Mood Foods is my new favourite online food store! Since my local Tesco in Honiton stopped selling my favourite Lizi’s Granola breakfast cereal, I had to search online for it and found and ordered some from Mood Foods.

As my daughter’s school here in Devon is having a Yummy Mummy Market on Saturday 20th March – I thought I’d drop Mood Foods a line to see if they could donate anything for our raffle.

To my surprise a massive box arrived the other day full of lovely things like sample packs of Lizi’s Belgian Chocolate Granola (above) and Nairn’s Oatcakes.

I love the idea behind the Mood Foods website – that the food you eat can have a big effect on your mood and how you feel.

Do you need to roll yourself out of bed in the morning, stumbling around till you’ve fuelled up on coffee to get your engine revving? Does your concentration desert you mid morning till you’ve had a sugar fix then you’re back on track?

Caffeine is probably the most widely used behaviour modifying drug in the world. We reach for a cup if we are feeling tired and irritable to give us a boost and help us concentrate. Too much caffeine though and we can get symptoms such as anxiety and nervousness.

Many people are also worried about food additives and their impact on health, the dangers of some food additives and preservatives and the benefits of organic food.

Obesity and depression are at an all time high. The statistics make pretty grim reading.

There’s growing interest, and research, in how food and nutrition can affect your emotional and mental health and we’ve only just begun to understand the powerful links between nutrition, mood and mental health.

More and more people today are shunning pills and potions and looking for self help and natural approaches to help them feel happy and healthy. One self-help strategy is to change what we eat.

Take a look at the Mood Food website and be inspired by all these wonderful healthy foods & thanks again guys. Really appreciate the donation.

www.moodfoodcompany.co.uk

Thank you to Laura at www.laurasjewellery.folksy.com for sending us such a lovely raffle prize for our Yummy Mummy Market on March 20th. Laura sells a range of her handmade jewellery (like these Devil Duckie Earrings above) on her folksy site and also over on Etsy.

Laura describes her creations as “A delightful mixture of cute, kitsch, unique, funky and sometimes a slight vintage feeling all rolled up in to wonderful pieces of jewellery.”

She adds “I started crafting jewellery for friends and family, I mainly made pieces which I thought suited their personalities. One day, my mum suggested retailing it. “

I met Laura on twitter and you can chat to her too – @LaurasJewellery

Thanks again Laura & if you are reading this and could donate a little something to the raffle at our market (details here) like Laura did – then please tweet me @tishtashtoys

My daughter’s school (in Upottery near Honiton) is running a Yummy Mummy market in March and we’ve been asking local Devon businesses for donations to our charity raffle.

So far we’ve had a few responses. Rachel of Devon based Curworthy Cheese has emailed me back to say they will be happy to donate a cheese and we’ve been promised some drinks from Luscombe but the first donation arrived this week in the form of a shiny new voucher from Quickes to spend in their farm shop over near Exeter.

Thank you Mary (pictured above) at Quickes – this should help us raise some money via our raffle and the proceeds are to be shared between Upottery PTFA school funds and Clic Sargent – the children’s cancer care charity who promote fun-packed fundraising events for mums of all ages across the UK.

Quickes Cheese Shop is based at the farm in Newton St Cyres and the shop stocks the whole range of Quickes Cheddars plus their handmade whey butter and ice cream. The highest standard produce is all sourced from the West Country, from like minded artisan producers.

The the deli counter also offers a number of other West Country produced cheeses such as Cornish Blue, Sharpham Rustic, Cornish Yarg, Beenleigh Blue, to name but a few. Other gems you will find in the store include handmade chocolates from Somerset, tea made in Cornwall, honey made in Exmouth and free range eggs from Yeoford.

I don’t know about you but I think I need to make a point of visiting the Quickes Farm shop in the near future, it all sounds absolutely delicious!!!

If you run a business here in Devon and could help us out with a raffle prize or would like a stall at the Yummy Mummy Market which is being held at the Manor Rooms in Upottery on Saturday 20th March 10am – 12 midday, please call Sharon on 07740973990 or email sdpavey@googlemail.com

Here’s some things I’ve come across this week which I thought might be useful/interesting to pass on. Please add comments at the end if you’ve found the links of interest, I’d love to hear from you and see what you think.

1. Tina (above) at Kitty Kat Cards in Maryland, USA cut her hair off and donated it to make wigs for women who have lost their hair to cancer. How cool is Tina, you go girl!

2. Age Concern and Help the Aged is calling on people to keep an eye out for older family‚ friends and neighbours during the cold weather.  The charity is concerned that the extreme temperatures will leave some older people facing difficulties getting out to buy food and essentials‚ while others will struggle to stay warm. I found a very sad story on the news today about a 90 year old woman slipping in her garden near Barnsley and dying of hypothermia – click here to read (but get the hankies ready). Poor woman.

3. More tissues needed – for the “Letter to my daughter’s other mother” article on the MumsRock blog. I often think about adopting a child (read my blog on it) so this was particularly poignant for me. I had a friend back in Sussex with an absolute angel of a daughter she’d adopted and the mother in this letter reminds me of that child’s birth mother.

4. Carrying on the sad theme with a blog about a tough few months from a twitter friend of mine Sarah of Kookylicious.

5. And let’s not stop there – might as well use the whole box of tissues up. I came across the Most/Least blog this week. Ella is mum to four boys aged 7, 5, 3 and 1. Last February, Ella’s 5 year old son William was diagnosed with FSGS and her family’s lives changed forever.

Well – it’s day 5 of being snowed in here in the Devon hills. It’s snowing again today and looking unlikely the village school will be open again tomorrow (it was closed Thursday & Friday last week). Even if it does manage to open, Devon council is not running the school buses and there’s no way we can get out of here as the little country lanes are extremely icy and snowy. We only have a little car (see my blog There’s Snow way we’re getting a 4×4) so we’re here for the forseeable future unless the council decide to come and grit/clear the lanes?

This is my four year old, Aleck, above making bread as we’ve run out of fresh – and it keeps him busy and entertained (and tastes delicious too!). We would love to hear your ideas on activities to do with a four year old boy and an eight year old girl.

With Tasha (our eight year old) I’d love to hear of any ideas which will help her literacy, numeracy etc. She had some workbooks but has used them all up. Any good websites out there we could use – get her brain defrosted a bit. We can go out and play in the snow in short bursts but when it’s not sunny (like today) it’s very very cold out there.

Please add your comments below, thanks ever so much.

We are absolutely thrilled to have made it into the Tots100 index of the UK’s Top 100 parent blogs and bloggers this January!

Our two and a half year old Tish Tash Toys blog debuts at number 85 in this index of parents’ blogs put together by Sally Whittle of Who’s The Mummy – the true story of the life of Lancashire mum Sally Whittle and her 4 year old daughter Flea. Sally is a freelance journalist, blogger and trainer and works out the scores of hundreds of mummy and daddy blogs based on three basic things: links, comments and readership.

You can view the list of top 100 blogs here at Who’s The Mummy.

I’ve flicked down the list myself and here are some of my favourites…

No. 64 A Place of my own – Kelly loves the summer but can’t cope with the sun. She’s loud and silly with friends but painfully shy around strangers and she likes penguins, singing loudly alone in the car, and Cornwall. I like Kelly because like her, I don’t like people who think the world owes them something!

No. 45 The homeschooling blog Patch of Puddles debuts really high on the list and is great for me with two children off school for days due to the weather. I’ll be using this blog next week to find some activities for my two to do should school still be closed.

Warmest wishes to all our agents, customers, friends, family & blog readers this New Year. We hope you had a peaceful restful break with your loved ones and are looking foward to a happy healthy 2010.

After a very busy run up to Christmas, we had a lovely quiet few days off here in the pretty hills of East Devon. We had family from Axminster and Exeter over for Christmas lunch and we had a noisy (but good) time at the big family get together at my husbands Aunties farmhouse in Churchinford, just over the border in Somerset. There were a lot of children there this year and more on the way so the annual gathering of the clan is set to be even noisier next year!

New Year is never a big event in our household, but it was nice to share the evening with my sister and her little boy and my brother this year, who all came to stay for a few days and managed to escape back to County Durham before the snows came, although they’ve have plenty of their own up there for a while. Our New Year sale started on the 31st December and will run throughout January. We have lots of great offers like this Noah Activity Ark below for babies over six months, reduced from £26.99 to £19.99.

Tish Tash had her 8th birthday on January 6th and woke up to a birthday surprise of a couple of inches of snow! It snowed more throughout the day and now we’re on day three of being snowed in! We’d checked the weather forecast earlier in the week so it wasn’t as much of a surprise to us. We’d done a big shop on the day before including packets of bread mix, extra milk, extra tins and frozen bits. We stocked up on locally produced veggies at Millers Farm Shop in Kilmington.

School was supposed to start yesterday but it’s closed along with lots of other schools here in Devon. Tasha enjoyed her birthday with her very very special gift – 4 month old Gabriella (below) rescued from East Devon Cats Protection. Isn’t she adorable!

Even though we are snowed in down ‘ere in the Westcountry, we’re keeping busy with a brand new website to indulge our love of blogging. Blackdown Blogs is a new project started to help out fellow small businesses who don’t have either the inclination or the time to blog regularly. I’m also getting involved with Green issues here in East Devon and have started a blog called sharonpavey.org

That’s all for now folks, back soon – and don’t forget to add your own comments below to tell us how your Christmas was – or how you and your little ones are coping with being snowed in too. Any ideas for fun activities for restless 8 and 4 year old appreciated!!

Picture at the top – Tasha & Aleck helping clean out the chicken coop!

I’m on the P.T.F.A. (parents, teachers and friends association) committee for my daughter’s school in the small village of Upottery in East Devon (about half an hour out of Exeter).

We are organising a fundraising Yummy Mummy market on the Saturday morning of 20th March 2010 in The Manor Rooms, Upottery. Half the proceeds will go towards buying a school stage and the other half to the wonderful Clic Sargent charity – which cares for children with cancer.

We are looking forward to seeing a lot of parents, grandparents and children from Upottery School at the village market which will include food, crafts and local tradespeople.

The highlight of the market will be the raffle which is always incredibly popular at any school fundraising event. So I’m on a mission to collect some goodies from fellow businesses in the run up to the event.

Please either add a comment if you can donate something or email me direct on sharon@tishtashtoys.com

If you do send us something – I could add a blog article about your business on here – just send me over some words & I’ll add links etc. This blog has been going for years now and all the articles get well ranked on google so great free ad for you as a bonus!

Thank you for reading

Sharon Pavey

www.tishtashtoys.com

Winner has now been drawn (@irenestrange) – no more entrants please!!!

Be nice to get from 1350 twitter followers to over 1400, so let’s do a CHRISTMAS GIVEAWAY!!!

Please recommend your friends to follow us @tishtashtoys, then post a quick comment on here, below to say you’ve RT (re-tweeted) our message on twitter. Don’t forget to include your own twitter name.

When we get over 50 new followers we’ll randomly choose a winner from the comments below.

….and the prize is to spend £15 on the Tish Tash Toys website – FREE postage too!!! Start browsing and choose what you’d like now – add it to your comment too – I’d love to hear which toys catch your eye. This cooker below is one of my favourite things (and if you like it, you can use the £15 as a money off voucher).

Best of luck – how exciting !!!

Sharon x