This is a review post.

A few weeks ago, the wonderful people at Eurocamp kindly sent us on a much-needed holiday to their Château Lez Eaux campsite in Normandy. Having done a Eurocamp holiday in 2008 – staying here, in a tent – we thought we knew what was coming. We really didn’t.

I had made the executive decision for us to sail from Portsmouth to Caen rather than Dover to Calais. For us, the driving distance on the UK side was the same but it was going to save me roughly 5 hours driving at the other side whilst also giving me 6 hours on the ferry to recuperate. As our children are so young (Findlay is 9, Nairn is 4, Erica is 3 and Greer is only 1) when we drive down South we tend to leave late evening and drive through the night so that the kids aren’t bored the whole trip home. Generally speaking it’s a win-win situation as doing it this way means we miss any heavy traffic normally encountered around Manchester, Birmingham and London and the total driving time is vastly reduced and indeed we did our 440 mile trip in 7.5 hours.

I have to admit that with four young children who had slept almost all night, Bob and I were dreading the ferry trip. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that not only was there a small soft-play area, playroom with colouring-in station & kids DVDs playing but there was also a full entertainment programme for older children including a very energetic quiz and a magician. As I had work to do, I paid for WiFi and got on with that whilst the children played. All in all, a surprisingly relaxing way to travel.

We docked in Caen in the early afternoon and set off towards Saint Pair-Sur-Mer, getting hopelessly lost circumnavigating Granville but still arriving on the site an hour after we got off the ferry which I was extremely relieved about. Now, in the space of 10 days we had been offered the trip, put an emergency passport application in for Greer, arranged for someone to stay at our home to watch over the menagerie and got permission to take Findlay out of school for the week so I must have missed the section of the email that explained that rather than staying in a tent, we’d be hanging out in one of these for the next week:

I have to admit to feeling a little ambivalent about staying in the static caravan rather than the tent but when the heavens opened not half an hour after we arrived, I realised immediately the one difference which became massively important – the kids didn’t end up traipsing mud everywhere. Anyone who has ever been camping will relate to that feeling as if your entire body is filthy no matter how good the ablution facilities are and thankfully, in our 3 bedroom superior we never had that. Having such an expanse of space was excellent too since the boys had a room to themselves where they could escape to play games, the girls had a room to themselves and we still had a comfortably sized living & dining room space too.

We were so exhausted after our trip down that we stayed on the parc for the first few days which is unlike us -we’re the kind of family who goes out and sees things rather than the heading-to-the-beach type – but with beautifully clean swimming pools and excellent facilities on site we wanted for nothing. There was plenty for the kids to do, a shop on-site where we could get the essentials and a bar too where internet access was available.

The kids absolutely loved the swimming pool and I have to admit I was terrified at the prospect of taking four of them to the pool with only two adults but it turned out to be completely manageable. What mainly worried me was that there was no lifeguard supervision (a common occurrence in France) around the pools but the boys took good care of Erica leaving Bob and I to take turns with Greer. Although, we did see a fairly horrific accident involving a teenager, a backflip dive and a certain broken nose. Ouch.

The site had a kids club available but our brood, being quite anti-social wary weren’t too keen on being left there which was fine. Instead they chose to spend a fair amount of time in a well-designed playground. I remember thinking, “Health and safety would never allow a playground like this back home” when watching Nairn clambering up a climbing wall – it was exactly the type of place that kids should always have access to and they absolutely loved it. Look at the smiles!

The Eurocamp staff who had briefed us prior to our departure had mentioned that this parc in particular was beautiful but that didn’t quite do it justice. The site was just stunning, plenty of greenery and a little fishing lake where guests were welcome to sit and indulge themselves. One thing that really impressed me – and which I felt reflected the consideration given to the site’s clientele – was that the entry to the parc was controlled via a security barrier which opened after a PIN number was entered into it. The PIN station was available on both sides of the road meaning that both UK and continental drivers could access it. Clever, eh?

We did do a couple of day trips – to Le Mont-Saint-Michel and to Saint Malo where we visited the Great Aquarium which were both within an hour’s drive of our site – and I shall blog about these later.

All in all, this trip just reinforced how good a holiday a family of our size can have on a budget. A seven-night break in this site, staying in accommodation exactly like ours would cost £987 accommodation only and – as we did – you can book your ferry crossing through Eurocamp who manage to get it significantly cheaper than I ever found quotes for. I’ve been told that Eurocamp can also help organise fly-drives and rail travel too.

For me, the difference between this kind of holiday and a package holiday is simple – you do everything on your own time. Having our car with us meant we could leave when we wanted, go where we wanted and not have to worry about schedules and going off-plan. The Eurocamp couriers spoke English – which was an embarrassing relief as my French has never exceeded schoolgirl level – and were available at the drop of a hat to assist. As an example – on our trip two years ago I came down with a stomach bug and had to go to a Doctor. Our courier found a Doctor and came with me to translate. I get the impression that the sites are picked by people who understand what a family abroad needs, such is the level of detail like ensuring we had a travel cot available for Greer to sleep in and providing loo roll and washing up liquid in the welcome pack.We’ve done two Eurocamp holidays now and I know that we’ll be back. Thanks ever so much for a great time!

Posted under reviews

I mentioned in my CyberMummy recap that a significant portion of my day revolved around the topic of working with brands and so I am writing a clear explanation here of my stance. For the purposes of clarity I am assuming that anyone reading this is a complete newbie to my blog.

When I started this blog three years ago it was to catalogue my attempts at sewing, knitting and cooking with a dash of parenting. As time has moved on and I’ve found a comfort zone with my writing, I’ve expanded the parenting element somewhat and in the process I have attracted many offers from companies wishing me to review their products, some of which I’ve accepted. My criteria for accepting products for review has been simple: Would I use it? I have rejected probably 75% of these offers as being irrelevant to my readership or simply unattractive to me but for the products that I do elect to keep & review I will be using a more defined method so that you – my readership – know what drives the review you’re reading.

1. I will always be honest if I am reviewing a product I have been sent for free.
I do talk about products that I love with fair frequency and I realise that could be confusing in establishing my motives. From this point forward, any product reviews will have a note telling you at the start of the article that I have been sent this product for free.

2. I will not accept payment for reviews.
I will not put myself in the position where I could be accused of putting financial gain before my integrity. I have built this blog up through investing my time and energy, it’s not worth throwing that away.

3. I will tell the truth about the products I’m reviewing
I recently did a product review for a company that ticks all of my boxes – environmentally conscious, morally agreeable, affordable product – but didn’t write up the review because the product didn’t work for my family. I fed back to the PR company but have felt distinctly at ease since then. From now on, I will tell you if I haven’t liked something I’ve tested but I will also offer my support and feedback to the companies sending me review products.

4. I will not review any product which is manufactured by any of the Nestlé brands.
As a family we actively boycott Nestlé and all subsidiary companies as a result of their appalling marketing practices and continued use of child slave labour. I could not in good conscience ever accept a product of any kind from Nestlé.

5. I will only review products which are true to the ethos of the blog.
If it relates to cooking, crafting, family life etc then I’ll review it. If it’s not something I’ve talked about here then chances are I won’t be interested.

Additionally, at present I have no advertising on my blog. That’s not to say it’ll always be like this but as of this date I receive no payment for anything posted here. Everything I write is my own opinion and words – I will not simply rehash press releases, nor will I change what I’ve written. I do have an Amazon associates link but in the three years of writing this blog I have made £0.10p so I don’t think we have much to worry about there!

If you have read this and would like to send me something to review, please do email me.

As the people I write for, your opinion on this is extremely important to me and so I would welcome your comments on this post.

Thanks for reading

Posted under site stuff

The lovely folk over at Quadrille publishing got in touch with me recently, offering to send me Erika Knight’s latest knitting book called ‘Simple Knitting‘ and asked me if I’d review it here. I’ve had this book for weeks now, desperate to do it justice so here we go.

Firstly I should own up and say that I was aware of Erika Knight as a knitting author already as my friend Midwife Katie had used one of her patterns from ‘Simple Knits for Cherished Babies‘ to knit a sweater for Nairn. I’ve been a knitter for a long time and as someone who spends a lot of time on the internet, I’m used to the easy availability of free patterns but I still ordered that book based on the one sweater I’d seen designed by this author.

Erika Knight’s style is very distinctive – it’s perhaps obvious to state that she goes for simple designs – so it wasn’t a surprise to me at all to discover that she has consulted with high street brands with instantly recognisable clothing ranges like Gap and M&S. This new book builds on her ‘simple’ look with 20 projects that really appeal to a broad spectrum of abilities and tastes all set out in a workshop fashion.

It’s slightly difficult for me to review this book as it is very much aimed at complete novices but suffice to say if I was learning to knit right now, this is the book I’d pick to teach myself. Beautifully photographed and illustrated instructions combined with Knight’s clean and simple style make this book easy-to-follow. Particularly appealing for me is that the author does not assume that her learners will be ‘afraid’ of their new hobby so alongside the usual explanations of different yarn types and weights there is also indepth instruction in understanding pattern construction, knitting in the round and reading charts – three elements of knitting that I didn’t understand until fairly recently and I’ve been knitting for over 20 years now.

Better yet, despite this book’s clear focus on instructing newbies each workshop ends with a completed project that is actually both desirable and useful whilst the learner has unwittingly developed new skills and techniques. The very first project provides the new knitter with a fashionable muffler and the others are just as creative – my personal favourite being the notebooks made as project #4 – between socks, a hot water bottle cover and a sweater I was truly spoiled for what to choose to work on first. I strongly suspect this is going to be the book I buy for any of my friends who express an interest in knitting from now on and I highly recommend it!

Simple Knitting by Erika Knight – RRP £16.99 – is published by Quadrille publishing

Posted under reviews

I promised you that I had lots to share and I am now able to share most of it. In my usual style, I’m going to tell you a bit of a story first.

I am a renowned rubbish practical joker. I try and play jokes on people all the time and they usually fall flat, this year’s April Fool’s Day was no exception when I told the kids that I was pregnant again and that as a result we would have to move into a one bedroom flat since we couldn’t afford to stay in our house anymore. They fell for it so well that I decided to expand it and phoned my sister, whereupon the following conversation ensued:
Me: Steph? Steph! Oh my GOD I’m pregnant. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I’m pregnant and I have no idea how it happened and how can I possibly have another baby I’ll have five kids under 10!
Steph – Deadpan: Oh my actual God. Are you kidding?
Me – almost crying: NO I’M NOT KIDDING I can’t believe this how on earth did this happen?!
Steph: Are you kidding?
Me: NO!
Steph: No way. I am too.
Me – shrieking: OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! I WAS ONLY KIDDING BECAUSE IT’S APRIL FOOL’S DAY! Are you ACTUALLY pregnant?!
Steph: I hate you.

What this little vignette doesn’t tell the reader is that I am also renowned for being the worst secret keeper in all the land. Seriously. And Stephanie is the only person I know who actually managed to keep her first pregnancy secret until she’d got past 12 weeks. GNNNNNNNNNGGGGGG! So the last eight weeks has been torturous for me knowing but not able to tell anyone until today. Steph & Gary had their scan yesterday and there’s a little baby in there! It’s the clearest scan picture I’ve ever seen – you can see it here which is a photo of the scan and therefore not great, but clear enough to see a bambino in there. Hooray! Baby is due to land before Christmas which is just perfect. I am seriously excited

So that’s my first piece of news. My SECOND piece of news is that Bob & I’s business The Life Craft (which we’ve been sporadically blogging about here) has been entered into a really amazing competition run by Barclay’s Bank. Competitors are divided up by location and then by sector; in 12 days the judges will shortlist their favourite three entries per location and whoever gets the most votes wins up to £50,000 to develop their business. We really need people to back us just now – a task that will take literally seconds to do in the hope that we can be shortlisted. If you could take a moment to do this I really would be most grateful.

So that’s the news for just now! Onto the reviews.

I posted yesterday about our big walk around Calderglen Park with Penny the other night. When we got home, I was so knackered that I decided to have a bath. Lush had sent me a Big Blue bath ballistic and a bar of Sandstone soap last week as a freebie to encourage me to take 90 minutes as a World Cup Widow and I wasn’t going to look that gift horse in the mouth (although I didn’t have the heart to ‘fess up about Scotland’s lack of qualifying!) I’ve used the Big Blue loads of times before and love it but the Sandstone soap was a new one to my crappy sensitive skin and I’m really impressed with it! I got off all of the dry flaky bits without irritating my skin any further and it smells really nice too. Lush are also promoting their BB Seaweed facemask to World Cup Widows but I haven’t tried that one yet.

Although I have to say I’m very jealous of our friends in the South after discovering that Lush have Spas, but they’re only in London, Leeds, Poole and Kingston! Have any of you tried them out before?

The other review I wanted to share with you is for a website that I discovered after Christmas called Dot Com Giftshop. I got these supercute Russian Doll tins for the girls to keep their hairbobbles, colouring pencils and various tiny toys in so that I’d stop standing on them and I was really impressed with the speed and service offered by the site. A few weeks ago, they contacted me to say they’d listed Adventures of a Lady in Training in their top 50 craft blogs (at #42! The cheek of it, I reckon I should have been top 20 at least!) and would I be interested in reviewing some of their products. So they sent me out some of their Heart gifts range and I have to say that yet again, I was impressed with the speed, service and quality offered by them.

This gorgeous & classy tealight holder has been claimed by Erica for above her bed:

and they also sent this selection:

which just made me smile as soon as I opened the box which contained Feltcraft butterfly hearts, Iron-on patches, thick wrapping tape with hearts, thinner gift tape, alphabet heart stickers and decorative heart stickers which I have to admit made me want to sit down and write a letter to someone – anyone – which I could decorate with hearts. Yes I know, I’m unashamedly girly. Anyway, it’s a big thumbs up from me for the Dot Com Giftshop not just for having such a wide variety of cute and inexpensive gift items but also for the brilliant customer service experience.

And finally the bit you’ve all been waiting for – the giveaway! This giveaway has now closed

OK – up for grabs we have everything in this photograph:

and to enter the giveaway I would like you to:

1) Comment here (that gets you one entry)
2) Be a fan on facebook (that gets you another entry
3) Tweet about the giveaway (that gets you yet another entry)

Please remember to tell me in your comment if you’ve done steps 2 & 3 otherwise you won’t be credited for that entry! Also ensure you leave an email address for me to contact you on. You have until 8pm on Wednesday 2nd June 2010 to enter and I will post anywhere in the world.

Please note: I am not paid for reviews other than getting to keep the product I’m reviewing. You can therefore be assured that the review I write is unbiased.

Posted under giveaway

Neither Ecover nor their PR company have paid me for this review and in fact requested that I was completely honest. In order to provide a fair comparison, I was sent Ecover’s new range AND products from their leading competitors.

So as I mentioned in my last post, Ecover’s PR people approached me and asked if I’d like to do a side-by-side comparison of their products against some leading brand petrochemical-based cleaning products. At first I was a little bamboozled – surely they’d read this blog and my varying mentions of hating housework and my lack of cleaning prowess? Why on earth did they want the world’s most apathetic Mum blogger to test their products? Then of course, my interest was caught because I’ve always been a fan of Ecover’s philosophies but my concern was that being plant-based and “green” would mean the products wouldn’t be up to much. I should also mention here that I have hideously sensitive skin and contact dermatitis and as much as I’d like to be cautious, I don’t have time to go searching for rubber gloves every time the kids spill something you know? So the more I thought about it the more my interest was piqued and I agreed to test them out.

When the trug arrived with some serious-looking  cleaning products I was even more curious. Ecover’s PR people pulled no punches, they were requesting that I test Ecover against the big guns – Cillit Bang, Flash and Mr Muscle. By this point I wasn’t sure what to think. Were they serious? An ecologically friendly, plant-based real alternative to less-than-environmentally-friendly cleaners that may not be green, but get the job done? Sounds amazing in theory but I just couldn’t see how it was possible.

My first test was on the windows. Nairn and Erica had drawn on the windows with crayon which I’d left as a sign of their independance and artistic creativity. Crayon is a pain in the patootie to get off of most surfaces at the best of times so I didn’t hold out much hope. I gave each window a skoosh – one with Mr Muscle and one with the Ecover – and both worked straight away. No real win for either… until I realised the Mr Muscle had smeared the wax rather than lift it straight off. Plus one for the Ecover brand, there.

My second test was with the all-purpose cleaners. I’ll confess here that we usually use a fair amount of bleach to clean the floor in the hall, bathroom and kitchen because quite frankly we have a lot of children who walk muck from one end of the house to the other. The problem being that the bleach irritates my skin and I can’t walk on the floor barefoot even once it’s dry, so I was really hopeful that the Ecover product would do the job. My gripe with this product though was that when I (stupidly) opened the cap and had a sniff it nearly blew my nostrils inside out, BUT once I’d diluted it in water the smell was a lot less grab-the-back-of-your-throat than I’m used to with other cleaning products. Plus two for Ecover.  The back of the bottle mentions using this one neat for stubborn stains but I found simply mopping with it diluted was enough to lift everything the kids/cats/goblins had traipsed in. This one I wouldn’t say was particularly better in terms of cleaning ability than the Flash, but it was comparable and had the added benefits for me of not irritating my skin.

Showing myself up here, but the kitchen is really Bob’s domain and so I handed over the degreasers to him so the hob could be given a once over. He used the Cillit Bang on one half and the Ecover on the other, then promptly forgot which side was which. But this in itself was a success because the hob was spotless with no ‘giving it a bit more welly because it’s eco-friendly and therefore not likely to be up to much’. The simple fact is, this stuff is good. My hob was pretty grotty and Ecover’s power cleaner managed to stand up to that against a product that is seriously strong.

The final product I tested was the multi surface cleaner (which I tested against Flash One for All spray). Stupidly, I used the flash on the first day and wiped down the table without wearing rubber gloves. Within an hour, I had a sore red rash in between my fingers which immediately hacked me off so I switched to the Ecover and it has now been my go-to product for everything. I’ve used it to clean the bathroom, I’ve used it to clean the table and I used it in the car to clean up after Erica spewed everywhere last week. In cleaning terms I found I preferred the Ecover immediately because it wasn’t irritating my skin but still getting the job at the same time.

So – I have to admit I’m surprised. I was worried about writing this review because I thought if I was honest and the product was crap that a) People that read this blog would stop buying eco-friendly products and b) Ecover’s PR people would send a hitman in an electric car to make my body into worm food. Luckily for me the Ecover range stood up to all the crap a family with four grotty kids and two less-than-tidy adults could throw at it. Would I recommend it? I’d do more than that – I’ve already replaced the multi surface cleaner and I’ll be moving over to an Ecover household. I do like it when I feel like an ethical and responsible consumer!

Ecover have kindly donated for a giveaway the complete set of the products tested by us. Please click here to enter.

Posted under recommendations