LoveLox Personalised Locket Review

March 7, 2021 JayneLeave a comment

Here in the Mum’s the Word house, we’re huge fans of personalised gifts. In the past, we’ve made mugs, photo books, canvas prints and even chocolates with special messages on them! That’s why, when LoveLox Lockets got in touch and asked if I’d like to review a personalised locket, I knew I couldn’t refuse.

LoveLox is a London-based company with one goal – providing beautiful bespoke jewellery which is unique to everyone who buys one. There’s a huge range of options to choose from in terms of your finish and engraving, and each locket is engraved, assembled and packaged here in the UK.

The beauty of the personalised locket is that, unlike old fashioned lockets where you have to try to find a TINY photo and cut it out to put it in the locket yourself, LoveLox use a lab quality printer and professional grade glossy paper to place the image directly into each locket before they send it to you. Aside from making the whole process about a million times easier than doing it yourself, it looks about a million times better, too!

The actual process of creating your locket online couldn’t be easier. Simply choose the images you want to use and upload them to the website. You can move the photos around and crop them as you need to, to make sure they’re displayed perfectly. This is where you can add your engraving, with choices of fonts and letter sizing allowing you to get it just right. There’s also the option to choose a 16-18 inch necklace or a slightly longer one which is 20-24 inches – I went for the latter because I’ve got a fat neck and standard necklaces end to look like chokers on me!

Once the order was placed, delivery took less than a week, and there’s even an option for two-day delivery for just a few quid extra, making this ideal for even the scattiest of brains if you need a gift for a special occasion! The lockets are beautifully packaged, too, so you could happily send one directly to the recipient, safe in the knowledge that it will turn up looking perfectly gift-worthy and gorgeous.

I’m absolutely delighted with the quality of my personalised locket – the images may be small but they’re lovely and clear and the engraving looks top-notch. I wear it constantly, even when I’m just at home, as I love the feeling of having it close to me. As you can see from the images above, I’ve got one picture of Husband with Chuck and one image of Husband with Maureen and the engraving says “Goodest Ones” (absolute pigeon, I’m aware, but we used to tell Chuck that he wasn’t just a good boy, he was the “goodest boy” and it’s something that just stuck).

If you’re looking for a last minute Mother’s Day gift, birthday pressie or just something to show someone how much they mean to you, I highly recommend LoveLox. I couldn’t be happier with my beautiful locket and it’s something that I know will last a long time. The personalisation makes it so special and I can’t imagine anyone receiving one as a gift not loving it.

Head over to the LoveLox lockets page to see all of the different options available.

(I was gifted a locket for the purposes of my review but all opinions are genuine)

Food · Review

Caribbean Flavours at Turtle Bay

September 10, 2018February 8, 2022 Jayne1 Comment

When we first found out that we were going to be reviewing Turtle Bay, my first thought was how happy Husband would be as he’s a HUGE fan of Caribbean food. My second thought was “will the kids cope with the spice?”. It has to be said, my kids aren’t total chilli wusses, BB has been asking for sriracha on her food since she was about 2 and Sausage copes with things like hot wings, so I figured we’d just see how they fared – besides, there was a kids menu to choose from.

The Turtle Bay we visited was in Chelmsford, just outside the High Chelmer Shopping Centre and in a nice location with an outdoor seating area. The first thing you notice about Turtle Bay is just how vibrant and beautifully styled the whole place is. From the bright colours that scream Jamaica to the wall of guitar amps and the reggae playing in the background, the restaurant felt themed in a way that managed to avoid the pantomime-y feel of other themed restaurants.

We did the usual ‘sit down, peruse the menu, give our drinks order’ and were informed that cocktails were currently 2 for 1, so mine and Sausage’s virgin cocktail orders meant we’d be brought two drinks each – quite a bonus and one to remember next time we’re out for dinner and I’m not driving!

While we were waiting for our food, we were given colouring stuff for the girls, but also a Connect4 game, which made the time between ordering our food and it arriving pass really quickly. Not only did we love the fact that the kids were catered for, we loved the implication that this wasn’t a place where kids had to be seen and not heard, that they were allowed to have fun and be kids.

BB ate from the kids menu, and her main arrived at the same time as our starters, which worked well as she’s a SLOOOOW eater! Serving it this way meant that by the time we’d eaten our starter and mains, she was just about finished too.

Caribbean Flavour at Turtle Bay

In terms of the food, here’s what we ordered:

I’m not going to bore you with a description of every single morsel of food that we ate (ALTHOUGH, the prawns I had for my starter were TO DIE FOR, and I said to husband that I could quite happily have eaten it ten times over), but every single one of us loved all of our dishes. The jerk chicken and ribs were SO beautifully seasoned and spiced, not so much that it blew your head off, but just enough to make you feel warm down to your flip flops. Husband’s curry goat and my ribs were so tender, the meat melted in your mouth and all of the desserts were perfect and sweet, after such a savoury meal.

The meal was, in fact, such a resounding success, that the whole family declared it the best place we’ve ever reviewed, and we’ve been to a LOT of restaurants in the last eight years! Unless you’ve got kids who are exceptionally fussy with what they eat, please don’t think you can’t eat as a family at Turtle Bay because there are plenty of dishes which cater for those with more delicate taste buds, and everyone else gets to enjoy the deep flavour of Jerk wonderfulness!

It would also be an amazing place for dinner and drinks with friends (not least of all because the cocktails are 2-for-1!), and the decor and atmosphere would really lend itself to relaxation and socialising. All in all (for three starters, three mains, a kids meal, four desserts, four virgin cocktails, two pints of Red Stripe and a soft drink) our meal would have cost £82.60, which I think is excellent value.

As we were leaving, the manager mentioned to us that a new Turtle Bay is going to be opening in Southend, which is even closer to us, and all I can say is, I really hope he’s correct!

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Home · Review

Blinds in a Box Review

August 30, 2017 Jayne7 Comments

A few months back, our landlady told us that she was having a new roof put onto our property, and although this was really welcome news, it occurred to us that this meant having very little privacy during the day while the roofers were here. We’ve got blinds on all of our front windows, but we back onto farmland and enjoy the unobscured view from our lounge, so we don’t have any coverings on those windows. I didn’t want to buy blinds or curtains just to be used for a months or so, and while doing some research on temporary blinds, I found a company called ‘Blinds in a Box’.

Blinds In A Box is the brainchild of Simeone Salik, interior designer Janice Dalton and businessman Dominic Lawrence, 3 entrepreneurs from North London. They took their product on Dragons Den and received the praise (and investement!) of both Duncan Bannatyne and James Caan. I emailed and asked if they’d like to send me some blinds to try out and here we are. The blinds come with a set of literally two instructions, so I thought I’d make a (probably TOO honest…) video so you can see what the installation process is like:

As you can see from the video, it was SUPER easy to install the blinds! We’ve been really impressed with the quality of the blinds since we installed them a week ago, too. They allow us a really good level of privacy without blocking out too much light and they come with little crocodile clips so that you can raise them as and when you want to. The white colour is really neutral and Husband and I have both said that we fully intend to leave the blinds up for as long as they last.

If we ever move house again (although, I really hope we don’t!) I would 100% invest in a couple of boxes of Blinds in a Box so that we could avoid that awkward stage where you don’t have blinds or curtains for the new house and end up sleeping in a room with nothing at the windows! Every time we’ve moved house, we’ve ended up putting either newspaper or old sheets up at the windows, and not only does it look pretty rubbish, it’s a total inconvenience. Knowing that we could just pull the blinds out of the box, trim them to the right size and have smart-looking window coverings is really appealing.

The blinds can be bought in white or black (the black offers a blackout effect, which would be great if you’re taking light-sleeper kids on holiday) in regular or wide widths, and can be bought one at a time, or in a box of three or six. We were sent a box of three, which would be £22 to buy, and I really feel they’d be worth every penny for situations like we’ve been in. They also arrive REALLY fast – if you order by 12pm on a weekday, your blinds will be with you the next day, so even if you forget right until the last minute, you can have them with you really quickly.

I can totally see why the Dragons were so impressed with this products, and I’ll be recommending it to anyone who’ll listen!

Eating Out · Review

Become a Mini Ninja at YO! Sushi (review)

August 30, 2017April 11, 2020 Jayne1 Comment

If there are two things that my kids love it’s cooking (I had to get them a kids kitchen set) and sushi, but unless you’ve got some serious skills, the two passions rarely meet – until now! Recently, the people at YO! Sushi got in touch to tell us about their in-store cooking classes, Sushi Ninja for adults and Mini Ninja for kids, and we knew we had to go along and try them. Our nearest YO! Sushi is in Lakeside and we’ve actually never eaten there before, despite our love of Japanese food, so it was a first for us all.

We arrived at the the restaurant at 11am, before they start opening up for the day, and the kids were sat down with their bamboo mats in front of them, all cling-filmed up and ready for use, before being taught all about the importance of proper hand hygiene, especially when making food with raw fish. They were given hair covers and gloves to wear and I think I counted at least three glove changes throughout the class, which was impressive to say the least.

The class was run by Marcell, the manager of Lakeside YO!, and she clearly knew her stuff. She was excellent with the kids and taught the whole class without once talking down to the kids or making things too complicated. She was happy to help Burrito Baby, whose hands were probably still a little bit on the small side of sushi rolling, and both of the girls thought she was a fab teacher.

The Mini Sushi Ninja classes cost £15 per child, last one hour and include all of the ingredients, the bamboo mat which the kids get to take away with them, and a goody bag containing the recipe cards, chops sticks and the bag itself. The girls made three types of sushi during the class, a cucumber roll, a salmon nigiri, and a California hand roll, which then gets put into a takeaway box for the kids to eat once they’re done. Husband and I sampled the sushi and were really impressed with how well both girls did. The whole class was such an awesome and different way to spend a morning and the girls actually said that it was their favourite activity of the whole summer.

We were also lucky enough to stay at YO! Sushi for lunch, and although we’re regular sushi eaters, we wanted to try some new stuff too – Marcell kindly offered to choose a few dishes for us so that we got a variety of flavours and MY GOODNESS did she choose well! I’m not usually a fan of squid, but I liked their spicy pepper squid so much that I ate a whole plate of it by myself! The beef teriyaki was also basically one of the nicest things we’ve ever tasted; we were back in Lakeside the next day for a different event and were seriously considering just going back to YO! for about five plates of beef teriyaki!

Although this was our first experience of YO! Sushi, it most definitely won’t be our last. The class was excellent, the food was genuinely lovely and the whole experience was hugely positive for all of us. The classes were so fun to observe that Husband and I are thinking about trying the adult classes too! Head over to the YO! Sushi website for more info about the classes, store locations and the menus.

Thanks so much to Marcell and the team at YO! Sushi Lakeside for giving us such a lovely experience.

Giveaway · Review

MUM’s Office Diary Review and Address Book Giveaway

December 17, 2016December 17, 2016 Jayne39 Comments

You’d think, given the amount of time that I spend on my smartphone, that I would be using it’s calendar to its fullest potential, using it to organise the family, but regardless of what device I’m using I’ve just never really liked using a digital calendar. I think it’s because I like it all just there to see, on a page, in my own handwriting preferably. I’ve been looking for a paper diary for 2017 for a while now, something that I can use to keep track of the whole family but haven’t been able to find anything which has everything I need…until I discovered MUM’s Office!

This is the Mum’s Office MUMs Diary 2017, with a week-to-view on one page and a grid arrangement on the opposite page, allowing me to have a column for myself, Husband, Sausage and Burrito Baby. I chose the French Navy colour which comes with teal print inside, basically my two favourite colours, and it looks really stylish (something I am usually NOT!).

MUM's Office Diary 2017

What I love about this diary is that it has SO many little clever touches to make your life easier. There’s an elastic loop on the side to keep your pen attached (how many hours have I lost to spending time digging in my bag for a pen?!), there’s a cardboard pouch on the inside back cover for keeping slips, receipts and all the other annoying bits of paper which usually end up on my car floor, there’s a whole section for logging pocket money (the ex-accounts assistant in me finds this very appealing!) and it all just looks lovely.

MUMs Office Diary 2017

Another part which is absolutely genius is the “In Case I Lose my Mobile” section, a whole area for writing phone numbers just in case your mobile phone goes walkies, as well as term planners, important info for you, your partner and your kids and even a section for planning travel. You might think that a diary containing this many pages would need to be huge, but it’s a really good, baggable size without being heavy or cumbersome. Honestly, I’m in love.

The lovely folk at MUMs Office also make address books and they’ve kindly given me one to give away to my lovely readers. All you need to do is fill in the Rafflecopter widget below for your chance to win! I’ll draw the winner on Christmas Eve at 5pm and the prize will be sent out as soon as the postal service resumes.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Good luck!