Huggies Messy Play Challenge Entry

You may remember that a couple of days ago I posted about the Huggies Messy Play Challenge. Well I was considering entering this photo of Big Cousin because I think it sums up Messy play quite nicely.

That is what happens if you leave your milkshake at Toddler height. Luckily I didn't have to clean her up so the challenge for me was to just take the photo! Auntie on the other hand might of felt a little different.

I started thinking that technically that photo isn't of my child and so I was wondering if I should enter a photo of Top Ender that I have tucked away, but I decided that I should save that for another day... one day when she has really annoyed me!

This evening however I found the photo (well group of photos) that I am going to enter.

Luckily a bath for Baby Boy took care of his clean up, the sofa covers and pajamas are in the washing machine and the other lumps that I keep finding all over the living room? Well wet wipes aren't just for paint or poop!

Guest Post: A VROOM VROOM MOMENT!

Hello! I am delighted to be guest posting here at A Mother's Ramblings as part of Little Mummy's marvellous guest post day! I am normally to be found over at my blog Thinly Spread so called because I have four children aged 4, 10, 12 and 14...so I am! Pippa is over at my place so do pop over and see what she's on about!

My smallest boy had one of those breakthrough moments this week. The kind when you can almost hear children changing up a gear and vrooming off. The kind that makes your heart swell with pride and makes you want to shout from the rooftops.

Most children go through these moments of course and if I did start shouting on roofs I would probably be taken away and locked up for a while. But it IS miraculous and even though this is the fourth time I have seen it with my own children and the umpteenth time I have seen it as a teacher it is still amazing.

Bonus Boy moved in one leap from drawing his 'peanut people' (pictures of various members of the family all with one long peanut body without a separate head and with sticks for arms and legs) to 'proper people' with defined heads and bodies and rectangle arms and legs with fingers and toes.

He is obviously very pleased with this and can see the difference himself because he has spent an enormous amount of time doing it ever since. We now have pupils in the centres of our very startled looking eyes.

It will be a while yet until his inner critic makes its presence felt so he is drawing for the sheer pleasure of it and it is wonderful to see. He has no limits and draws with abandon: 'I am drawing the family Mummy and we are blue people cos I don't have any skin pens.'

He branched out into cats, rabbits, hedgehogs and smiley blue whales. He moved onto aliens with extra legs and a complicated picture with rocket ships and moon landings and then got absorbed in drawing the sun in the sky and exotic beach scenes. All in one week!

Most children go through the same developmental stages in their drawing at more or less the same time and more or less in the same order. This shows it more clearly than I can here but I think it's a wonderful thing to watch and it is well worth keeping a record of it!

Have you noticed the changes and stages in your child's drawing? Are you keeping a record of it? Don't forget to date drawings and write on them what the children call them; it's lovely to look back on!

Messy Play Challenge!

Before we go on this is a Sponsored post of sorts. You see I am a Huggies Mum and this is a Huggies challenge post and I don't have to tell you about this challenge but everyone knows I like a challenge and when Huggies told me and the other Huggies Mums about this Messy Play challenge I was a little excited and started planning how messy I could get Top Ender or Baby Boy in order to win this challenge!

As I am sure you know and as countless psychologists and experts have said before Messy play is good for children. In fact Janine Spencer (who is a child psychologist) said "Giving children the freedom to play messily helps them develop their imagination and social skills. It boosts their confidence and helps them understand the world around them. That’s a small price to pay for a bit of mess."

You know she's right. I don't care about a bit of mess if what Top Ender and Baby Boy and I are doing is boosting their skills or letting us have a bit of fun together. And that's what we are all about in our house, having fun. Now this challenge isn't just for Huggies Mums, it's open to everyone in the UK!

I am thinking that one of these photos might be my entry...

So what you need to do is post a photo on your blog between now and July 14th of your little ones (or big ones!) getting messy. It could be a photo like Baby Boy here covered in ice-cream, or a photo of you covered in flour following a baking session together, or anything that you can think of... as long as you are messy!

The challenge isn't really that hard you might be thinking and you are right. Even if I told you that the real challenge is the cleaning up after you have made the mess, with great wipes like the ones that Huggies make (honestly I love Huggies wipes, they feel stronger than some wipes I have used in the past, but are still soft) it won't be too hard!

So here are the rules as set out by Huggies!


1. The messier your baby is in the photo the better. (The challenge is cleaning up!)
2. Post the photo to your blog with The Messy Play by Huggies Wipes challenge. (It can be an old photo or a previous post).
3. Send a link of your blog post featuring your Messy Play photo to @Huggies_UK on Twitter or online.team@Huggies.com to participate.
4. Check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/messyplaybyhuggieswipes/ to see all the blogger submissions and links to their blogs. Submissions will also be shouted out by @Huggies_UK on Twitter.
5. The top 3 messiest entries will receive Huggies® gift packs of Huggies merchandise.

Wordless Wednesday - Before, During and After (Baby Boys First Hair Cut)

The Family Fun Elephant Parade!

Every once in a while I get a notion in my head about something that we could do as a family. Something that is fun, something that will involve exercise and family bonding and most importantly will be exciting.

Luckily when these notions come over me, Daddy is able to reign me back in and make my ideas more do-able or more suitable for the time that we have available to us. It has happened in the past and it is bound to happen again in the future.

When I was in London last week for the Huggies Mums meet up, I noticed a lot of elephants dotted around. I vaguely remembered that these were being auctioned (after having been decorated by famous people and artists) because of the problems that Asian elephants face with habitat being lost and this will lead to us losing wild Asian Elephants.

My great idea for the weekend was that as a family we walked round London finding all the elephants and photographing them. Daddy suggested that maybe we should only try and find the elephants in one area on this trip to London, and that we could go back over the next few weeks to spot the rest.

The plan was that on Sunday morning we would arrive in London at 8am. However we then realised that even at 8am London wasn't going to be a particularly nice place to be, what with the heat wave and everything. Our plans changed so that we wouldn't arrive in London until 6pm, time for the heat to disparate and we would find the elephants in Westfield shopping centre (four of them) and then the ones that were around Hyde Park.

As you can see, we found elephants...

Somehow we missed one at Westfield Shopping Centre and so we will have to go back (Shame!) to find it! It was only when we actually got to the shopping centre that we told Top Ender what we were doing, and she loved that we were going on an Elephant Parade!

We caught the tube from White City (which is just a couple of minutes away from Westfield shopping centre if you don't know) and walked past the wall of the BBC where the Blue Peter Garden is, and past a van which is from Prank Patrol. Daddy and I also pretended that we saw Kate Adie and remembered when Daddy won the £25,000* top prize on the pilot of "Dial M for Money" hosted by Phillip Schofield.

When we got off the tube at Marble Arch we were greeted with a very large crowd of people. For some reason I had made the Tourist mistake of expecting London to be like Milton Keynes, ie devoid of people when the shops had shut. The second mistake that we made was expecting London to have followed the normal rules and cooled down now that it was the evening. Undeterred we crossed the busy roads to find our next elephants.

Luckily, Daddy was once a Scout and so was prepared for the sun that was still out and slapped the suncream on us all whilst we played with the elephants and listened in on some fantastic conversations going on around us!

Crossing the road in to Hyde Park was a revelation for me. I could see what appeared to be hundreds of people standing around, we ignored them and took the photos of what we had came to London for. Although Top Ender was a little more excited than normal as she was convinced that the building in the background of this photo was Doctor Who's TARDIS...

This is Bobby and was my favourite out of all the Elephants we saw on Sunday.

What I quickly realised was that we were in Speakers Corner and there were a lot of Speakers about on this sunny Sunday evening. It led to a lovely discussion with Top Ender about free speech and having different opinions on different subjects to others, and also why some people felt the need to bring a step ladder or big box to the park to explain their point of view.

Just to give you an idea of how many people were about!

A quick walk through the underpass to The Dorchester Hotel (which had lots of Paparazzi standing outside!) and we found our next two Elephants. I tired to delay us leaving the outside of the hotel in the hopes that someone famous would come out, but time was marching on and I knew that we had to keep on walking too.

Back into Hyde Park we marched and found two more friends outside the gates... well I already knew they were there having seen them on the Tuesday, but we let Top Ender find them by herself.

As you can see the second of the Elephants just outside Hyde Park was hollow and was great fun for looking in. This one was Daddy's favourite, and I must admit that I have a soft spot for it too! We then walked back up Hyde Park and I felt very continental as Daddy told me that it was nearly 9pm! It was so light and there were so many people about that it really did feel a lot earlier. We weren't the only people with young children out and about either!

We soon found the last "herd" for the day and peered through the fence at them.

Baby Boy and Top Ender were still going strong and Baby Boy was getting a lot of admiring glances from young women holding on to their semi naked muscular partners as he was smiling and chattering away to anyone within earshot!

We walked along The Serpentine and discussed everything we could think of, watched some people Salsa dancing and tried not to stare at the family having a picnic complete with what looked like bongs!

We eventually made it back to the Tube and back to where we had left our car at Westfield at around 10pm. It was a bit later than we had planned, but it had been a grand day out and nobody minded.

We are planning our other trips to London to see the rest of the Elephants over the next couple of weeks, if you would like to take part then your best resource would be the Elephant Parade Website at http://www.elephantparadelondon.org/ as it has a route map and almost everything you want to know. If you want to know anything that isn't on the website, then you can always try asking me!

*But as it was the pilot he actually went home with a much much much lesser prize.