Miss Frugal turned 13 last September and I'm pleased to say that she's been doing really well in her teenager training since then - she mastered the teenage attitude and the sulk with no problem at all and quickly moved on to practicing her storm out of the room move before completely getting the hang of the death stare.In fact, she's doing so well that I'm pretty sure that she has some sort of 'How to be a Teenager' handbook hidden away in her bedroom that she's working her way through, chapter by chapter.Here's just a few of the rules that I'm convinced are in there.... It's … [Read more...]

Master Frugal has now completed a full two weeks at the secondary school he'll be attending in September and so far, he's liking it which is a huge relief.  I'm not sure how the schools deal with transition in your area but here the kids spend pretty much the whole of July at their new schools to help them get used to it ready for when they start for real in September.His time at his Junior school ended at the start of the month with a very emotional leavers ceremony that had me sat with a lump in my throat from the moment it started.  I managed to (almost) stop the tears from falling … [Read more...]

OK, so I'm going to get it out of the way right at the start and tell you that this isn't a review that I've been asked to write. ;-)  I wanted to write this post because I used to constantly worry about my two getting sunburnt and this is the only product that I've found that actually works!Before we had children, we used to go on at least two holidays a year and when they came along, we tried our best not to give up our holidays and would save money each month to pay for our annual family trip which we looked forward to all year.But it all changed when the kids were old enough to … [Read more...]

My children have never shown the same love of reading that I remember having at their age and in some ways that makes me a little bit sad.  To me, reading is an escape and I love nothing more than curling up in bed on a night and reading a good romance novel (Don't judge me ;-)).Personally, I feel like any chance that they were going to love reading was ruined by over enthusiastic teachers who set them challenges to read a set number of pages every night and a certain number of books a week.  Master Frugal once got in to trouble as he was taking too long to read a book and from then on, … [Read more...]