Holiday budget tips - you read it here first

Seriously...this is much more fun than Disney

The lovely Rosie Scribble has blogged about a competition in which you can win some foreign currency for posting your family budgeting travel tips. As I'm heading off to Europe shortly, this would come in very handy, so I'm going to have a go.

Having travelled a fair amount with my kids, particularly in the US, I've learned a few things over the years about how not to spend your money. Here are a few ways I can think of to cut down on expenses during your holiday.

1. My number one budgeting tip -- don't eat out too often with small children if you can avoid it. You will pay extortionate amounts for food they don't like and drinks they don't finish. If you are self-catering, great -- buy delicious food for yourself and eat in, and cook the kids the stuff they like. You'll also be able to afford that good bottle of wine, instead of having to pick the cheapest bottle on the menu.

2. If you are eating out, check out whether or not kids' menus are actually cheaper. We've now worked out that for two kids, the Pizza Express kids' menu adds up to more than if you buy an adult Margarita (pizza, not the drink!) and split it between them. My kids never, ever want the pudding or the "babyccino" (being too full up on pizza) so it's really not worth it. Oh, and take crayons. Or you'll end up buying expensive drinks just to drown out the noise of the bored children complaining, and ice cream to keep them from going crazy.

3. Consider travelling by car to your destination, instead of flying.  If your kids are OK in the car, it will save you money -- flights plus car hire add up to a lot (particularly when care hire firms whack on extra charges for car seats etc). You can also take all your stuff and paraphenalia that goes with having children -- and avoid extra bag charges from mean airlines (BA, I'm looking at you here). Take plenty of audio entertainment for the car -- we enjoyed listening to Harry Potter on the way to France this year.

4. If you are doing long drives, a good plan is to stay overnight at somewhere with a pool for when you arrive. This may not sound like budgeting, but actually not all hotels with pools are expensive (in America, we always went for the Holiday Inn Express chain; it was relatively budget, but all the hotels had small pools). It will also save your sanity, as what you really don't need after a long drive is manic, screaming kids in a hotel room.

5. If you do have to hire a car - see above -- avoid the car seat charges by packing a blow-up car seat. We have a brand called Bubblebum. Yes, the Littleboys giggle about the name and say they're "squishy", but these seats are incredibly useful and fit nicely into your luggage.

6. If you want to save money, avoid theme parks. Honestly. Take your children swimming in a lake, hiking up a mountain, make sandcastles at the beach. They will have just as much fun, probably won't have any meltdowns and you'll be about two hundred pounds better off.

7. If you're going to a city, do your homework first about travel options - is there a family travelcard, does it include museums/sightseeing? In San Francisco, we managed to get a travel ticket that included several attractions. Otherwise, you could spend a fortune on just getting around.

8. Also in cities - don't try and do too many museums in a day. Not only will you pay through the nose (most places, unlike London, charge for museums), your children will want to kill you and you'll end up buying them expensive ice creams/toys to keep them from melting down....

9. If you are determined to do lots of museums, check out in advance whether your chosen destination has free ones. Washington DC is a good option as the Smithsonian Museums are free. Also, if you visit New York, bear in mind that some museums, like the Museum of Natural History, advertise a high price for your visit which (if you read the small print) is actually optional. You can pay $1 to visit that museum, as long as you are prepared for some dirty looks at the ticket booth.

10. Last one -- and this might be obvious, but I still haven't quite learned from it -- avoid that museum gift shop! Your kids will want to buy some piece of utter tat, or a toy that they will love for ten minutes and then forget all about. You'll find it in two years time lying at the bottom of the toy box and wonder why you spent twenty five dollars of your hard earned cash on it. Trust me.

I'm going to BritMums Live - are you?

About six years ago, when I had just started blogging about life with small children in Nappy Valley, I was contacted by someone called Susanna, with a blog called A Modern Mother, who wanted to start a network for Mummy Bloggers. I wasn't sure what this really meant, but I signed up to it, and a few months later she launched British Mummy Bloggers.

A few other bloggers joined up, and I remember that they had a coffee morning in London, but I couldn't go because I had a work meeting. So I didn't get to meet Susanna. Then, just as I headed to live in the USA, British Mummy Bloggers had its first blogging conference. My little part of the blogosphere was abuzzwith this event, as hundreds of people I'd met online got to meet each other in real life, and I was really disappointed not to be able to go.

Over the years, as BMB evolved into Brit Mums Live, and got bigger and bigger and then REALLY huge, I STILL haven't made it due to living abroad and having small children who I couldn't leave. Oh yes, and in the meantime, I had introduced my good friend, Maddy, to Susanna (long story, but she was moving to the same town), and she is now one of the chief organizers of the event. And I still haven't met Susanna.

But this year ...(drum roll).....I'm back in London. So this year I'm finally going (well, for one day anyway. Kiddie commitments still get in the way).

Saturday's schedule sounds exciting. I'm really looking forward to some of the speakers, such as Benjamin Brooks-Dutton, who has written so movingly about his wife's death. If I'm honest I'm a bit terrified by all the sessions about monetizing your blog, creating brilliant video content and so forth, as I've never really done any of this, and I'm not sure I ever will, but there's a session on travel blogging that sounds good. Really, it seems from the programme that there's something for everyone.

So what I want to know is are any of you, dear readers, going? Sadly I know a few of my old muckers are unable to make it (you know who you are). So who should I be looking out for? (Apart from Susanna - who I finally, six years on, will get to meet). Let me know....I don't want to miss anyone.

Life for Rent

Crystal Palace: our new abode

"If my life is for rent, and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cos nothing I have is truly mine"

So warbled Dido -- and I'm inclined to agree. Although I've been a homeowner for 15 years (with the exception of the past month) I'm coming to the end of my fifth year of renting houses and I'm happy to report that we've just exchanged contracts on our new house.

Yes, NappyValleyGirl is no more as we're moving to Crystal Palace in August. Any suggestions on what to call the blog gratefully received. I've though of a few -- View from the Palace, Life in the Palace, Palatial Living -- but not sure yet about any of them.But we are sure about the house, and the area -- which has a great park (with model dinosaurs in it), fun restaurants and shops, and -- possibly --  an exciting future with the plans to rebuild the Crystal Palace itself.

There are upsides to renting. When something goes wrong (as it seems to do on a weekly basis in the house we're currently renting) you just call the landlord/agent and they have to pay to sort it out.
Luckily in our case this has normally been quick and efficient - but in our first rental in America, where our landlady was tricky to get old of and insisted on trying to fix everything herself first, it wasn't always so. But on the whole, the only stress you have is waiting in for the workman rather than worrying about how expensive it's going to be to fix.

On the other hand, you can't solve the longer term problems with the house. The reason something goes wrong with our current house on a weekly basis is partly because the plumbing is dreadful. If it was our house we would probably rip it all out and start again - but, we can't. In our 10 years in Clapham, I only once recall having to call a plumber out -- this year has seen at least three visits.

Clearly, renting also means you can't make decorative changes -- my landlady has quite eclectic taste in wallpaper, and we haven't put any pictures up this year because it didn't really seem worth damaging the walls for a 12 month stay. It's also hard to get too excited about maintaining the garden when it's not, well, yours.

Of course, I'll probably be eating my words once we move in and I'm spending half my earnings on house maintenance and half my time pruning what estate agents term a "mature" garden (read overgrown and out of control). But for now, I'm looking forward to making my own disastrous decorative choices, hammering some picture hooks into walls and planting some flowers of my choice (I have a dream of a wisteria-covered facade).

Crystal Palace, here we come.

How Lord of the Rings saved violin practice

At least all that obsessive watching of "The Two Towers" has been productive

Littleboy 1 recently started playing the violin. Now, he's a musical boy who took to the piano very quickly, and with his Dad also a good violinist, I had rather assumed that this would all go smoothly and I wouldn't have to do much.

But somehow, with the all the piano practice, homework, sport and other stuff we have to fit into our week, violin seems to have fallen somewhat off the radar. We were managing one session a week, with The Doctor at the weekend, but it increasingly ended in tears, either of frustration because he found it hard, or because there was something much more interesting to be done with his brother. (Meanwhile I was wondering if the neighbours could hear the terrible sounds emanating from our house and thought we were strangling a cat.)

Six months in, and his teacher had begun to write subtle, then not-so-subtle hints in his lesson book about the need for more practice. He'd also joined a string ensemble at school and had been given music to learn for a concert -- despite the fact that he had just about mastered playing open strings. It was time for action, so I decided that over half term we would get to grips with the violin.

Now, although I have tried in vain before to emulate the "tiger mother" style when it comes to music practice, I have never really succeeded. But this time I tried all sorts of things. Bribes, mainly, but also -- playing along to a CD that came with his violin book, and me playing the piano with him so it seemed like we were doing duets. But there was still lots of grumbling and not much improvement.

And then.....it happened by chance that Littleboy 2 was playing a tune on the piano that he said reminded him of the music from Lord of the Rings (something the two of them watch obsessively on DVD). I sat down at the piano and managed to pick out the tune. (Just goes to show that MY years of music lessons, which included barely scraping through my 'cello Associated Board exams until I gave up at the age of 18, did actually pay off).

Soon we were looking up, and improvising, all sorts of different musical themes from the Lord of the Rings films. There was the Shire music (which has a vaguely Irish/gipsy feel), but their favourite seemed to be the "Riders of Rohan" music. I wasn't sure which this was, so we used the iPad to look it up. (Handy parental tip -- you can find all kinds of sheet music on the internet, and an iPad is a perfect way to look at it.)

Littleboy 1 then spent a whole half hour engrossed in playing this theme on his violin (I've tried to post the video here, but it doesn't seem to like Blogger). Voila - his playing improved, and he was then able to tackle the concert pieces much better. Littleboy 2 even accompanied him on the piano.

So thank you, Peter Jackson, or actually Howard Shore, who Wikipedia tells me wrote most of the music for LOTR. Thank you for saving violin practice. Now, if you could just help me with that maths homework.....

Books for boys. Or girls. Or both?

,

The Secret Garden

Is it half term already? The last couple of weeks have flown by in a whirl of homework, sports days, swimming galas and vomiting bugs (the latter laying us all low for the past few days).

Blogging time seems in short supply, but I've been mulling a blog post for a while about books I'm reading with the boys. When I go into bookshops these days, I'm often struck by how the kids' books seem to be divided by gender. The "boys" books, all about superheroes and dragons and wars and monsters, as opposed to the "girls" books, with their slightly pinkish covers, all about friendships and school and ballet and horses.

Now I know that getting boys to read can be an issue; I've read countless articles about "books for boys", and how we must encourage them by feeding them with subject matter that interests them, etc. And maybe it has been ever thus; after all, I grew up loving Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes and L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, while my husband remembers devouring TinTin and Lord of the Rings (both of which my boys adore too). Clearly there have always been books that appeal, in general, to one sex more than another, just as with toys, however we much we don't like to admit it.

But my point is that we shouldn't rule out the books that we think our children won't enjoy. The boys have surprised me on several occasions. For example, I have read the Littleboys most of the the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series, and for the most part they were riveted. Maybe they enjoyed different bits to me as a child -- instead of imagining Laura's Christmas hair ribbons and poplin dresses, they're more fascinated by how the family built their shanty -- but the point is, they're great stories.

The boys are also starting to love classics like Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows which have a universal appeal -- don't rule these out for being too old-fashioned. They find A.A. Milne hilarious, and they're currently listening with fascination to the Wind in the Willows, despite the fact that the language is quite heavy going for today's kids.(A note: I tried to read these books to them when they were younger, without success. But it seems nine and seven is the perfect age).

What really surprised me this week was when, all of us recovering from said tummy bug, the boys and I sat down to watch a 1975 TV series of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. This was something that came free a few years ago with a newspaper, and I had found among our DVD collection, long-forgotten since we moved to the US. Having not read it since I was a child, I would have said on balance that this was a "girl's" book, but the boys loved watching this serial so much that, as the credits rolled for the last episode, Littleboy was heard to say incredulously: "That's it? There's no more?"

That the same boy who is currently enjoying Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters could be riveted  by the tale of Mary Lennox and her invalid cousin is a testament to the power of great writing. So, bookstores, don't be afraid to mix it up a bit -- and fellow parents, we should all remember that a good story is a good story, whether it contains monsters and zombies or gardens and foxcubs.

A Magical Birthday at Hogwarts

Hanging around at 4 Privet Drive

Trying out some wand moves

Littleboy 1's birthday treat this year was to visit Hogwarts. And, for those of you who are thinking of going (I know Iota is), here's a little review (non-sponsored, I paid for it myself) to let you know how the Warner Bros. Studio Tour at Leavesden (near Watford) measured up.

First things first - you need to book online and well in advance. I booked six weeks ahead for a Saturday in May, and the only slot we could get was 5PM-8PM. However, this turned out to be fine - it wasn't absolutely mobbed, and when we turned up at 4.30, they seemed quite happy to let us in early.

Although I had heard nothing but good reports, I still wasn't quite sure what to expect. The Doctor and I are not generally big fans of theme parks, and tend to prefer the Great Outdoors to any indoor attraction, or anything (Disney, I'm looking at you here) where things are fake.

But we all love Harry Potter. I read all the books myself before having children, and I've recently read the first three aloud to the boys.  We did a marathon watching of all the films over Christmas so the boys were familiar with all the characters from beginning to end (which probably helps, because if you haven't seen all the films/read all the books, the tour does contain some spoilers).

So, when the curtain went up at the beginning of the tour (I won't say what's revealed, because it's such a surprise), I really was swept up in the magic. The one thing I hadn't expected was that I would enjoy it as much (if not more than) the children. This is partly because I am a huge movie buff - just the idea that we were on a film set was terribly exciting. Seeing the real costumes that actors like Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman and Robbie Coltrane actually wore was fascinating, as was seeing the real live sets (including the outdoor ones, such as 4 Privet Drive) and taking in all the information about how they were created. I began to feel quite regretful that I'd never pursued a career in film -- I think it's probably a bit late now...

What's good about the tour is that it is pitched for all ages. Children may not have the attention span to watch a five minute video about how a set was created, or marvel at the fact that someone sat down and actually painted all those portraits of the Headmasters of Hogwarts in Dumbledore's office. But they can try out doing wizard-y wand moves in front of a mirror, or riding a Quidditch broomstick against a green screen (afterwards you can purchase a DVD that makes you look as if you're flying over Hogwarts). Be warned though - even at 5PM there was a very long queue for the broomstick rides; we gave it a miss as there was so much else we wanted to do).

My highlights? Diagon Alley, the model Hogwarts Castle and the Hogwarts Great Hall. The creature workshop (where you can see how they made characters such as Dobby and Buckbeak come to life) is also really interesting.

Lowlights? The shop, which you can't avoid and in which everything is incredibly expensive. We had to spend ages persuading the boys not to spend their entire year's pocket money on a twenty five quid plastic broomstick (which we knew they'd only play with for five minutes).

If you want the newly nine-year-old's view -- Littleboy 1 says he liked Diagon Alley best of all."I was impressed how much they built of it," he tells me.  That's fair comment.

I'd  only add -- go when your children are nine or older. Really young children may not appreciate it all. The teenagers there seemed possibly the most excited - and that's fair enough,as Harry Potter is probably pitched more at their age than any other. But if you're really keen fans, and don't mind paying the ninety quid family ticket price, it's a bit like Disney; you could always go again.....

Fez-tastic

I'm thinking of turning this blog into a craft blog and entering it for lots of awards. I expect to get lots of followers pinning my brilliant craft designs to Pinterest and tweeting excitedly about them -- because, y'know, I am just so fantastic at this kind of project.

No, not really,

But this may be the first and last time I post a craft project on my blog. Unless it really catches on.

So, here we go: How to make a fez: by the least crafty mother in Britain.

1.Buy red foam
2. Put foam around child's head and measure - cut hat shape to fit head
3. Use red card (not quite matching) to create a top for the hat
4. With help of seven year old, staple the pieces rather wonkily together
5. Get seven year old to decorate hat - the gold stars were his idea
6. Complain about lack of tassel to another mother at school gate. Very kindly she offers to give you one.
6. Sellotape tassel on
7. Turn up at school with said fez (which your seven year old is too embarrassed to wear). Note that the other fezzes range from the ultra-sophisticated (proper felt and all manner of decorations) to the really half-hearted (paper party hat in blue).
8. Realise that in determination not to forget fez, you have forgotten seven year old's piano books and failed to realise that he is supposed to be doing a gym display today.

Stay tuned for more creative projects on the Nappy Valley craft blog!