It's that time of year again and the kids are going back to school!  Call me crazy, but I've always loved back to school shopping, so now I'm excited that I get to do it all over again with the kids.  

The first purchase has to be a new school bag, and this is just about the cutest one that you're going to find to send your little one off to nursery or preschool.  The Bobo Buddies bag from Peach Perfect is the softest snuggliest backpack you'll ever find, and it also comes with a blanket inside and doubles as a pillow, so it's great for nap time at nursery (and for travel).  We got this adorable giraffe one (called Raffy) which we intended to be Ethan's new school bag, but Ivy has fallen completely in love with it, so Raffy now goes with her everywhere she goes!


Then you've got to have a pencil case full of cool pencils, erasers and anything else that you can find at the stationery shop.  We were lucky enough to get this cute one from Smiggle as well as a few fun things to go inside it.  We also filled it up with some great stationery that we found at shops like Tiger and the pound shop.



Next, if your little one takes a packed lunch you've got to have a great lunch box and drink bottle.  Ethan doesn't bring his lunch, but I always have to arrive with a bag full of snacks when I pick him up because he's always starving!  Our favourite snack pots are the Lego lunchboxes and we love Sigg waterbottles.  But I'm already thinking that he'll need a Yumbox for next year when he does bring his lunch, and maybe a fun firetruck lunchbox to put it in!

Now that I've got one in preschool and another that's starting all sorts of different activities, and with all of the play dates and birthday parties these two have much busier social lives than I do so I need a good diary to keep track of it all.  We got this fantastic one from Toad Diaries that I was able to completely personalise to suit our needs.  I chose a huge A4 sized diary so that I would have lots of room to write about their daily activities, and I was even able to chose the format having all seven days on one page and the other page just with lines for keeping track of all of my to do lists!  I got to design the cover and chose a cute green background with bunting design and put Ethan and Ivy's names on it.  I will be organised this year!



We're also thinking about ways to keep the fun and learning going at home, so we've got these great alphabet wall stickers from Stickers4Walls that I've put up in Ethan's room.  The stickers are made of fabric so they're a bit thicker than other wall stickers and have a lovely texture.  Each letter has a pattern that represents the letter (A has apples, B has bears, C has cats, D has dots...) which makes it fun to go through them together and ask Ethan to identify each sound and word that starts with it.  Even Ivy joined in with saying the words and singing the ABC song!


We are starting to feel more prepared for preschool now.  We've been reading our books about starting school and all of Ethan's clothes are labelled, he's got all of this fantastic new school essentials and we're ready for some great preschool days of fun and learning!

* This is a review post, we were sent the Bobo Buddies bag, Smiggle pencil case, Toad diary and ABC wall stickers to try out and write our honest opinions about.  The post also contains affiliate links.*