When being a nanny there’s a daily overlap of mum, dad and Jen.  When does mum and dad stop being the one’s in charge and it passes to me?

This was tested this week, I arrived as normal and both M & L had been at a friends birthday party so were fairly amped up on sugar!  M was colouring in a picture using some stickers she had received in her goody bag, she reached over for L’s stickers and MB (MumBoss) told M not to use them as they weren’t hers.  This is when M’s selective hearing kicked in, despite numerous protestations from MB, M peeled a sticker off and placed it on her piece of paper.

I’m afraid I could no longer sit and watch, I told M that she really ought to go sit on her stool (i.e. taking her away from the activity she is obviously so involved in) and of course because she was being chastised and because mum and dad were there, she started crying.

I felt slightly frustrated, because had we been alone she would have gone straight to the stool, sat down and calmed down, but because her parents were there, I felt she was trying to get some sympathy and it really brought to light how much the parents and my disciplinary measures differ.

However at the end of all this, no matter how hard I come down on M, she tells me every day that she “loves me all the way to Pluto”, so parents, please!  Don’t be afraid to be firm with children, they crave the authoritative parenting style.

Well a very happy deathday to Shakespeare and happy world book night to every one else!

I have to admit I came into April with good intentions wanting to improve my reading of Shakespeare.  The last time I had read Shakespeare it was probably 2000 and I was still in High School being forced to read Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, and yet… I always tell people these are my favourite.

Maybe it’s the way we learnt about them in school, but this time round I started with As You Like It and just couldn’t get into it, I finished it but I couldn’t tell you what happened in it.

I’m currently working my way through A Midsummer Nights Dream and again, I have no idea what’s going on.  So what did I do in school so differently to what I’m doing now?

Perhaps Olivia Hussey flouncing around as Juliet or Keith Chegwin popping up in Macbeth helped to sink the message in… not ideal but maybe visual Shakespeare is the way to go!

I can honestly say I feel utterly gutted that I’ve just finished Mini Shopaholic, after months/years of putting it off I started on Confessions of a Shopaholic last week and proceeded to  race through all six books of this series.

Contrary to being a bookworm I’ve seen the movie many times and thought Isla Fisher was brilliant and I think having seen the movie I lost any interest in reading the books.  But I had acquired them in a fashion for my kindlething and having not read a word for a few weeks I clicked onto it and well that was it, I could not put it down.

Seeing the movie first proved, in this instance, to be a positive, I saw Isla Fisher perfectly as Becky Bloomwood.  I only faltered when I finished book 5; Shopaholic and Baby and looked for book 6 on my kindlething to realise I didn’t actually have it!!  Torturous!  I bounded over to Amazon and bought a real copy for 1p (bargain!)

So tonight at work (kids were in bed I must add!) I finished Mini Shopaholic and now I feel a bit lost, I have nothing further to look forward to.  I actually have Sophie Kinsella’s website open in a tab trying furiously to see if there’s any more planned.

Regardless, if you’re looking for an easy read, I cannot recommend this series enough, although as an avid saver myself I found her frustrating at times there were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments to make up for it!