What Keeps You from Leaving The House? REVIEW & GIVEAWAY: Beets BLU Wireless Key Finder

Gone are the days where I could spend however long I wanted perfecting my makeup, hair and outfit look. When I would blast my favourite tunes and casually get ready to leave the house. When my main worry was that I had my matching lipgloss and lipstick in my handbag when I was on my way out.

I was in for a rude shock when Baby Girl was born. Sometimes we would leave the house 2 hours after we planned. Sometimes we wouldn't leave at all. For so many reasons; Poop explosions, instant hunger, crying, vomiting all over me, her or both, needing to get the changing bag sorted - nappies, bibs, wipes, muslins, spare clothes..... oh no she's just pooped again. Sound familiar?

Now Baby Girl is older thankfully things are a lot easier and while it's still a finely tuned operation to get out of the house, it's somewhat manageable. These days, the main thing that delays me from leaving the house is my extended baby brain (it's a real thing I promise - and hubby has it too!). I'm always forgetting where I'm putting my belongings. I think that comes from trying to do 50 things at any one time. My phone, my handbag, my keys. My keys are the number one culprit. If I had to add up the number of hours that either me or J have spent looking for keys just as we were about to leave the house it wouldn't be pretty.

When the lovely people at Beets BLU got in touch with me to review their PagerTag wireless bluetooth key finder I was ALL OVER IT! This little piece of technology was made for me. Keep reading to the bottom, I'm going to tell you what I think of it and then most importantly how to enter a giveaway to win your very own.

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Sunday Mini Styles #48

Sun is shining, weather is sweet....

I can't get this song out of my head. UK is getting it's first dose of summer. Yesterday was 25 degrees and as I type this it's 27 degrees and I'm waiting for Baby Girl to wake up from her nap so we can enjoy some sunshine in the park. It's hard to believe that just 2 weeks ago we had snow.

Here's yesterday's outfit. It just screams summer.

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Rejected As A Mother - Toddler Parent Favouritism

Baby Girl has always been a daddy's girl. When she was a mere few weeks old I remember some days where she would just cry and cry and cry. If she wasn't sleeping or eating she would be crying. It was difficult for me to manage and I ended up exhausted by the end of the day. When my husband J would wander in from a day in the office he would scoop up Baby Girl in his arms and she would  instantly stop. He had the magic touch. I used to call him the baby whisperer.

As Baby Girl came out of that newborn stage we stayed on a pretty even playing ground. All 3 of us were trapped in this giant love bubble. We couldn't get enough of Baby Girl and she couldn't get enough of us. J is a really hands on dad and we would share all parenting duties. Feeding times, bed times, cuddles time, play time, comforting time. With the exception of bath time, that was always J's thing.

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Minis Meals #2 Sweet Treats Containing No Sugar

Welcome back to #MinisMeals - a weekly meeting place creating inspiration for family meal planning and feeding your little ones.

Here you will find recipes, food ideas, cooking with kids posts, weaning support, lunchbox ideas, meal plans, grocery hauls, family friendly food inspiration, restaurant reviews and more. There will be a new post every Thursday with fresh ideas and recipes.

I loved hosting this last week and there was so many wonderful ideas linked up. Minis Meals #1 was my most popular post by a long shot for the week and I got so much great feedback both from the lovely blogging community and all of you parents out there just trying to get your kids to eat. My vision was to bring everyone together and I just wanted to jump up and down with excitement when I saw this start to happen.

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Vegetarian Quorn Mince Casserole Recipe

I've mentioned before that dinners can sometimes be a bit complicated in my house. I've been working hard on making them much more simple and meal planning has really helped me with that. The complication is that I'm a vegetarian (that eats some fish) and both hubby and Baby Girl are meat eaters. It often means I have to whip something up quickly for myself if I'm making a hearty meat dish for my family.

The prerequisite when I'm cooking for myself is that it's quick, healthy and ideally I can divide them into batches for freezing so that I can enjoy a few times over. Often when I'm cooking dinner, I go with instinct and add a bit of this and that and no dish is ever the same. This is why I don't really publish many dinner type recipes. By the time I finish, I've forgotten how I made it.

One evening last week I decided to switch on the camera and record myself whipping up a veggie casserole for myself. I must say it was the ultimate form of multi tasking because as I was recording I had a meat dish on the go too, as well as a toddler wandering around my feet who 50% of the time wanted cuddles and 50% of the time was fascinated with the tripod. Thank goodness for editing!

Watching this video back allowed me to record exactly how I made it so I thought I would include this as a recipe on the good old blog and publish the video on my YouTube channel. Whilst this is a recipe that I made for myself I think it's a great one for the family too. This can be altered as a meat dish by switching the quorn mince to beef mince. You can also shake up the veggie combinations to what ever you fancy. I cheated a little as I brought a packed sweet potato and butternut squash that was already cubed. Let's face it, sometimes it's quite a task to cut a butternut squash and sometimes I need a shortcut.

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Sunday Mini Styles #47

Today's outfit is bits and pieces of older favourites that you may have already seen. The key to dealing with this strange weather we are having is layering. I can't dress Baby Girl in things that are too thick. She's always been a bit of a hot baby anyway and she is currently going through a stage where she insists layers of her clothes come off at a moments notice. The day that she wore this outfit, at one stage she was down to her dress alone. However it was cold outside and she needed to be warm during our outings.

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