Billie B Competition!

Billie B Brown has a new series, Billie B Mysteries and YOU could win the chance to star in the next book!
Billie, her bestie Jack and a group of their buddies are solving mysteries at school and around the neighbourhood and they need your help!
Use your detective skills and track down one of the Billie B Mysteries standees. Then get your mum or dad to snap a pic of you with Billie and the gang and upload it to Instagram or Facebook with the hash tag #BillieBMystery along with the reasons you would make the best new member of the Mysteries gang. Author Sally Rippin will then choose the best answer and that person will appear in the 6th Billie B Mystery book publishing in September 2014!
For more details ask mum or dad to visit the Bookids Facebook page and check the notes section. You can also find the locations of the Billie B Mysteries stand on the Bookids Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/Bookids.com.au

Playground Detectives - Billie B Mystery Number Three!

I've had a few enquiries lately about the release date for the next Billie Mystery so thought I should put a little sneak peek up here.

Billie and her friends have a brand new Secret Mystery Clubhouse, high up in the apple tree. Now they just need a brand new mystery to uncover. Billie comes up with an idea. Only last week Rebecca found leaves in her sandwich and Benny was immediately blamed. Lola says she even saw him loitering in the corridor that day. Everyone agrees it has to have been Benny. After all, Benny always does stupid things like that. But this time Benny is adamant it wasn't him. And, to Billie, something feels not quite right. But then, if it wasn't Benny, who was it? It's up to the Secret Mystery Club to find out!

Playground Detectives should be available at the beginning of March. So for any keen Billie readers, that's only fifteen more sleeps!

Happy New Year and Five Non-Resolutions

So, everyone knows how hard it can be to keep New Year's resolutions. You wake up on the first of Jan, full of good intentions and determined to do things differently, but more often than not the most ambitious of those resolutions have well and truly slipped by the wayside by the end of the first week.

So, this year, I thought I'd try something different.

Five Things I Resolve NOT To Do In 2014:

1) I will not take on more work than I know I can handle - no matter how interesting it sounds - and no matter how much I convince myself I can squeeze it in. Too much work means not enough play time and we all know that makes Jack a dull boy.

2) I will not feel guilty about my pyjama days. Days when I am not really sick, just pretending, so that I can spend a day in bed napping, drinking tea and mindlessly scrolling through Facebook. After all I've found that one fake sick day can often ward off a real one.

3) I will not skip my yoga class, book group, singing class or piano lesson because I have too much work to do. (See no.1) I will also not feel guilty about a long lunch date with a friend. I work enough Sundays to justify the odd weekday tryst.

4) I will do my very best to be at all my kids school performances, parent-teacher interviews and fundraisers, but will not beat myself up if I miss one for whatever reason. There are plenty of other parents at the school who are better bakers than me. I am much better on the book stall anyway.

5) I will not forget to stop whatever it is I am doing and just enjoy those brief moments when my rapidly-growing sons want to share something funny with me they have seen on the internet, talk to me about their day at school or just sit with me in the kitchen when I'm cooking. The older they get the more it becomes clear to me that these days are numbered and I don't ever want to regret spending more time checking emails on my iPhone than being present with my kids. If I can only manage to keep one non-resolution this year, I think this might be the most important one for me for 2014.

Hope you are having some success in sticking to yours!