Les Alicourts, The Loire Valley, France - A review from a mum of two.

This summer we took ourselves off to France.  Not the South of France, no.  That would require getting on a plane, and since we'd worked to a tight budget this year we decided to go only as far as we could drive.  So drive we did.  All 600 miles.  We decided to break up the trip there by driving only as far as the south coast of England one Saturday afternoon, and checking into a hotel, giving us a full Sunday to drive to Eurotunnel, drive our car onto the train (the children absolutely lurvvvedd that!  Cheeky Monkey No. 2 (who is nearly 3yrs old)  just couldn't quite get her head around a car being on a train), and then drove down past Paris.

Now I should say right here that this was a successful holiday.  The resort, Les Alicourts, was great, the chalet we stayed in was clean, sufficiently kitted out, and had air conditioning ( a must, since the temperature reached 34 degrees Celsius). 

However, I am only human, and English at that, so I will of course be starting off the review with the pitfalls!

Pitfall number 1.  Driving around Paris.  You can do it, and you can do it fairly stress free with two children in the car under the following conditions,
1) both children have recently been to the toilet and will be OK for a good half an hour before they need to go again.
2)  you have an in car DVD player showing a film they've never seen before and will therefore keep them suitably entertained
3) you have an updated SatNav system.

I absolutely love my SatNav.  The lady, who is so far unnamed, is calm and gets you to precisely where you need to go.  OK so she sometimes has a slightly weird 'turn' and tries to get you to completely avoid a stretch of road for no apparent reason* and sometimes takes unnecessary detours, but she does get you there, and frankly, when you are circumnavigating a large city, on the wrong side of the road**, you need help and not a stressed passenger trying to read a map.

2.  The chalet had bunk beds.  It was a 6 person VIP Chalet with 3 bedrooms that could sleep up to 8 and we had my mum and dad there with us, which meant we could have put the children in one of the double bedrooms and my hubby and I could have slept on the convertible sofa in the lounge.  But, due to the kindness of a good friend, we had borrowed a 'Readybed'*** and so our eldest had the bottom bunk and our youngest slept in the Readybed on the floor next to her.  No-one was allowed on the top bunk.  OK, so at 5 years old you might argue she's old enough, but we weren't convinced.  And there was room, just, for our Readybed, so we used it.

3.  The chalet had limited storage.  My parents had the main bedroom with en-suite and had to hang clothes in a wardrobe cupboard situated weirdly in the lounge area.  We had a smaller double room without en suite but with wardrobes so were OK.  The bunk bed room had the smallest cupboard ever, and we ended up keeping clothes on the top bunk.

And so, on to the positives:

1.  The resort has a man-made lakeside beach.  This is great with small children as there's no tides or waves to worry about.  And the sandcastles stay in tact!

2.  The splash pool area for little ones got very full, so if you weren't there at opening time at 10am you were unlikely to get a sun lounger to sit on by the pool.  Having said that, you only needed one lounger between 2 adults and 2 children, because frankly when do you sit down!?

3.  The take away was fantastic.  Not just pizza and chips, oh no!  This is France after all.  Gorgeous spit roasted chickens and dauphinoise potatoes with green beans all to take away at incredible prices.

4.  The restaurant was equally brill.  Just book the day before to get a table for 6pm when it opens.

5.  10 mins drive to nearby Lamotte Beurvon and you can get on the quietest, smoothest trains ever to Paris, changing at Orlean, in roughly 2 hours.  If you can't be bothered, like us, you're in Orlean in about half an hour and it's a lovely french town with Joan of Arc heritage for those looking for history.

6. Everything was beautifully clean and well kept, from the gardens, to the chalets.

7.  The drive was particularly easy once you hit the French toll roads.  These, unlike equivalent motorways in the UK, have rest stops roughly every 10 minutes.  As a minimum these allow you to pull over for a picnic, a large percentage include toilets, and others have petrol stations and cafes/shops of varying sizes.  Additionally the French appear to hardly use them, creating the emptiest roads I've seen in a while.  It cost us about £30 in tolls to get halfway down France, but it was worth every penny for the convenience and speed.

8.  There's an indoor pool at the resort for those rainy days, which is great and also has a little slide in water only a few centimetres deep.  Downside though - the pool is in the Spa complex so only accessible to families with children between the hours of 10.30 and 12.30 in the morning.  We only needed to use it once and it was full.  The children got a little fed up of not having much room, so we left after only about half an hour.  


Overall Les Alicourts is a lovely resort.  You can book with Eurocamp who have caravans on site, as do Keycamp and Thomson Alfresco.  We booked direct with Les Alicourts online and got a better deal.  They also have some new Tree houses for the adventurous (though suspect not suitable for young children!)



*for some reason she didn't want us on the M1 northbound on the way home past Luton.  We ignored her, and hit no problems.  She panicked and for half an hour desperately tried to get us to turn off the M1 and get back on it further up North.
** yes, wrong!
*** A blow up bed with built in cover and pillow shaping, meaning you literally need nothing.

Parenting tips from a regular mum this autumn!

I consider myself a fairly average mum that works part-time, which few mums seem to do these days; I have a husband and 2 children, as I'm not yet sure how to get the 0.4 of a child required to exactly meet the average; I eat out and order takeaway more than I think I should and beat myself up about it*; I wash and iron everyone's clothes before my own; I rarely go out with girlfriends; manage a professional manicure about once a year; have opted out of salon colouring and have a strong relationship with Nice N Easy which I will love forever as long as it continues to lie to the world about my hair colour which is clearly brunette and not white at all! And I spend far to much time watching rubbish TV, albeit on Sky+ which cuts out the ads and saves me money but means I have no idea what innovations are hitting the highstreet.

So, with that in mind, here's a much longer list than I originally intended of the things that make my crazy normal life a little easier at the moment and will hopefully help you.

1.  Fork out for School dinners.  The children get a hot meal for £2 a day which I could never emulate.  And I can pick them up and be 'picnic mum' at tea time, not concerned with meat and veg, only with cold sausages, cheese and crackers, dippy egg and beans on toast.  My daughter is testing me this week and wanting to try packed lunches.  It's taken me until 9pm to get them to bed and then make appropriate lunches for tomorrow.  Usually I've done the ironing by then which is still sitting there grumbling at me... grrrrr.

2.  Always have the following either in your bag or easily accessible in the car:  plasters, germolene, a sticker/activity/colouring book, crayons, drinks, snacks, spare nappies (even if the kids are out of them, they are the best at absorbing any large spills quickly!), wipes (whatever age they are), a couple of nappy bags (good for rubbish which gravitates towards mum, if nothing else),  a spare outfit per child including socks and pants** (you'll thank me when you need it).

3.  Children don't tend to like doing tasks that they 'have' to do, like teeth brushing.  I have recently invented the "Teeth Monster" in our house.  Tell them he's lurking and that they need to brush their teeth quick and that you'll help.  Do some little growls, play acting, whilst brushing, then just as you are finishing their teech say, "Quick!  I can hear him!  I'll go and look! and pop out of the bathroom.  Then immediately come back in with arms in, what I like to call the 'T-Rex position', with fingers clawing, and say "I'm the Teeth Monster!  I'm coming to eat up everyone with mucky teeth!" look at their teeth and immediately look disappointed...."oh, that's not fair!  I'm hungry but you have lovely clean teeth so I can't eat you!  My tummy's grumbling...  Is there anyone else?"  In our house the children normally get away but then the Teeth Monster finds my hubby (or vice versa) and says "Hurray, you have Very mucky teeth" and tries to eat their arm, which the children find hilarious and enjoy fighting off the monster!  My children actually ask me to brush their teeth now instead of running away!

4.  Invest in an in car DVD player with 2 monitors for the backseats.  Ours was £50 from Curry's Clearance Store and worth every penny during the 8 hour drive to France on holiday.

5.  Save TV time until 4pm.  The children are tired and hungry by this time, so if limiting TV absolutely limit it to this time slot to enable you to cook in relative ease.

6.  Invest in Sky+ if you ever want to watch programmes of your own again.  Unless you have a much better memory than me and can manage to set the VHS/DVD recorder regularly.

7.  And one final tip for very new mothers;  don't panic if all you feel like doing is crying during the first few months of looking after your first child.  The culture shock alone is enough to throw anyone off kilter, and if you throw in crazy hormones and lack of sleep you have to expect that you won't be at your best.  It'll get easier and more fun as time goes by and as you begin to find ways of managing this new life.  I have cried buckets in my time, literally over spilt milk.  Don't worry about it, that's one aspect of child rearing that's most definitely a given!

And that'll do for now.  Let me know if it was helpful, boring, rubbish, funny etc.... and I'll try better next time!


* not literally of course, mentally.  No need to write in.
** that's knickers if you're in America.  Trousers are trousers in the UK.  Knickers are pants!

Out of the mouths of babes...

So we are all lined up waiting our turn for a go on the bumperboats.  These are round boats, with inflatable rings around them.  They seat two, and you use a joystick style controller with a button on the top to direct the electric motor and point the boat in the direction you want to go. 

We are at Wheelgate Adventure Park, just north of Nottingham, in the Midlands.  It's a great park for young children, with plenty of rides for them.  We've been to the park a couple of times before, but had never yet got around to a go on the boats. 

Well today was the day.  The sun was shining and the girls were being particularly well behaved making for a nice family day out.  We reached the start of the queue and the man in charge of the ride handed us two lifejackets for the girls.  I'd ride with Cheeky Monkey no.1, my husband with other youngest of our two cheeky monkeys, now approaching 3 years old.  My husband had been holding CM No.2 in his arms, but placed her back down on the ground so he could put her life jacket on.

Jackets were put on.  CM No.2 looked down at hers, a thick padded jacket which came out from her chest a good few inches.  She patted her chest with a satisfied expression.

It was fairly quiet in this queue.  I should point that out now.

CM No. 2 looked up at daddy, still patting her chest in a satisfied manner.

"Daddy,"  she shouted up.  "Look, you can't pick me up now!"
"Ok luv," he responded and asked "why?"
"You can't pick me up now, daddy, because I've got BIG boobies!"  And she giggled the cheekiest giggle and shouted to her sister.
"Look!  I've got BIG boobies!"  patting away on her chest.

Kids.... Don't you just love 'em!

Keep everything safe on the beach, and still look stylish! Canvas Beach Bag

I rarely buy much at Boots other than the annual pot of Clarins moisturiser and top-up mascaras, I’ve mentioned before how much of a non-girly girl I really am, and of course it’s the only place I seem to be able to get hold of the photo albums I like, as I’m of the pre-photobook generation.  But recently I have made a great Boots purchase.  

I live in a pretty small town, and Boots was going to be one of only a handful of shops I was going to be able to buy some new swimwear for the summer, but of course I was making this shopping expedition in the first week of August.

With the benefit of hindsight I can see how those fashion savvy readers will be thinking ‘What the!’ since it transpires that August is actually the last time you can expect to buy swimwear in the shops. Apparently we are supposed to make these purchases three months in advance in March. Shops in August stock knitwear, wellington boots and other general autumn fair.  I understand that this would be fine for those equally blessed fashion followers who happen to have a static body shape. But I’m shopping for me, someone who has two infant children, and has varied success at actually getting any exercise.

My body size moves from a size 10 to a size 14 depending on what shop I’m in within the same day, further aggravated by the swinging body size resulting from events like Christmas and year-end accounts time (ask any accountants you know about that and watch them reach for the chocolate).

So the shopping trip was pretty unsuccessful when it came to buying any swimwear. I wanted a full swimsuit as well, not a bikini. Ha! Boots had roughly four different designs still in stock, all not to my taste and another couple of designs which I liked, but turned out to be maternity ones.

So I browsed the rest of their dwindling summer fair and spotted a lovely navy, white and red beach bag.


The design attracted me initially, but when I investigated further I discovered that it had a feature that I personally hadn’t seen before. The bag had an inner drawstring lining, meaning you could throw all sorts of stuff in it, pull the string, let the inner bag fall inside the outer bag, and have a beach bag that wasn’t going to spill all your suncream, sunglasses, kids swimming nappies, wipes, mobile etc all over the sand.

I’ve checked, but it doesn’t look like you can buy Boot’s summer stuff online (oddly), so you’ll just have to look out for similar designs like this one and be smug when you’re all ready for summer!

Tried and tested. I love it.  Photos finally added... If anyone knows where one can buy these on line this year please post the link in a comment.. Thanks!

The big one goes public!

We were in the dentist's waiting room this morning.  All fairly quiet.  Receptionist typing away on her keyboard.  Nice leather tub chairs. Coffee table sporting the usual magazines and this morning's paper.   Other parents with children that all all speaking interestingly quietly.  The volume definitely seems to turn down when you walk children into clinics, hospitals and dentists.  Why is that?  It was all very civilised.

We'd arrived early having also hit the doctors surgery this morning., so the girls were looking a the children's books and toys provided in a waiting room 'toy-box'.  All's well so far.

Eldest daughter:  "Is it our turn yet mummy?" 

"No, luv.  We were a bit early.  It won't be long though"

Youngest daughter, now 3, stands up and starts peering around the room intently.
"Mummy..." she says.  Far, far more loudly that the volume we've already established is appropriate for this type of venue...  "Where's the cock?"

"They haven't got a cLock here luv..." I say, speaking uncannily like Ros in Friends, with a need to stress every single letter and trying not to catch the eye of the receptionist.

It was only a matter of time before she went public!


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