Spree Book Norwich

I've had a spree book for the last few years. A spree book is a large book full of vouchers, it costs £20 for the book but if you were to use every voucher you would save thousands. A new book is released every year in July and it expires the following year in October. I purchased my book through my younger brothers school, that way meant they got a percentage of those sales. But they can be purchased online too.

The book is split into 5 sections

A: Restaurants & Family Dining

B: Informal Dining & Takeaway

C: Leisure & Recreation

D: Health & Beauty 

E: Shopping

Looking through the book there a lot of vouchers I may use, some that I'm pretty sure I'll use include:

Italian Job Pizza

Yellows

Frankie & Bennys

Sealife Centre Yarmouth

Merrivale Model Village

Hollywood Cinemas 

Each voucher has all the terms and conditions of use printed on them. To use the vouchers is really simple, you just hand over with payment along with your membership card, which you also get when you purchase the book. In my opinion the book is well worth purchasing and I am certainly planning to continue to buy and use them.

GoGo Dragons

Every muscle in my body aches, but it was worth it!
Yesterday we did the GoGo Dragons trail around Norwich, walked miles but managed to see 60 big and 89 little ones. These type of trails are very popular around the UK and this is the 3rd one that Norwich has done, it started with elephants. then gorillas and this year dragons.

GoGo King Tut

 

All the dragons are decorated by UK artists, well the larger ones are, the smaller ones are all decorated by local kids from schools and children's centres. There are 84 large dragons and 120 baby dragons to find on the streets, run by break and wild in art to raise funds for break who support vulnerable children, young people and families across East Anglia. The sculptures are on the streets until 5th September. There then auctioned off to raise more funds.

 

Some of the school dragons

 

 

I would highly recommend if your local or are coming to Norfolk to do the trail it's great fun, some of the dragons are stunning. I'm looking forward to heading to Norwich again in the next few weeks to do the last few we ran out of time to do. It's a great day out, for all ages, Amelie had a super time and got excited every time she saw a dragon.

Some the favourites of all of us that went were:







Yaxham Waters

Yaxham Waters is a 10 acre holiday park with log cabins and space for tourers. There's also a lovely farm shop and a cafe.

The cafe is where we went today, me Amelie and Amelies nanna and uncle went for lunch. It's a lovely light cafe with lots of patio doors and windows to give it a really nice feel. There is a great outdoor area with a sandpit, swings and lots of ride on toys, and situated next to the lake so theres a really nice view. Sadly it's been raining all day today, so we werent able to be outside, but they do have a little kids table with toys, books and colouring inside to keep them occupied on a wet day like today. I have to say I was impressed at how family friendly it was, not just activitiea but the toilets and the number of highchairs

The food too was delicious, there was a great choice on the menu from sandwiches, jacket potatoes and even lasagne. There were also a number of kids options. I had a cheese baugette which came with chips and salad. Amelie had sausage roll, chips and beans which came with a free glass of squash. I had a diet coke which was one of the old fashioned glass bottle types. They also have an alcohol licence, so you'd be able to have a glass of winr with your dinner. We had a voucher from a spree book which made one of the meals free, which was great and meant it was only £22 for the other 3 meals and drinks.

I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to pop out for lunch and i bet its great to take the kids too on a day when the weather is nice.

Time to lose the pounds!

I sit here today as a chocaholic weighing 13 stone 11bs. My BMI is 34.1 which makes me obese. But this needs to change so the diet starts NOW, my target is to get to 9st 10lbs, which is in the healthy range for my height and age. The plan is to loosely follow the slimming world diet plan with a few differences. I am going to meal plan which will hopefully help to keep me on track and ties in nicely with my grocery challenge I'm beginning in august.

My biggest problem when it comes to weight loss is that I'm rubbish with portion sizes and I always end up with too much, along with the fact I am a fussy eater. I don't really eat much fruit, or many salad products. Thinking about it I'm not that great with exercise either, I never did like PE at school, but I must do something about that. In fact I need to change a lot, my food needs to be healthier, I need to try and have my 5 a day, I need to cut down on fizzy drinks and try to drink more water, I need to eat less chocolate and sweet treats, and finally I need to do at least 10-15 minutes exercise a day.

I will post updates of my progress as I go along but for now

Start Weight - 13 stone 11lbs
Target Weight - 9st 10lbs

Weight to lose - 4 stone 1bs

Postcrossing July 2015

So you may remember I did a post a few weeks ago on a website called Postcrossing. When I wrote the post I had sent my first 3 postcards. Well now I have sent more, some have been received by recipients and I've even had one sent to me arrive.

First of all a little update on the first 3 I originally sent:

1. USA - Travelled 3,767 miles in 18 days
               Arrived 7/7/15
2. Germany - Travelled 526 miles in 13 days
                      Arrived 2/7/15
3. Russia - Still Travelling

Since then I've sent another 6 more postcards:

1. Italy - Travelled 600 miles in 6 days
              Arrived 6/7/15
2. Netherlands - Travelled 239 miles in 13 days
                           Arrived 3/7/15
3. France - Travelled 365 miles in 11 days
                  Arrived 7/7/15
4. Finland - Still Travelling
5. Germany - Sill Travelling
6. China - Still Travelling

Even better I have received my first postcard, it travelled 987 miles and came all the way from Finland, only taking 4 days.

I will do a monthly update of my postcrossing adventure 

CheckoutSmart

Checkoutsmart is a great app, you can get money back on your grocery shopping, and sometimes you can even get freebies. The app is fairly simple to use, once downloaded and you have an account set up, head to the offers area of the app, to see what the current offers are, these change frequently so it's worth checking every few days.

The offers today, well some of them are free bread from sainsburys and 10p back if you buy bananas.

As well as lots more offers, this morning I did a morrisons shop so I took advantage of the current offers. The 2 I used today were 10p reward for any walkers product, and a 10p reward for any pampers product.

Also because I uploaded a reciept I entered into the current competition to win a spa day which also got me and additional 1p per reward. So today for simply buying products I would of done anyway I've earned 21p. 

This app is great and you can see from the photo I have earned quite a bit from it. Once your account balance is up to £5 which is quite easy to get to you can withdraw into a paypal account. I really do suggest you download the app and check out what offwrs are on there now, and see what money you can make. 

<div align="center">

<aöhref="http://www.mummytothemax.co.uk/" rel="nofollow" title="Mummy To The mAX"><img src="http://i1332.photobucket.com/albums/w611/Helen_Dickinson_Annette/bag%20RESIZE_zpsxcchjsru.png" alt="Mummy To The mAX" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

Oh what a night!

Last night I finally got to see a show I have been wanting to see for quite a few years. When I saw it in the theatre brochure I just knew I had to see it. So last night me and my friend Robyn headed to Norwich Theatre Royal to watch Jersey Boys.

Jersey Boys is a show all about Frankie Valli and the four seasons. The real life story of how they came to be and features songs including 'Big Girls Don't Cry', 'Sherry', 'Can't take my eyes off you' and many more.

Last night we saw the 2014/2015 UK tour of the show which was incredible. When I go to see shows I have been wanting to see for a long time I worry they won't be as good as I'm expecting them to be. But last night did not disappoint, the show was so much better than I thought. The actors were incredible, I was really impressed at their vocal range especially the guy who played Frankie. For a show that goes through a large time frame so quickly the small cast did incredibly well. As well as the design crew, the way the lighting and the set just gelled so well together and was able to show the different locations, years and even decades without the need for drastic set changes was very clever.

For anyone thinking about going to see the show I would say do it, wherever it may be whether its this tour, whether its west end, the show was amazing and I really don't think you'd be disappointed. I will certainly be going to see it again if I can.

Saving for Amelies future. Part 1

I have this dream for Amelies future, Yes I want her to be successful at whatever she chooses to do, but I want her to be able to do that without worrying about money. So I'm saving for her future.

Shes got 2 accounts one is a savers account, this Amelie will have access to from her 12th birthday. My aim with this account is that she will be able to use the contents as pocket money, which will be £10 a week. So I need in this account by 29/11/2024 to have at least £3,120 which her weekly pocket money until she reaches 18. At which time she will then get access to her second account. I havent really decided on an amount I want this account to have in. I will just see as I go along how much I am able to.

Currently all I have done is just put any loose change into the accounts but the plan now is to sell some unwanted things and put that money into the accounts too, as well as other money making ways. I will write more about them as I do them, which is why I wrote this post as a sort of introduction to this mini series.

CO-OP £5 Deal

My cousin and his partner are coming to stay on Monday night and I was trying to think of something to do for Tea. I had got to the stage where it was going to be a takeaway until I saw the fab deal that Co-op have got on at the minute.

So the deal is basically 5 things for £5. But its a good deal.

First of all is a Chicago Town Pizza. BBQ Sizzler. I'm not a pizza eater personally so I will get an opinion from my cousin on this one.

The other big value item in the deal, is a favourite of many. Its Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough Ice cream. 

The finally 3 items are just Co-op own brand products but they work great with this deal. 

1. Onion Ring 

2. Wedges 

3. Garlic Baguettes

If i had bought these products on a normal day without the deal i would of paid just over £12. So to get it all for £5 . I think i got a great deal. So if you live near a co-op its def worth grabbing one of these great deals.