as we go along
Sorry for the delay in announcing this – I don’t know where the time goes atm!
Anyway, I finally managed to pin Big down and get her to go through the anonymised selections, and it turned out she was most taken by the ridiculous outfit selected by Lucy from Vegan Family. By which I mean she couldn’t stop laughing at the idea of me in a velvet dress with floral leggings and biker wellies 🙂
Hope you enjoy your £30 Tesco voucher Lucy.
Now, I read Grit. And I think she’s hilarious. I’ve even met her, and was utterly tongue tied and admiring when she admitted to having read my blog too 🙂
So it was with a sinking feeling that I read her post this week, about blog advertising, specifically wrt school uniforms.
It *is* that time of year, many children *are* returning to, or starting, school, and companies are offering all sorts of enticements and competitions to get the parents to buy their uniform from them. ClothingAtTesco have been doing school uniform giveaways, and after falling over them left, right , and centre on many of the blogs I read, I admit I was a bit terse when I started directing tweets at them.
I shouldn’t have been. Because the response was really lovely. Turns out there’s a real person behind the tweets, and she offered me the same value of the uniform packs they’ve been sending out – £15 per child for Big and Small and the chance for a reader to win £30 voucher for themselves.
Now, I know that I have in the past ranted about the Tescopoly. And I’m likely to continue doing so because I have real concerns about their corporate approach. But I can’t be Grit and promote home education by being pantswettingly funny, so I’ll do it how I can, by elbowinggently inserting myself into online conversations and memes and gradually increasing the numbers of ppl out there who know about home ed, and even (virtually) know a home educator. You never know, there could be a few ppl who pop over to this post and discover that while we may well be a bit unusual educationally speaking, at least we do wear clothes too 🙂
And so to the clothes.
Sadly, all the fairtrade clothes in the Tesco children’s clothing range appear to be school uniform. Because I do prefer to buy fairtrade when I can. And in fact I’ll even buy secondhand in preference to new not fairtrade (something to think about there Tesco 😉 ). So I had to go for other things.
Big is tall and slender, so I chose her a three pack of handkerchief hem T shirts and a pair of jeggings. Small is a huge Ben 10 fan, so it was easy to pick a top, and he likes jeans so that was easy too.
All the clothes fit well, probably because I chose by height instead of age. Well, OK, there’s plenty of growth room in Small’s jeans, but as the waist has those neat elastic things, they don’t fall off and he doesn’t mind turn ups 😉
And they are both very happy with them.
And the giveaway?
I had a choice of how to run this giveaway, so I’m going to give you a choice too. You can either pick the outfit you’d most like to see me wearing from the clothing at Tesco range (even if it’s the outfit that you think would make me look most ridiculous 😉 ), or pick your (not) back to school outfit. And if you do use school, you could pick an outfit for wearing back on the school run (but remember, no pjs allowed) 😉 Post your selections up to the value of £30 in the comment box, and I’ll get Big to choose the outfit she likes best (don’t worry, I’ll blank out the names before I get her to choose 😉 ).
I’m going to run this for a week, then we’ll choose our winner next Saturday evening at 7pm BST. Enjoy!
[Small print. Giveaway is sponsored by ClothingAtTesco and the winners details will be passed to them to sort out the prize. If you don’t want your details passing on, don’t enter. Giveaway UK only. Thank you.]
ETA comments closed now, Big will be choosing a winner in a little while 🙂
I’ve come to the conclusion that I won’t be doing a lot of reviews on here. There are a few reasons for this. One is the practical reason that I’m not being offered very many 😉 Another is that I’ve been told in a number of places that many of my regular readers don’t like the concept. And also I don’t want to fill up the blog with posts that aren’t relevant to our lifestyle.
But games are relevant. We play lots of games – online, offline, board, handheld, active, seated. Well, when I say we, usually I mean the kids, as I’m not that big on games myself. But even I played Blokus 3D last weekend 😉
So, when I met the ppl behind Mastermind, on twitter and they offered to send me a Mastermind Attache Travel Pack
There’s nothing new to the game itself, you’re still making a code and your opponent is still trying to figure it out, but the case is swanky to say the least. On the negative side, for a travel game it’s kind of bulky. But on the positive it’s a really sturdy case, it folds up well and is *very* nice looking. There are compartments for the pegs to live in, with lids that can be fixed back on easily when they pop off (sigh) and plenty of room for all the pegs.
As soon as it was arrived it disappeared into the kids’ bedroom to be played with – obviously I snuck in with a camera 😉
Just in case anyone isn’t familiar with the game, it’s a very simple game of logical deduction. One player sets up a code using coloured pegs which is hidden at their end of the board. The other player then tries to guess the code, and the codemaker lets them know how they are doing by placing small pegs next to their guess – a magenta peg for each guess peg that’s the right colour in the right place, and white for right colour but wrong place.
Very simple. And yet challenging enough to go on playing over and over. Great for kids – Small had a go, although he wasn’t utterly convince, and Big and M (both 10 years old) played for quite a while.
Like I said, I was offered a second game for my readers so I’m also running a competition where you can win your own mastermind game. Entry is very simple – just leave a comment here with a way for me to get in touch with you (email field will not be displayed), and I’ll draw the winner using a randomiser in just over a week’s time on Weds 15th at 9pm BST. As mastermind are not a UK firm, this draw is open internationally (the game will be sent direct from them, if you don’t want your information passing to a third party, don’t enter). If I can’t get in touch with the winner within 48 hours of the draw closing, I’ll draw another winner.
I’m not going to offer extra entries for twitter RT or FB shares at this point (mainly as I don’t want to irritate my followers any more than I already am doing!), but do feel free to share – more interest in the blog means more possibility of competitions (hopefully relevant to at least a few of you) in the future.