The Minx got more Valentines cards than I did.

One from her father as is only natural and proper (though I wonder how long it will take for her to become horribly embarrassed by them?) and one from the little son of one of the very nice mothers I’ve been hanging around with recently (well apparently he’d instructed his mother to buy Lulu a card).

The only thing was that he also gave a card to another baby girl at the same time.  It seems that boys are not to be trusted even at 8 months. Here are all the components of this love triangle ‘playing’ (and I use this term loosely) together.

What a difference a year makes. 

This time last year I was still recovering from a dreadful labour and birth, breastfeeding was going badly, my baby was underweight and looked like a little wizened gnome. She was so small that I was too scared to take her out in the cold, even if she’d had a snowsuit small enough to fit her.  So instead of going out to buy a card for my husband, I painted her tiny foot with red watercolour paint and printed her footprint on a piece of card.

This year we’re all going to breakfast together on our traditional Eggs Benedict and then we’ll open the Valentines card the Minx ‘made’ for us both at nursery. Much preferring this year.

HAPPY SAINT VALENTINES DAY

Some rather unexpected coverage today in the Sunday Express ‘S’ Magazine.

Last November we took a stand at the House & Garden Spirit of Christmas fair and were rather sadly excited when Linda Barker (a very well-known celebrity interior designer here in the UK) came and bought loads of stuff.

Well, here she is in today’s magazine showing off our extremely delicious Creation Mathias bath confetti which we import from France.

Am I being ungrateful to wish that she had a slightly more upmarket ‘brand’?*

*I have to say that she did seem extremely nice when we met her.  I just wish she didn’t also endorse Curry’s and DFS

As promised (we aim to please here at mirror mirror), here’s a bit more about our trip to Southern California.  It’s not really about business or babies, but hey!

As we were going to be on the West Coast in Seattle, it seemed sensible to travel down to visit my aunt down in Orange County (just south of LA).  Actually it wasn’t very sensible at all, it was only after we booked the flights that we realised that she actually lives 1,000 miles from Seattle – America sure is BIG.

But in the end it was definitely worth it.  I had last seen my aunt about eighteen years ago at my father’s funeral – we’ve never known her very well as she moved to Canada and then the US when she was about 20.  Nevertheless there was the immediate shock of the very familiar – she looks a bit like my father, but even more like my father’s (and her) aunt, an old lady whom I knew when I was a child.  Her wry, slightly deadpan, sense of humour is also very much like my father’s – and completely un-Californian.  And therein lies the rub.  For my aunt, though living in paradise, is a rather sad and lonely woman.

She lives with her cat in her slightly-Austin-Powersish-but-nevertheless-beautiful house with views over the ocean, listening to Tom Jones and surrounded by photographs of herself in her 1960s heyday. She is slim, immaculately well-groomed and elegant, and looks to be in her early sixties rather than 75.  Money is clearly no object.

But her life has been tough. She and my father were orphaned during the war, she then lost her only brother (my father) when he was still quite young, her husband died only a few years later and her only child, her daughter, died last year of cancer at the age of 48.  So now she has no-one and seems to find it impossible to make real friends in California, with Californians.

She talks of coming back to England, which she fondly imagines is an oasis of old-fashioned good manners and intelligent conversation (I didn’t disabuse her), but knows no-one here either and doesn’t think she could cope with the weather.

We had a lovely time together and I learnt lots I didn’t know about our family history which was fab (may blog a bit about this as well).  But it’s left me feeling sad and thoughtful.  Not sure what to conclude except that money clearly doesn’t buy happiness.  It also gives an new interesting perspective to the ‘should I have another baby’ debate (which I will DEFINITELY blog about later).

The above photo was taken from the lounge of the Ritz-Carlton hotel. How can I in all honesty tell my aunt to come back to England?

This morning I escaped to the hairdressers to get my hair cut and was BULLIED (this is for my husband’s benefit) into having a pedicure at the same.   Two hours of being worked on at both ends with me reading magazines in the middle – utter bliss -(though the amount of dead skin which was removed from my heels was somewhat alarming).

I would never have believed before I had a baby how pathetically grateful I would become for a bit of ‘me’ time.  Or how pleased I would be to look almost like a human being. I can’t even find any snot on my shoulder.

All of a sudden my baby girl seems all growed up. 

In the last few days she seems to have acquired incredible manual dexterity – she can feed herself with her fab spoon-on-a-telephone-wire, point to various pictures in books very accurately, throw things properly and even reach out and pick things up without having to look directly at them.

She gives us the most wonderful hugs, can say about five words -mostly beginning with ‘c’ – and understands a whole lot more, loves music and dancing, and adores cats and dogs.

She’s still not walking, though doing everything but – practically running behind her brick walker, standing unaided for long periods of time, cruising on tiptoe and standing supported on one leg.  I don’t think she sees the point of walking at all when she can crawl so easily.

Most importantly of all SHE HAD A GREAT DAY AT NURSERY TODAY AND CAME HOME IN A GOOD MOOD.  I know I’m supposed to be all nostalgic for the baby days, but goodness me I’m enjoying these days so much more… And am I a bad mother to enjoy her absences so much?

Just back from our madcap trip to the West Coast of the US.  More successful than I ever dreamed possible – thanks to all the planning we did  and the fact that the Minx somehow metamorphosed into a little angel along the way.  Though it was a bit tragic to see how excited she was this morning to be back with all her familiar toys, particularly her beloved piano.  She was even beside herself with glee when we put her in her high chair. 

Anyway, the trip to Seattle may have interesting ramifications, so I will blog about it at a later date when the ramifications have become clearer.

Our trip to California to see my elderly aunt was also hugely thought-provoking on many levels, so I will blog about that at a later date when my provoked thoughts get themselves into some sort of order and I don’t have so many Valentines Day orders to pack.  (Dear Reader, how can you bear the suspense?)

In the meantime I’d like to mention a little book I read on the plane – Purple Cow by Seth Godin.  To be honest, the book was somewhat insubstantial, as his basic premise can be summed up in about a paragraph (he clearly is a marketing genius to be able to parlay that into a best-selling book). 

In a nutshell, he states a truly successful business can’t just be very good at what it does – there are far too many other very good companies out there –  but has to be REMARKABLE in some way.  Which of course got me thinking about mirror mirror and how we can make it stand out from the crowd, especially all our competitors who are so much bigger and uglier than we are.

I think the key areas where we can differentiate ourselves are a) stunning products; b) the gift service in general and in particular the care and attention we pay to our packaging and c) providing an outstanding level of customer service. 

Of course, I’d like to think we’re a Purple Cow company already , but I’d love to get any ideas you might have on things we could do better and things we could do add to the service to make it truly incredible.  Please share your thoughts of what you’d really like to see from an online shop. (The best ideas will win a yet-to-be-determined prize…)

Anyone who has had the privilege over the last month of receiving a gorgeous gift from mirror mirror (a small, but thankfully growing, elite) may have noticed that our products now come wrapped even more stunningly than before.

We made a decision early on to wrap beautifully everything that we send out – whether it’s a gift or not. We wanted people who order from mirror mirror to be really thrilled when they open their box and it’s a way that we can differentiate ourselves a little bit from our competition.

I have cursed this decision on many occasions when I’ve been up to the wee small hours packaging up parcels, but we know from our customer feedback that it’s something our customers really appreciate. 

The other slight problem is that I have always been absolutely dreadful at wrapping parcels and however hard I tried the packages often looked like they’d been wrapped by someone with flippers rather than hands.   

All that has now changed thanks to the wonderful Jane Means – the giftwrap guru.  Just after Christmas my friend Emmeline (garden designer extraordinaire) and I treated ourselves to a personal giftwrapping course from Jane.  We had a really fun day and picked up loads of tips and tricks.  Some of them were very obvious to all but me – have sharp scissors, cut your paper properly to size, don’t use that slithery silvery paper that doesn’t crease, use double-sided sticky tape for a neater finish, tidy up as you go along etc. etc  but others, such as the cellophane technique and the pleating for cylinders technique have been worth their weight in gold, particularly as mirror mirror has so many awkward-shaped objects to wrap.

Anyway, I was so delighted with how my parcels looked over the weekend, that I thought I’d take a photo to show you…

Thrilled to bits today with some fab coverage in The Independent which has meant that we’ve had one of our best days ever and certainly the best  ever Saturday (which is usually  quite a slow day for us). 

The only downside is that we’ve already nearly sold out of my lovely eggcups since I only got a few in to see how they would sell and they’re proving incredibly popular.  I am officially an idiot.