Ahhhh yes. I love photos. Photos, photos photos, all day long. Every day. Photos. Photos on my hard-drive, photos on my Instagram, Snapchat, FB……. wherever I can whack up some digital snaps I do. We used to be ridiculously diligent about getting our precious snaps …
Stuffed mushrooms make a super-easy, quick dinner that is one of our favourites. It’s perfect for those nights when you don’t feel like cooking a ‘meaty’ meal with multiple sides and multiple pots and pans to wash – plus, it’s kind-of a little bit fancy. …
The latest range of on-trend kids ‘Fashionery’ is in store now, just in time to kick off Term 2! Make sure to read to the end for your chance to win $100 to spend at Warehouse Stationery.
The end of the first school term leaves many little scholars a little worse for wear – I know my two boys are tired, they’re fighting off the first winter ills and for Ethan, the excitement of his new school has begun to fade……..the homework wars have begun after all!
It’s not a rule-of-thumb in our house, but I generally treat the kids to a couple of small purchases over the holidays; little items that are fun, cute and inexpensive, that they will either use for art and craft or to play with. I feel like I’m pulling the wool over Ethan’s eyes these holidays by killing two birds with one stone; a holiday treat combined with a little ‘motivation’ (in the form of super cool stationery) to get back to work in Term 2 lol.
The ‘Science Project’ is looming ::::::::sigh::::::::
Kids stationery is quite the crucial element in creating the ‘perfect’ (read: no excuses) environment within which to coax your children towards their homework, a battle I now dread every, single school day. Like fashion, there are seasonal new releases within stationery – or ‘fashionery’ – ranges and Kookie have just launched their Geosaur range which is sure to capture the imagination of kids heading back to school over the next couple of weeks.
I’ve picked up some bits and pieces from the range that I’ll surprise E with before he heads back to school. We’ve got some tentative routines around homework in place that I want to work on cementing in Term 2, so dedicating a certain notebook (I’ve picked the Kookie Geosaur Notebook) to brainstorming, as well as having his home stationery organised using the Square Stack box set should help. Ethan’s class is given a theme for their fortnightly homework assignments. I’m going to be keeping this front-and-centre in Term 2 using the rad Geosaur mini whiteboard to display the topic, a visual reminder to do his homework rather than the usual nagging/pleading one from me lol.
My favourite item from the range?
A freaking SPY pen!!!! Dreams do come true! It writes in invisible ink which can only be viewed via the UV light in the cap! Genius! Ethan loves this little gadget, guaranteed Top Secret fun.
Shop the Geosaur Range online now (the prices are amazing!) and comment below with your favourite item to be in to win a $100 Gift Card from Warehouse Stationery! Competition closes 22/5/16 10pm.
Kookie Geosaur Colour Pencils 24 Pack Blue $6.99, Kookie Geosaur Stationery Set 7 pieces $7.99, Kookie Geosaur Pencil Case/Pen Cup Green $6.99, Kookie Geosaur Lunch Box Square Stack of 4 $12.99, Kookie Geosaur Lockable Notebook Green $4.99, Kookie Geosaur Spy Pen Purple $4.99, Kookie Geosaur Bag Tag Green $3.99, Kookie Geosaur Whiteboard Green $7.99, Kookie World Globe Blue $19.99
This post was made possible thanks to Warehouse Stationery.
Our back door opens to a flat concrete patio complete with roof, the perfect spot to enclose for winter play with the addition of two sides of roll-up PVC blinds. I can see it now…… That’s on the wish list. A very rainy first weekend …
For 6 years now Ethan has played rugby for our local club. We have lived, breathed and loved rugby each winter for each of those years and look forward to doing it all over again with Nixon – god help us! E missed his first …
If you grew up in New Zealand like me, the Slip Slop Slap message became as much a part of summer as jandals and Coppertone.
So much so that we all pretty much tuned it out.
I was born in the late seventies to hardworking parents who lived for the weekends when we could all head to the beach or out on the boat. Maximising our hours in the sun was our number one goal. The only time I remember wearing sunscreen was when fluorescent zinc was in fashion for five minutes in the eighties lol.
I never saw my Dad, a marine engineer, apply sunscreen.
He died of melanoma at age 56. Five years ago, nine months after diagnosis.
Since then, my job as a mother has a new onus – to protect my boys from ever getting sunburnt. Ever.
The thing with melanoma is, there are often very visible signs that things are not as they should be. The difficulty in diagnosis lies in monitoring visible changes in our skin with accurate record keeping and analysis. This is both costly and very hard to implement.
Until now.
This week I downloaded the SkinVision app. It’s the first of its kind, a revolutionary tool native to our ever-present smartphones that provides simple to use, instant melanoma risk assessment of any mole whilst creating an easy to use archive of photos. I’ve created folders for every member of our family so I can snap suspect moles and archive the images for comparison each month (I’ve also set ongoing calendar reminders to take new images!). Creating a routine is just as important for melanoma detection and prevention as it is with breast cancer.
To be clear though, SkinVision is not a diagnostic tool, it assesses the risk of skin lesions and provides recommendations based on analysis of the image procured from the app. With an accuracy rate of roughly 80% for identifying melanoma skin cancer (www.stuff.co.nz, 6.4.16), SkinVision has positioned itself comfortably between the diagnosis rate of GP’s and dermatologists – a rate that sits very well with me.
I’ve had my skin mapped so am familiar with the process and was impressed with how similar the imaging from SkinVision was. My skin is dodgy as – obviously there is a high chance that there is a genetic risk factor for melanoma in our family. I’m covered in moles and there are more appearing all the time so having access to risk assessment technology that I trust is invaluable to both myself and our family.
These are screen-grabs of my SkinVision app. Unfortunately I have many, many high-risk moles, some of which are very small, so it would be super easy to overlook them. See that ‘send to doctor’ button? How cool is that! No more procrastinating!
What you need to know about SkinVision
SkinVision will help you spot a suspicious mole on yourself or on a family member or friendFor me the value in this app was only realised after I began to use it. Discovering medium and high risk moles was the wake-up call that I needed to take ownership of my skin health and my family history with melanoma.
I urge you to try SkinVision, it costs nothing to download and will change the way you think about the risk we all face against melanoma.
I am SO happy to be able to offer SEVEN of you the chance to win a SkinVision annual plan! To enter just leave me a comment below. Competition closes 27.4.16.
I introduced New Zealand made, Royal Nectar skin care in my Cruise Essentials post a couple of weeks ago and I’m still loving it. The combination of bee venom and Manuka Honey is perfection and these three products deliver amazing results! My skin has been particularly …
What’s not to love about the Big Book of Love by Catherine & Laurence Anholt? This is the book every parent would love to write for their little ones. It’s sweet, absolutely brimming with positivity and gratitude, it’s rhyming rhythm rolls easily off the tongue …
Eventually though, enough days will pass and you’ll be able to look back and recall all of the stabby details without wanting to smash a hole in the wall. Then, friends, it’s time to blog about it.
I should have realised that the gods had it in for me quite early on Thursday morning, but the first ordeal – getting Nixon in the truck for swimming lessons – arrived earlier than expected. I had no chance to fully activate all of my (limited) faculties before the first tantrum hit. We eventually gone on the road, 10 minutes late, with Nix still in his pajamas. Zero fucks given at this point. Was so close to packing it in and staying home but once we were on the motorway I prematurely gave myself a smug little pat on the back.
This moment of triumph was short-lived when I realised we had arrived at the pool with no towels.
WTF.
Towels borrowed, lesson complete, Nix and I were completing the god-awful changing room shuffle when the baby next to us power-spewed all over the floor. A milk/chlorine power-spew. After I acclimated to the smell I realised that no-one in the changing room had offered to help the poor spew-mum, in fact I’ve never seen the Mummy and bub duos vacate the changing rooms so quickly. Women were literally running to their cars barefoot and braless!
Nixon was quite entertained marvelling at the spew and narrating (at volume) the post-spew movements of his classmate so I stepped in, offered my assistance and went to get help with the cleanup.
We got back home and everything muddled along quite well until the after school shift began. E came home in a particularly defiant mood that rapidly escalated into a full blown showdown complete with “I’m never talking to you again”, “You don’t want me to be happy”, “You don’t care about anything I do” and “You just say NO to everything!”. I gave up and vacated to the yard with Nix where we spent the rest of the daylight hours jumping on the tramp and driving trucks in the dirt. There’s actually no arguing reasoning with my angry tweenager right now. He’s so pumped full of testosterone that anything you say in the throes of a discussion just translates to him as ‘I’m going to take away all of your shit and make your life as miserable as I can’.
The only technique I have for dealing with him is to let him cool off, think about what he’s said and occasionally he might apologise. What’s got him on a knife-edge right now is the xBox game we ‘mutually’ removed from circulation a couple of weeks ago (catch up on that here).
He wants it back. And quite frankly I’m sick of hearing about it. So, this weekend we re-negotiated the terms of the game’s release and the situation is being ‘monitored’.
Anyway. Back to Thursday.
Scene: Nixon and myself – good times – escaping yelling older son by playing in the garden.
Sun disappears, it gets cold. It’s time for dinner. Then it was all on. Nixon wanted no part of;
Cue massive, violent, extremely vocal tantrum. Outside. Nixon is huge. 18+ kilograms of thrashing toddler-superhuman that wants nothing more than to exert his will over mine. The only way I can safely move him in the state he was in without losing massive clumps of hair or an ear, is to hoist him under my arm and carry him face down like a canoe on my hip. Leave him outside you say? The volume of our youngest son is equal to his impressive bulk. Our neighbours can’t (and shouldn’t have to) handle an un-muffled Nixon tanty that had the potential to go on for at least 30 minutes.
So this went on and on and eventually resulted in a UFC-style knee to my jaw. At speed.
Much like my exit to our bedroom where I shut the door and cried for an hour. I had nothing left in the tank.
I can usually handle one of the boys giving me hell, but on that day, back-to-back tantrums at 11/10 on the meltdown scale just ruined me. Now, as I read back over this post I think “pffttttt, it doesn’t even sound that bad. You are a LAME mother Melissa”.
It was bad though. And it placed me firmly at the end of my rope leaving Dave and my Mum to pick up the pieces, feed the boys and get Nixon ready for bed. Failing to cope with my own kids left me with an all too familiar, despondent feeling that I was unable to shake for a couple of days.
With some perspective, I’ve thought hard about some different tactics to employ with each of the boys but, they don’t call it The Witching Hour for nothing right? Every day at 5pm I feel a little nervous…………….
I took a LOT of new products with me to trial on our cruise last month and have been putting them through their paces ever since. I was looking for time-savers, space-savers, multi-taskers or just downright awesomeness and I’ve whittled my holiday grab bag down to …