Yesterday I was lucky enough to be invited to the Christmas In July event run by Evolution PR. Traditionally, retailers and PR companies on their behalf advertise their Christmas wares in July and invite members of the press to come and preview them. As a blogger, the invite has been extended and I too now have got to see in advance what will come up this yule tide. I went to a few last year and they were super exciting so I have accepted every invitation I’ve been given this year. The event yesterday was to showcase all the top toys coming out and I was invited as part of the UKMums.TV Mum’s Choice Panel to look and grade out of ten all the toys expected to be popular presents! The idea of the panel is for press to be presented with the UKMums.tv ‘Mums Choice Awards’, a list of the very best toys which real mums think will be on their child’s Christmas lists. I felt a little like Tom Hanks in the film ‘Big’ and was super looking forward to the event!
We arrived early, I met with some of the other bloggers who are real Mums on the panel and grabbed our clip boards about to start dissecting all the masses of toys on display. Unfortunately, within minutes of being there, poor little Dylan who belongs to Mummy Adventure, had a pretty nasty fall so we had to have a little trip to A&E before any toy testing could take place. After a lot of hanging around for poor them they ended up staying the night… Mummy Adventure obviously couldn’t go and see the toys for herself but I did nip back for the last hour and a half of the event to carry out my duties.
With the help of Mummy Is A Gadget Geek, who wasn’t originally on the panel but who was at the event, I managed to grade most of the toys and even though the stands were coming down and the room was being packed away as we finished, I got my completed form in! Phew!
I did have a good time looking at all the new toys and here are some of the things I liked best!
There were loads of other toys and loads of other things I would have liked, games from Ravensberger both old, new and revamped ones were fab but I forgot to photograph in the rush and I saw something which reminded me of Boglins, remember those? I only had an hour and a half at the end of the day to whip round so my favourites list is quite short!
I have not been paid to write this post.
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I was there too. How did you manage to fit it all in in 90 minutes. I was there all day and still missed a couple of things on the grading sheet. Was really good fun though. Would definitely do it again.
I had the lovely mummyisagadgetgeek to help me/do it! 😉