Who's the Mummy?

Halloween Costumes: Sorted.

This month, The Great Toy Guide team has been hard at work testing kids’ Halloween costumes, and we’ve put together our guide to 12 of the best outfits for your children this Halloween. Hey, it's a tough job, but we're there for you. 

We think there's something great here whatever your budget or your kids' preferences: from cute pumpkin outfits to spooky ghouls, medieval princesses and Peter Pan. Tim from Bringing up Charlie has even tested a fantastic face paint and special FX kit that can add the perfect finishing touch to any Halloween outfit - a severed thumb. 

Pop over to the Great Toy Guide Halloween Special to find out more, or read all our Halloween reviews here!

An Ode to Playmobil

As a parent, you enter - or rather re-enter - the World of Toys. 

One of my favourite rediscoveries has been Playmobil. For those who aren't familiar, this is a range of plastic figures and playsets that allow kids to play at all sorts of things, from construction to hospitals. They're a bit smaller than your typical action figure (that's because of the 1970s oil crisis, trivia fans) and so they're just the right size for little hands.

I loved Playmobil as a kid, and Flea loves it almost as much. She can be entertained by herself for an entire morning with her Playmobil figures, lost in her own little world of dinosaurs, pirates and Egyptian skeletons.

However, if you're new to the world of Playmobil, let me be your guide. Let me tell you not to buy that little set where the two robbers steal the jewels because it has an unbelievably annoying alarm that goes off every time you move the toybox. Let me be the one o tell you that if you buy the lovely Playmobil hospital, you're going to lose eight hours of your life and possibly create life-long feuds with your partner as you try to assemble it. 

Over at The Great Toy Guide, we have put together these reviews of 12 best-selling Playmobil playsets, for anyone who might be considering investing. If you're responsible for buying presents for a child aged 4 or over this Christmas, I urge you to click on the link above and go check them out - after all, where else can you buy your child a toy jewel thief or sarcophagus? 

Why don't fathers get called Dadpreneurs?

There’s been lots of chat online in the last month about “mumpreneurs” – women who set up businesses while also running a family.

One of the big winners at the recent Mumpreneur conference was Antonia Chitty, a fantastically successful journalist and author, who I've known of through work for a number of years. So I was really interested to receive a copy of Antonia’s latest book,  “The Mumpreneur Guide”, billed as the ultimate guide to starting and running your own business.

For anyone considering going into business for themselves, it’s a really useful book. Extremely easy to follow, clearly laid out, easy to read, and with lots of examples from real women in business. It guides women through the process of coming up with a business idea, getting the business established and finding your first customers. The checklists alone should help you avoid many of the pitfalls that can derail new businesses.

Once you’re in business, though, I suspect you’d need much more detailed advice on regulation, taxation, finance and so on, but this is a great place to start as much of the advice is universal and would apply to any new business. 

But I must confess – I do have a bit of a problem with the word “mumpreneur”. To me, it conjures up all kinds of cosy images of women running friendly little businesses selling something appropriate, in between baking scones and doing the housework. It's like Diane Keaton in Baby Boom, updated for the Internet age.

When’s the last time you read about a Dadpreneur? You didn’t, because men in business are businessmen or entrepreneurs. So why do we assume that women running a business somehow need a special label to congratulate them on fitting in a little something while also doing their (proper) job of raising a family? Ugh.

Sadly, this book doesn’t do much to challenge that myth. I haven’t counted but I’d hazard a guess that 80% of the businesses mentioned in the book are online businesses set up to sell baby or child-related products or services. There are children’s toys, real nappies, children’s books, children’s dolls, baby clothes, baby towels, baby gifts.

Without intending any disrespect to any of the women running these businesses and the success they've achieved – I’d have loved to have seen a more rounded representation of what women in business can achieve. Where are the IT consultants, the retailers of non-baby products, the financial service whizzes, the inventors or travel gurus? As a journalist who’s covered business for 10 years, I know they’re out there – I've interviewed some incredibly inspiring business women and entrepreneurs in my time - but perhaps they’ve escaped the ‘mumpreneur’ tag?

I’d be interested to know what other women think – is being called a mumpreneur a compliment to women?