Half grand, that's me.

I don't write controversy - we've been there before.

I don't generally write funny posts. Whatever anyone says, it's a lot LOT harder to write funny stuff regularly than you might think. Meet me in real life and I will be funny occasionally, but the act of writing it makes it all sound a bit trite and unfunny. Hats off to anyone that manages to write genuinely funny posts regularly.

I don't do fabulous photography that makes people go "Ooh" and "Ahh". Possibly, it's because I don't have the patience to set it all up to create that effect. I am very much a "point and shoot" kinda gal. Which is a problem when I'm trying to make my food look fantastic,which of course it is *cough*, and it ends up looking ordinary.

Confidence trick - update

I can't believe it was only two weeks ago that I blogged about my concerns about Missy Woo and her occasional lack of confidence with her reading. Typically, and pretty much as often happens, things got better by themselves without much intervention by itself. I had some great comments on here and on Twitter about her. Eventually, I decided to speak to her teacher about it after school one day and she told me she'd got a special book out for her to try that week in addition to her usual book as she felt she needed stretching. Missy Woo loved this as she told me she knew she was the only one who got this treat. We read some of both books together at home and she was way more confident.

Since then, she's got better and better. She loves to write, even if her spelling is not 100% - we've started the Christmas lists, which are a hoot to read, and over the half term, she's written notes to her friends and a list of all her classmates' names. They weren't all correct but we sat down together and I wrote some of them out the right way for her, rather than tell her she was wrong.

A round up of thank yous

I've had a few things sent to me in the last few weeks so it's high time I said thanks for them. Where are my manners?

Firstly, Robinsons sent me a skills kit to try out so the children can practice and become a Champion of the Playground. Children can win their own kit by entering codes from special  bottles of Fruit Shoot at fruitshoot.com. The kit contains a drawstring bag (always handy), a skipping rope with digital counter, a hacky-sack, also with counter and a webcam. The counters rack up points the more you play with them and generate a code you enter on the website to progress through a game. The webcam is there to allow you to play some interactive games on the website but unfortunately, I couldn't get the webcam to work on my laptop so we never got to try it but the children had fun doing keepy-uppies with the hacky-sack. We were given a leaderboard to have a champion of the household but the children commandeered it and made up their own scoring system. I'm not sure who won but we also had a crown and it's been worn a few times, mostly by Missy Woo who thinks she is a princess. Thanks to Robinsons - who actually sent us two kits, one of which we donated to the children's school.