Nuby Step 3 No Spill Cups Review & GIVEAWAY!

A thoroughly average week plods on here. (Week 18! See my new improved Pregnancy page!) Disappointing British "summer" weather has robbed me of the sunshine induced mojo of the bank holiday weekend. We're in the throws of a round of teething and the house is in chaos from decorating. To boot my baby brain has thoroughly kicked in and I find myself completely unable to make decisions. Talk about first world problems… I have had more than one meltdown over not finding the perfect shade of grey for my lounge walls. So whilst I mentally backhand myself back into reality and work on getting a freaking grip, this seems like an excellent time for a good old fashioned review and GIVEAWAY! 

The products: Nuby Step 3 No Spill Drinking Cups

I became aware Euna seemed to need more fluids than her Step 1 & 2 cups could give her and after a few steals of her baby friends' cups I realised she was ready for… A STRAW! Cue a colourful delivery from Nuby and the opportunity to test drive the next step: Step 3.

Firstly… Pathetic sniff at how un-bottle-like these cups are. These are genuine toddler cups. For waddling toddlers. Not for babies. *Nostalgic sigh* **Second backhand** 

So! I got sent a few types of these… Some with handles, some with slide over lids and varying colours and shapes. Most importantly they all have the same rubbery straw that's flexible and soft in their mouth. The tip only opens if the straw is squeezed further down, this is what makes it "No Spill". And "No Spill" essentially for Euna means she can't pour it out all over the sofa and carpet and play splashy games in her new mini pool. It means I can leave it hanging around the lounge floor when she can pick it up and put it down when she needs without me having to supervise every sip. It also means, that despite some of them not having the slide over lids, that any of them can fall over in my nappy bag or footwell of the car and not pour out. Fab. 

The colours are nice. A range of more pastel cups as well as bright neon colour cups are available. 

Some have handles. Euna doesn't appear to have a preference between handles and no handles. On the handle ones they are removable though. I will advise that you need to make sure the handle is "clicked" into place where the thread of the screw top goes on, otherwise it does leak. 

Price? Well right now the price is EXCELLENT! Nuby UK website have huge sale on and they start at £1.50!!! A fact I had no idea about until writing this review! What luck!

In practice they've been great. We switched her over in one go. The above picture with the pastel pink cup were her first try and below is 3 days later and she totally has the hang of the straw and most importantly keeping the cup down to get the water up the straw (as opposed to tipping it up to get it to mouth piece like with the Step 1 & 2s).

 Excellent product!

Want one?!?!? 

***GIVEAWAY!!!!!!!!!!***

 I'm giving away these four cups... One lucky winner will get 2 x Step 1 cups and another will get 2 x Step 3 cups. I will email the first winner drawn to give them first refusal on which they'd like...

So here's what you do.... a Rafflecopter giveaway

17 Weeks

Here Comes the Summer Sun!

We don't get a lot of sun us Brits. The pitifully few sunny we get are rarely on a weekend and we daren't even dream of getting them on a bank holiday weekend! Oh BUT WE DID! 

And what a difference some sun makes. Literally it means you can go outside and breathe in a good mood! If my Dad was writing a guest post on here he would be inserting a paragraph here about how as natives we're physiologically built to run around naked and absorb all that vitamin D, because we wear clothes and have migrated so far north we are all vit D deficient and that that's why we feel so fabulous in the sun. If he's right it would explain a lot, because I know I feel great for some sun. 

Sun and air. 

As I'm writing this I am realising that this kind of enthused talk of sun and fresh air could only come from a pregnant woman who is finally getting her mojo back. Farewell 12 week long zombiehood and continuous nausea. Hellooooooo second trimester burst and bloom. I'm excited. I feel like I've been zapped back to life and someone lifted the veil. I want to eat fruit and get stuff done. I want to be outside and exercise. 

I feel like me again. 

So here's what we did with some sun, some energy and an few corners of the outdoors. 

Some more flower pics from our walk here...

 Cousins... She loves them. She loves the noise, the mess, the clumsiness... 

Green stuff ahoy!

 Food. It seems so much easier to eat well in the heat.

 Needs must. Won't say I wouldn't rather be soaking up this sun with a Pinot...

 My Mum reinvents rounders with a mallet, ball pool balls and teddies for stops. Euna charges the field every so often...

 "Say whaaaaaat?"

Bluebells and Other Wild Beauties...

Having a total blog-crush on Mona's Picturesque at the moment and her beautiful flower shots inspired me to take a trip out with the macro today... Enjoy!  

Difference

The Woolwich attack happened this week. An indisputable tragedy.

Events like these make Facebook an interesting place, I am always surprised at the varying levels of tolerance my "friends" have. Often I can be led to believe racism is a redundant concept. I mean... Why wouldn't it be? Surely we're there! Surely we're all so over the differences between us and our environments and our perspectives we've realised... Actually... We're all the same? No?

Difference.

I didn't grow up with a lot of difference. If I'm honest I grew up with little tolerance to difference. Fortunately, and quite hypocritically on a fews' part, I grew up with a hell of a lot of compassion and love as a principle way to be which seemed to balance out the intolerance on their part.

Then I went to university. The first person on my dance course I met had a "funny" name, brown skin, spoke three languages, was of a faith I had never even heard of and had lived all over the world. After I asked him to repeat his name three times (and still didn't understand it) we went on to become great friends. He would open my eyes and my world and I would be forever changed.

Though he wasn't alone, he was just the start. I went to study dance and then a career in the arts with a special interest in the socially excluded. Then education. It was all punctuated with travel. My life was full of difference and richer for it.

I live in a corner of the world where living remotely rurally means you don't live amongst much difference. We made the decision to give her green spaces, village halls, woodland walks, craft fairs and summer fetes on our doorstep. The positives far outweighed the negatives of being anywhere else within our repertoire but my reservation was always the regret she won't grow up around a lot of difference.

I remember when I was at primary school we had one black child in the whole school. I remember being fascinated that the palms of his hands were pink in contrast to the dark brown of the rest of his hands. I remember so clearly that fascination and shyness about my curiosity. Later on in secondary school I remember being really keenly interested in Religious Studies when we started to cover different religions. After I got over the horror of the fact some people don't celebrate Christmas, I was in awe of the colourful Hindu Gods.

That fascination, that curiosity and that awe made the world so magical to me. I want that for my daughter, for all my children. I understand she can't, no one can, view the whole world from the comfort and safety of our home but I want her to see enough for it to whet her appetite. I want her to feel that hunger for all the world's treasures; the colours, the people, the places, the foods, the perspectives.

I suppose I'll take lead from my experiences. You teach love as a principle and everything follows.

WW Walking... So Ends My Photography Course...

16 Weeks