LOVELY lie-ins, pyjamas until lunchtime and no uniform sorting or packed lunch making just about sums up what I love about the school holidays.

One half-term over, the Easter holiday looming fast, and the bonus of four bank holidays in one month. Lovely!

Our half-term holiday consisted of sleepovers, holiday clubs and a few enjoyable walks around Rickmansworth Aquadrome, finished off with a lazy Sunday morning breakfast in the Cafe in the Park.  There's something special about going out for breakfast on a Sunday - it's so much cheaper than having lunch out and it has the bonus of filling you up until tea time.

If you sign up to the Cafe in the Park Facebook page or website, you also get sent offers. At the moment they have a second breakfast for £1, with a special voucher. Unfortunately for me, every day except Sunday! Never mind. I also had great intentions of checking out the cafe I've been hearing loads about at Pinner Memorial Park. 

Four different people have told me how great it is and that I should get over there to check it out and write about it but I've not quite managed to yet. I've just been Googling it and it looks lovely. 

Thanks to the wonder of the web I've discovered that Heath Robinson used to live in Pinner and there is a gallery and museum dedicated to his life, also in Pinner Memorial Park - the same building as the cafe, I believe.  It has a selection of his painting available to view for free but only on Wednesdays and Saturdays 1-5pm. So I'm going to combine the two and go on a Saturday.

**IT IS World Book Day tomorrow (Thursday), and mums all over the country will be putting the finishing touches to costumes for their children so that they can go into school dressed as a character from their favourite book.  This has caused us loads of angst in our house as I'm rubbish at sewing, so costumes have to be created with glue, face paints and ingenuity.

I bet I'm going to be shot down for this but I have to say I think it's far harder for mums of boys. Lots of girls we know already have beautiful dressing-up clothes and can quickly cobble together a Tinkerbell, Rapunzel, princess or even witch, based on what they have in their wardrobe or dressing-up box.  Boys tend to have superhero outfits and generally schools don't want anything comic or character based.  It's a shame you're not allowed to wear a football kit and take a football annual as your 'book', as that would be nice and easy. Alex has been James Bond - dad's bowtie and his own toy spy kit - and last year he was Alex Rider, which was dead easy.

The best one was probably Wally from Where's Wally?, with specs, a borrowed walking stick, a stripey T-shirt and a customised Christmas hat.  The funniest outfit Alex has ever worn was Henry VIII for history day - he had a homemade gold crown from a previous school play, a dressing-up cloak from when he was little, black thermals, my pixie boots and a huge pillow stuffed under his jumper and dad's old belt to keep it up.  With a face paint moustache, beard and eyebrows he really looked the part! 

This year, we're doing Dracula, which will mainly mean 15 minutes of fiddling with face paints, copious amounts of hair gel for that smoothed-back look and, if I can't find anything that resembles a black cape, I will be cutting up a bin bag!