Petit Fernand – labelling my children

Friends! Happy New Year! Apologies for the extended absence. I intended to blog about turkey cooking, Elf on the Shelf, Santa, Christmas presents, family madness and more. Instead I mostly ate cheese. So generally, successful all round. Never fear though, I am back!

Sometimes blogging really pays off. And I don’t mean that rubbish “personal satisfaction” payment which I’m sure is lovely, but I’m actually talking about getting to try a product I’ve fancied for ages.

Facebook knows me better than I know myself (apart from its insistence on me losing my belly fat. I happen to like my belly fat. It keeps me warm and acts as a buoyancy aid). It has been promoting to me for a while the products at Petit Fernand, who very excitingly have given me the opportunity to review their really nifty-looking labels.

EldestGirl is getting to that age – much like her mother – where at almost any opportunity she will cast off her clothes and leave them scattered around. At nursery, that generally means having to delve through the unpleasant depths of the lost property bin to retrieve her jackets, gloves, wellingtons – whatever she has managed to lose this week.

Petit Fernand provide incredibly cute, and genuinely very affordable (£3 per label set at time of writing) labels for children’s clothes. I tried out the stick-on labels (brilliant for laziness, but can only be stuck to a clothes label – e.g. washing instructions), the iron-on labels and then I realised they did ones for labelling food containers too, so that was a must-have.

Because the products were so reasonably-priced, I assumed there would be a hefty whack of postage to pay, but I was really pleasantly surprised to see that postage is actually free (and posted all the way from France) with a minimum order of just £9.

I am a bit slow when it comes to social media, so it was a few days before it dawned on me that showing off these lovely labels on my blog wasn’t a brilliant way to protect my children’s anonymity! So I have blurred out their names as best I can. I really like that for the child who can’t yet read, you can choose a logo to go with the label (a tiger for EldestGirl and an elephant for YoungestGirl) to help them identify their items consistently.

Mostly I’m slack in the housekeeping stakes. Less than 12 hours after our cleaner has been, we could probably earn ourselves a social services referral for mess. The one thing I do generally keep on top of is little freezer meals for the children. Whenever I make something that freezes easily (macaroni cheese, tuna pasta, spicy rice etc.) I make little pots for the children and defrost them during the week in the microwave for an easy, healthy and quick meal. This is brilliant in theory, but in practice the whole bottom drawer of the freezer is “lucky dip food”. I have genuinely no idea what is in most tubs until I have defrosted them. By which point, it’s 50/50 whether YoungestGirl is going to get cauliflower cheese or pumpkin pie filling for lunch. So the baby jar food labels were a godsend. I used a wipe-clean marker on the label and it’s worked brilliantly. A trip through the dishwasher leaves the label intact, and clean ready to write on again.

I get the sense that Petit Fernand is a small company – certainly the service I had was incredibly personal and swift. I can’t recommend their products highly enough – have a look at their stuff and let me know what you think.

Also I have loads of pumpkin pie filling left that no bastard will eat. Let me know if you want some.