Package Holiday

We booked our flights and holiday accommodation with Cosmos and paid for the majority of our holiday with Tesco Clubcard Points. For every voucher you receive four times the face value in rewards. Since we booked they’ve put a £400 voucher per passenger limit on this deal but it’s still a great saving on the cost of an expensive holiday and a good use of points in my opinion.

Domestic Flight and Overnight Hotel

We flew from London and needed to travel Inverness to London the evening before to make the connecting Florida flight. By converting some more Tesco Clubcard Points to air miles, we flew down the night before and enjoyed a restful night in the very handy Hilton Gatwick (again thanks to Tesco Clubcard Deals!),  In the morning we enjoyed a yummy breakfast to set us up for the long flight ahead!

Hire Car

Our hire car was a fabulous Ford Mustang convertible hired from Hertz and booked through Expedia. It cost £264 for the 2 weeks including all insurance and I thought that was a pretty fabulous price. I’d definitely use Hertz again, the pickup and drop-off of the car was really fast without any hard sell for extra insurance. The car drove like a dream and the girls (and husband!) really wanted to keep it. They named her Orange Lightning in honour of the Sunshine State and our afternoon tropical storms.  In two weeks we drove just over 500 miles and spent $80 dollars on fuel, not too bad for a car with a 3.7 litre engine. We miss you Orange Lightning our smelly old people carrier just isn’t the same!

Theme Park Pass

Our Disney 14 Day Ultimate Florida Pass for 2 adults and 2 children cost £738 and our 2 Park Universal Ticket cost £280, both purchased during a special offer from Florida Escapes. We used these to their full advantage by doing theme parks in the morning followed by water parks most afternoons to cool down and chill out.

Universal Express Plus Pass

Knowing that Universal was going to be super busy due to the recently opened Wizarding World of Harry Potter we wanted to make the most of our time there.

We looked at purchasing the Express Plus Pass which lets you get to front of line but as you can only use it once per ride, at a cost of £43 per person it seemed a very expensive version of the free Disney Fast Pass.

Instead we paid to stay on site at the very lovely Loews Royal Pacific Resort. We paid around £135 for the night on a room only basis but this gave us unlimited front of line passes for two days, which works out at about £17 each per day, so much better value than the Express Plus Pass. Also you get the use of the hotel’s lovely facilities too, more on these later : )

Kids Eat Free Card

This card initially costs £10 per child and for each paying adult; the child’s meal is free at a wide range of restaurants. Even if you don’t use it for evening meals, we found that it easily paid for itself using it for breakfasts alone.

FairFX Currency Card

We placed our spending money on FairFX Card. The FairFX Currency Card is a prepaid MasterCard® Card that works like a debit card. You buy the currency you require on their website and load the funds onto the card. The card can be used just like any other card, even online.

Not only were the currency rates better than the High Street but by keeping an eye on the daily rate we could  try and maximise our holiday pot by adding when the rate was higher or when funds allowed! There were no charges for the features we wanted to use on the card, unlike our UK bank cards, so we saved on bank charges too. While away we found it very easy to keep track of our holiday spending by checking our balance online and as transactions are instantly debited from the account the balance was always accurate. This gave me peace of mind that we were sticking to within our daily budget and not going holiday mode credit card crazy!

Yotel

On the return journey we had a LONG wait between connecting flights. We flew into London at 5.30am and our Inverness flight home wasn’t until 7.30pm. There are earlier flights; we just didn’t book them in time.  I find airports pretty dull at the best of time but the thought of spending a whole day with two jet lagged children was not one I relished.

I had noticed the Yotel when we were last in Gatwick, on a lovely child free trip to Venice in February to celebrate Stuart’s 40^th birthday.  My initial thoughts were, “ohhh…what a brilliant idea but I bet it’s expensive”.

I was pleasantly surprised when I checked out their website.

A twin room (two large bunks) would be £56.50 for 6 hours. With access to the hotel executive lounge for only three hours costing £64 for 2 adults and 2 children, the Yotel seemed the perfect solution. It did indeed meet our needs very well and I will post a full review later.

Skype

As both my husband and I are self employed we needed to be able to call home on a daily basis. Our mobile phone rate to call the UK from the USA was £1.40 a minute, so we wanted to keep that rate for emergency use only and use a cheaper alternative for day to day calling.

Stuart had heard about the Net10 Pre-paid mobiles which cost $30 for 150 international minutes. I didn’t like the idea of having to find a Walmart and setting up a phone during our holiday time. I wanted something that was ready to use the moment we arrived.

The hotel we booked came with free Wi-Fi access in the room (and by the pool!) so we decided to opt for Skype for our daily calls. The rate to call home was only 1.2 pence per minute for landlines and 14.5 pence per minute for mobiles.  I uploaded £10 credit to my account and even though we used it almost every day we only spent £3 in the fortnight with the average call costing just 11 pence. Bargain! The system was a doddle to use, the sound quality was great and the girls thought it was very cool calling Granny on the computer  : )

Well that’s my spiel on how we managed to stretch our budget in the holiday booking stages, in my next post I’ll post our top tips on stretching the spending pot once you’ve arrived without scrimping on the holiday fun!

Unfortunately I’ve been a lazy toad too busy to try it more than once and the only thing I’ve exercised is my funny bone watching my girls giving it lardy!

Excuse the pyjama bottoms, Freya likes to be comfy. Spot the dog making her escape half way through!

Just Dance is a great game and would be great fun at a kid’s party.

This surprisingly small handbag contains an amazing 21 reusable bags enough for even a mammoth food shop!

The designers ZPM really have thought of the little details too: the Trolley Dolly features a slide in pocket for your shopping list, a zip pocket for your keys and purse, even a trolley token.

The bags are very durable and versatile. As well as the weekly shop, I’ve used mine to return books to the library, bring home a ton of goodies from the school fair and carry home 3 litres of glue from Early Learning Centre!

Although it was his third show of the day, his show was non-stop high energy science fun and the girls were on the edge of their seats throughout.

The experiments are of the loud Mummy’s weed her pants jumped out of her seats style that kids love!

Erynn’s favourite experiment was the glow in the dark alien wee wee, Freya loved the instant chips through a tennis racket and I loved the purple glow from the screaming jelly baby!

Okay, the girls probably did not giving two hoots WHY the liquid nitrogen turns the banana into a hammer but they did find it hugely entertaining and if that’s their memory of science and experimenting that’s just great.

Here’s a tiny clip of Dr Bunhead making an indoor cloud to give you a feel for the show. If you check the chance, go see a live show!

Emily Electric

Erynn’s homework this week was to build something useful for the future using different types of materials, explaining their uses.

Meet Emily Electric: she does all the jobs you hate!

This delightful household helper has been pre-programmed to do the following tasks (can you spot the Mummy ones!)

• Make the tea
• Cut the grass
• Clean out the rabbits
• Get you ready for school
• Wash the car
• Make the beds

But you can choose your own horrible tasks by turning her buttons. Her stretchy pipe cleaner arms help her reach far into the corners and her disposable gloves help her deal with those grotty jobs. She has a ruby red vacuum mouth and she can mop the floor with her stylish hair.

Ohh…Emily Electric I wish you were real,  maybe one day ; )

Moonlight Nest Making

Dear Bunny Moonlight,

Please stop making nests, 8 days before we are due to go on holiday.

I am pretty sure you are only having a wee hormonal surge and not actually about to become a Mum but it is a worry none the less.  Our girls will want to stay home and be Baby Bunny Mummies if you produce some bundles of joy in the next few days. I on the other hand want to get on a aeroplane and enjoy 2 weeks of sun please.

Midnight - Sunbathing

Look at your sister Midnight (please, please be a sister) enjoying the lovely sun.

I urge you to do the same. Pronto.

Thank you.

Chief Veggie Provider.

Samsung Netbook N130

It seems I’m not alone in feeling disappointed that the Ubisurfer doesn’t live up to it’s description. I’ve had many similar comments to my review.

I’ve returned mine to Maplin and got a full refund after they sent it back for testing.

We’re about to go off on holiday to Orlando for a fortnight and as my husband are both self-employed we will need to be able to  keep in touch with our working lives while we are away.

Santa brought my daughter a Samsung N130 netbook so I’m borrowing it for the hols.

I’ve set it up with Skype, added all the POP3 email addresses to Outlook, installed Open Office and Picasa – so I think I’m set for a bit of evening catch up!

Photo Credit: John Lewis

There are a whole range of science events planned both for schools and the general public.

You can check out the website here, where you can download a PDF of all the events. Many of which are free.

Sizzling Science (that’s me!) is running a Forensic Science Workshop as part of the Biodiversity Day on the 4th and 5th June.

I’m very exicted to be taking part in my first science festival, so please say, “Hello”, if you come along!

With x200 magnification it captures photo and video images. I got it here for £25.

Erynn's scratch

Yesterday morning the girls and I spent about an hour magnifying everything nearby.

I stuck to household objects, they mainly magnified themselves!

Erynn found a teeny, weeny scratch on her leg, you could barely see it. The magnified healing skin looks pretty amazing, if slightly gross!

So here’s wee quiz for you.

Below are 3 objects I found in my handbag, can you tell what they are?

It’s pretty easy – answers tomorrow!

Sarah runs a shop called Made on Fifth Street. She is also a home school mom to the funniest kids she knows.  She’s currently redoing an entire farmhouse along side her husband Craig.

Ocean In A Bottle

I totally loved this craft and so did my son, Hudson. He made an ocean in a bottle as a gift for his sister’s birthday. Now I know I got this idea form someone elses blog but I really can not for the life of me remember where I found it. Here is my tutorial.

Materials:

• plastic bottle
• water
• food coloring
• cooking oil
• sparkles, sequence and other small trinkets
• glue gun
• funnel

1. Start by filling a plastic bottle 2/3 full of water. (We started out using a measuring cup but found that pouring from another bottle was much easier).

2. Add some drops of blue food coloring and little green if you want as well.  Put the cap on the bottle and shake to mix the color.

4. Top up the bottle with cooking oil.
5. Place a circle of hot glue inside the bottle cap and screw on tightly.

Voila an ocean in a bottle!

I hope you enjoyed her post, do take a pop along to her blog – she has a load of home schooling ideas for pre-school children!