story – Mediocre Mum

The Land of Me – Interactive Story Book

I don’t know why I didn’t think I was going to like this, when in fact I really did. There are 6 Chapters that you can download for children age 2-6 (Shape, Size and Colour, The World Outside, Making things, Rhythm and Dance, Songs and Rhymes and Story Time). I absolutely love the music in the intro, the characters are gorgeous and what I like most of all is that there are over a 100 printable activities.

You follow the 3 characters Buddy Boo the bear, Eric the raccoon and Willow the owl through the Land Of Me. At each stop, children have the opportunity to choose elements of the adventure. My favourite is Anthony the Mexican Anteater in the desert, he’s a scream. We made a castle out of jelly in the mud!

There’s also the opportunity to explore Literacy, with a place to add your own text, there’s also information about the creatures and places you visit and if you watch carefully, in the background, you may see the other characters getting up to all sorts.

The only negatives I found were that it takes quite awhile to download. So, make sure you do this before you sit the kids in front of the PC. Secondly, as I’m a user of iTunes and rarely pay more than .59p for kid’s apps, I thought that £6.95 per chapter may be a bit dear. However, you can download the first chapter for free from here.

Plus, this weekend they are offering a whopping £10 off. All you need to do is type ‘happy’ into the discount code panel at checkout.

Disclosure: We received all 6 chapters in return for this review

Is your bedtime routine less than perfect?

Ready for Bed Week, where kids lifestyle company, Worlds Apart, encourages parents and kids to get their bedtime routine on track, couldn’t have come at a better time for us here at the Mediocre House as my daughter’s bedtime is turning into a bit of a nightmare. My daughter used to be brilliant at going to bed. Well that’s a bit of a lie as she didn’t sleep through the night until she was six months old. Luckily though she would just wake up feed and then go back to sleep. However, once she started sleeping through the night she was brilliant. It was a bit of a party trick, we’d say time for bed and she would toddle off to the bottom of the stairs wanting to go, people were absolutely amazed.

But, that has all changed recently; we’ve always been sticklers for routine, bath, milk, stories and bed as we value our adult time in the evenings. However, now when we put her to bed she doesn’t stay there and has worked out how to get out of her room. We did the rapid return thing taking turns, briskly taking her back and it usually worked after a while. However, she’s starting to wear us down. She now she sneaks downstairs and sits at the bottom behind the door. You may not approve but we’ve taken to ignoring her and we’ve found that she’ll eventually take herself back up to bed. Result!

On the other hand, she has taken to sleeping with the light on, well her illuminated globe and we have to sneak in, hoping not to wake her and shut it off. We find if we don’t she gets up in the middle of the night and starts wandering around the house getting into all sorts of mischief. So, we were over the moon when we were asked to review the lovely new Disney Princess Go Glow Story Projector. It’s a 3 in 1 rechargeable night light, torch and projector. It just arrived yesterday but she loves it. She toddled straight off to bed armed with her new torch to show daddy and didn’t come down once, bliss! Plus, we didn’t have to sneak in and turn it off!

More information about the Ready for Bed Week can be found here www.readyforbedweek.com. It features tips and advice on bedtime routines and the more families they get to download the bedtime reward chart from the site, the more help Worlds Apart can give to the Sleeping Children Around – the global charity which provides bed kits for children who don’t even have a
comfy place to sleep.

Performing Stories

Went to Story Tent put on by the Local Performing Arts Centre with my daughter yesterday morning. It’s absolutely brilliant. I’m assuming the lady who tells the story is an actor, as she orated it magnificently, not a book to be found. Then the children get the glue, scissors and paper out and create props for the story. They finish by acting the story out together. This week the story was Little Cock Feather Frock, one I’d never heard before. I did try to google it but it wasn’t one of my better ideas!

I really hope they aren’t affected by the governmental cut backs. It would be sad to see these type of things disappear.

Its Your Story! Personalised Gifts

I have to say I was really excited about reviewing Its Your Story, personalised books for children as I think it’s a brilliant idea and I wasn’t disappointed. All you have to do is choose a book from the website, which is nicely broken down by birthdays, gender or genre. There is also a section for Adults.

Once you have chosen a book they contact you and ask for details. In our case, it was daughter’s name, address, best friend’s name, and favourite food. Then all we had to do was upload a photo of Madame. Easy peasy. I think they would make excellent gifts; one to note with Christmas around the corner.

We chose a classic, Jack and the Beanstalk. When she first saw herself in the book she got so excited, shouting her name on each page.

Still not convinced, have a listen