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Presents! For Amy! (There was much excitement)

by Veronica on May 5, 2010

in Sponsored Posts

This post is sponsored by Nuffnang.

***

Toys are the bane of my life. No matter how many time I pick them up, they end up all over the floor again as soon as I turn my back. Not to mention that I am fairly sure they are breeding in the bottom of the toy box while I sleep.

Every few months I go through the kids rooms and toys and freecycle a bunch of them. However, there are some toys I can’t bring myself to Freecycle and funnily enough, these seem to be the expensive, better quality toys the children are gifted with at Christmas.

We’re not going to talk about the growing pile of stuffed toys that Amy has that I can’t bring myself to pass along to other children.

***

Amy is obsessed by the mail. It might be because we’ve got some lovely friends in the internet who send me things like chocolate, or because I buy a lot of books online, but there is nothing Amy likes more than checking the mail, hoping for packages.

She was a teensy bit disappointed when the other day, she checked the mail and instead of a letter, we got a red post office slip letting us know we had to go and collect a package.

A few hours and a few tantrums later – she’s been a bit difficult lately – we were on our way to the post office, collecting a package from Nuffnang and Mattel. Of course, I didn’t let her open it until we were home again, and she’d helped me clean up all the other toys strewn about the house.

Excitement ensued when she saw what was inside.

TOYS! MUM! THERE ARE TOYS! PRESENTS FOR AMY! TOYS!

Rather excited.

Mattel rather nicely, sent me some vehicles from the Little People Vehicle range and I’m not sure the kids have stopped playing with them yet.

Despite the packaging taking a while to open, with excited kidlets bouncing around me the whole time, I am so pleased with these toys. They are tough and the little people are soft enough that I’m not worried about the children hurting themselves on the edges. These definitely aren’t toys that I will want to get rid of.

Both vehicles, we’ve got a school bus and a tractor, sing. Isaac spends a lot of time pressing the person to make the car sing and then dancing. It’s rather cute.

All around, I love Fisher Price stuff and always have, so I’m not really a hard sell – and anything that comes in the post and is for the children is going to win them over instantly. Isaac incidentally is still crawling around with the cow in his hand, so I think they’ve won him over.

Now, I’ve just got to referee when they decide that they both need the school bus or they are going to die.


And you know, that’s always fun.

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Seven is a bully – a fat bully.

by Veronica on March 29, 2010

in Animals, Sponsored Posts

This post is sponsored by Nuffnang.

Seven was our first dog, a Dogs Home rescue over 2 years ago. Being at the dogs home and previous, god knows where, well, it’s given her Issues. With a capital I.

Seven is a bat

You can’t pat her without her cringing. She is bossy. And dominating.

I mean, she is a terrier x daschund x whatever – she is short and fat and has tiny little stubby legs so she doesn’t run very fast.

Seven 004

And being a small dog, she gets very fat, very quickly.

When I see her getting fat, I put her on a diet – which works …. for a while. Boiled rice, vegetables, raw bones, and a little bit of dog food is my normal plan (not all at once of course).

However, you’ve got to factor in the fact that Seven is a bully and she’s not averse to stealing everyone else’s food while she is dieting.

In fact, I think she has the cats so scared of her that they purposely throw her their food, just to keep her happy. Think schoolyard bully, shaking the weedy nerds upside down for their lunch money.

Yeah, that’s what Seven does.

So Seven gets fat, I put her on a diet, she loses weight, she beats up all the other animals for their food, gains weight again, I notice and put her on a diet again.

It’s like yoyo dieting for dogs.

And now we’ve got Susie, I need to be extra careful that Susie is eating enough and that Seven isn’t stealing all of Susie’s food, as well as the cats food, as well as any mice the cat catch –

As an aside here, this morning I went outside and narrowly missed stepping on a dead mouse. There was another one in the dogs bed, another near the water bowl and one in the hay. Seven was running around in circles, growling any time the cats tried to steal their (dead, cold) mice back. They eventually gave up. Like I said – bully.

So yeah, Seven is a fat bully.

Heh, Seven is eating from Susie's pile here. Like I said, bully.

Nuffnang asked if I’d like to be part of a trial for some new dog food, Pedigree’s Light and Mature for Overweight or Old dogs and I wavered for a while. I mean, it’s dog food.

But then I thought that it would give me an opportunity to talk about Seven and make Taz happy, so I agreed.

I’m under no illusions, when Seven is looking fat, then she is unhealthy. It seems that nowadays, over 40% of Aussie dogs are fat. Heh, I can just imagine them trying to run around a dog park, puffing and clutching at their sides.

This dog food from Pedigree, it’s formulated for less active and/or older dogs, with 30% less calories. I think Seven with her teensy little legs falls under the less active category. Poor Seven.

She seemed to like it to be honest. Not that that is any great test, I’m fairly sure this dog of mine would eat anything if given half a chance. Susie practically inhaled hers as well, despite not really needing it.

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I can do it my own self!

by Veronica on March 9, 2010

in Sponsored Posts

This post is sponsored by Nuffnang.

***

Just let me do it myself! she exclaims, holding the mouse like a hostage.

I wasn’t trying to take the mouse off her, but she is impatient and frustrating and she assumes that that is what I was going to do, because that’s what I did when I was 10 and teaching her how to navigate a computer for the first time.

Okay, let me talk you through it. Click on the email icon.

Where is the email icon?

In the start menu.

Slowly she navigates to the start menu, me sitting at an opposite desk.

Where is it? I can’t see it.

I click through on my computer and look.

There, at the top.

Her frustration rises and so does mine. This is the most annoying thing I’ve ever had to do and she just won’t listen. She’s like a toddler, yelling I can do it my OWN self, and I just want to calmly state that yes, of course you can, but geez, you need to listen to me talk you through it!

This was how it started, all of it. When I started college, my mother came with me as a mature age student. She’d been wanting to go back to school for a while and I’d been nagging her. Finally, it paid off and there we were, on opposite sides of a desk in the library, glaring at each other.

Never mind, she snapped. I’ll get S to show me later.

I can show you now Mum, you just need to listen!

I stood up, to stand behind her.

Veronica! She growled. I can do it myself! Don’t take the mouse off me!

Again, it was like a hostage situation.

I wasn’t going to take the mouse. I was going to point to where you needed to click.

ARGHHHH!

Eventually, we decided that instead of killing each other, we would let S show her how her email worked. S did, and Mum wasn’t worried about having the mouse wrestled from her grip. Not that I was going to anyway.

(And not that I did, although she claims otherwise, I maintain that her memory is flawed by the fear of having the mouse taken off her. I might have had to sit on my hands an awful lot, but I didn’t take that damn mouse away.)

5 years later and while she will still ring me up to get me to talk her through something tricky, Mum is pretty much a computer expert. When I started this blog, I nagged her into starting one of her own. Over 2 years later, her blog is still going strong. In fact, she was one of the finalists for Best Australian/NZ Weblog 2010.

I don’t think she’s ever gotten over the fear of having me take the mouse away though.

***

It seems we were ahead of our time, with computers and blogging. I was teaching Mum how to use a computer 10 years ago and we nearly killed each other.

Nowadays, there are things like The Digital Mums Campaign: helping to teach mothers how to use email, the Internet and social networking to keep in touch with their children in today’s online world.

I would have killed for something like that, it wouldn’t have gotten me sent to my room nearly as often! Mum and I might be ahead of the times, but I’m pretty sure other mothers are still sitting in front of their computers, holding a mouse hostage and telling their children to just let me work it out myself!

The Digital Mums Campaign is active over on Facebook and they talk about mothers, social networking and keeping in touch. I wonder if you’d like to click over and become a fan? You can probably find me over there, talking about my mother who has managed to outshine me in the digital world this year!

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Handy Manny – Tooling Around – review

by Veronica on March 2, 2010

in Sponsored Posts

This post is sponsored by Nuffnang.

—

We were having a sort of okay morning before the post arrived. Amy kept escaping out into the big yard, to run around and when I brought her back inside, we had tears and tantrums. FYI baling twine is great stuff to tie gates shut. Too tricky for small hands to untie. Awesome.

She’d just had yet another tantrum and Susie, the puppy jumped all over her making it so much worse, when the mailman came.

Getting the post is exciting don’tyouknow. Probably because it involved the big yard, yet again.

I’m not sure what made her happier, the fact that we got something in the mail from school (letting me know what days playgroups and early learners is on) or the fact that we got a package from Disney containing a dvd AND I let her open it. To the best of her abilities that is.

I waited until Isaac went down for a nap, figuring anything new to keep her quiet during naptime was a good thing, before putting the dvd on.

Now I must admit, I’m not a big fan of kids cartoons. I let Amy watch them most mornings and during dinner prep, but I don’t watch them myself very often. Kids movies, well, that’s a different matter, but we’re talking cartoons here.

So I put Handy Manny – Tooling Around on. Amy curled up on the couch to watch it. I checked emails, got some writing done and watched her reactions.

Dude, she was quiet! QUIET.

The dvd has an autoplay feature (Fastplay?) at the beginning, which was fantastic because I couldn’t find the dvd remote in the beginning. It was less fantastic 40 minutes later when it started playing again, without me touching it, meaning that either I brave the tantrums and turn it off anyway, or let her watch it again.

I’m not feeling very brave, I’m letting her watch it again.

Handy Manny offers messages about teamwork, friendship and community, while having fun with friends. I’m not sure how much of it sunk in to Amy’s head, but it’s not a bad thing for her to be learning at all. If she doesn’t bash Isaac on the head when they play with the building blocks later I’ll be inclined to look twice at the dvd.

The bonus features were a bit beyond Amy – I’m not encouraging her to learn to use the dvd remote just yet, it’s bad enough that she knows how to work the machine by herself.

So that’s that. Anything that gives me 40 minutes peace and quiet can only be a good thing!

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