Ever since A started pre-school there has been the stress of name-tags. It got even worse when he started real school where they want absolutely everything named due to them getting changed for P.E twice a week. I am sadly lacking in many of necessary practical skills of motherhood and had to set husband to work with a needle and thread last year to sew in lots of little tags for A. I know they do iron on ones but everyone I asked said they don't last and you'll be doing them all again after a few washes.

Not posted here for ages because my mind has been busy with much more important things that the acquisition of material possessions. Yeah yeah ok - I've been wasting my life on Twitter. The shopping urges are resurfacing though and Christmas is only 4 months away. My current fixation is a Doll's House, primarily for nearly 3 yr old M but I know that 5 yr old A will also get lots out of it. I bought M a Fisher Price Little People Doll House last Christmas which she loves and has been great but is quite small and limiting. She enjoys the sound effects, ringing doorbell, toilet flushing etc but the people don't lie v well in the bed, tend to roll about and it's v small in relation to the hugeness of the people.

When A was aged between 2 or 3 he had all sorts of electronic toys that were trying to sneak learning his letters into his head while he thought he was playing. Now he is at school and actually expected to know some letters and numbers it has become apparent that all this early brain washing had no effect whatsoever. I have therefore lost a lot of faith in all of these electronic learning aids and we actually don't have all that many in our house any more.

I am thinking it is time to move my baby girl into a bed. She will always be my baby but in practical terms she's a large child and I think she might be more comfortable with more room to move around.

designer cat bowls...... until now! I can't believe I have been living with such boring cat bowls all this time with realising there was such a funky alternative.

We bought our handheld hoover years ago and tbh it was never particularly good. It was cheap, not very powerful but I remember being very excited about how it supposedly could clean up "wet spills".

I have had my eye on this game for the Wii for ages. It has tons of brilliant reviews but the majority seem to be from die-hard gamers who relate it to lots of other games that I have never heard of.

I have bought into Nintendo in a pretty big way over the last couple of years. I got the Nintendo DS lite a couple of years ago and loved it and we have moved over to the Wii from the PS2 with not many regrets ( just the loss of Singstar really).