Dancing nuns and lost children

It’s the Coldharbour village fete tomorrow. I was appointed fete chairman many years ago (basically because I didn’t attend the fete planning meeting).
The stars at “my fete” were a troupe of dancing nuns. They brought their own music - and a tape-recorder with flat batteries. The batteries slowly gave up the ghost and the nuns danced slower and slower. Eventually the nuns gave up too. They bowed out gracefully and left centre stage to tumultuous applause. The previous year I took my son and daughter to the Coldharbour fete and they had a great afternoon. The PA system featured in my life that day as well. “Would the parents of Matthew and Harriet please…”.
Statistically, 90% of parents have had a similar experience. It was a very familiar experience to me; it was the third week in a row that I had heard this message (Dorking fete, Abinger fete, Coldharbour fete). I will never forget the look on the face of the chap running the PA system at Coldharbour. Running the PA at fetes must have been his hobby; I had met him twice before! Don’t bother reporting me to social services - as I suspect he wanted to! Matt (now 23) survived his gap year working in New Zealand and Harriet (now 21) came back from South East Asia in one piece. Of course, I worried about them when they were both so far away – but I would have worried about them far more if I had wrapped them in cotton wool from “birth to A levels”.
We are sponsoring a Blogging Carnival about Child Safety. Obviously we have a product to sell, but we are far more interested in people’s opinions. Emily has set the tone for this debate really nicely. We can't and don't claim that our temporary tattoo transfers can stop children wandering off. It happens all the time but it very rarely leads to tragedy. The only claim that we make is that our product can help a kind stranger (and many more people are kind than predatory) re-unite a lost child with his or her mum or dad. Our child safety tips are published here. Please do join the Blogging Carnival and share your thoughts.
Simon

Sponsoring CyberMummy

We're delighted to announce that we will be sponsoring one lucky Mummy Blogger to attend the CyberMummy conference on 3rd July. We'll pay for the ticket - but sorry we can't run to doling out spending money! See Sian's post at mummy-tips.com. She's the person to get in touch with if you'd like to attend but don't have the readies.

There's no obligation to blog about us. We're just looking to make some new friends right now. We'll also drop a few freebies into the event goodie bags. How about:

Please Call Mum has a blog!

Thanks to some seriously good software from http://www.blogger.com/ I managed to set up this blog in about 4 hours. My next challenge is to work out what to do with it next!

I had a chat with Emily at http://babyrambles.blogspot.com/ and we agree that - whilst we at PleaseCallMum may be tempted to use the blogosphere to promote our child safety tattoo products and our website pleasecallmum.com/ - our blogs should be both interesting and useful.

More to come!

Thanks Emily O

Many thanks to Emily O at babyrambles for her really useful tip about http://draft.blogger.com/. This provides new features - and some great new templates.

Will this e-mail become a post?

I will be seriously impressed if it does!

Will this update my link cloud?

There's only one way to find out and that's to just do it.

All blogs start somewhere...

... and ours starts here. We are setting this up using http://www.blogspot.com/ and so far it's been pretty straightforward! All you need is a Google account (you will be prompted at http://www.blogspot.com/ to either logon or register) and then you just follow your nose and pick from a list of standard templates. More help for beginners later!