Schools are back and it is the end of the summer holidays. Personally, I love the holidays - no shouting trying to get everyone up in the morning and to the right place at the right time. I am particularly dreading the year ahead with one child doing A2 exams and hoping to go to university and the other taking GCSE's.  I can feel my stress levels rising as I type this! Certainly, time seems to go faster the older I get.  Anyway, enough of the doom and gloom!

The new website was launched and, fingers crossed, all seems well at present. We didn't drop out of the Google search and customers are still finding us and placing orders.  It was a bit nervewracking as both my partner and I were on holiday at the time of the launch - extremely bad planning and it won't be happening again but ours was a last minute booking, my daughter having fractured her ankle and missing out on a 3 week Australian netball tour that had been planned for nearly two years!

The launch meant that for the first time I took a laptop with me on holiday in order to monitor business and check everything was OK on September 1st when the ‘old’ gave way to the ‘new’. Slight panic on the day before the launch as the server managed to crash so our site along with others was out of the 'world wide web' for about 12 hours. So, after many weeks of work, above and beyond the call of duty, I would like to thank Christopher Thompson of CDTi for the almost finished product.  We will be improving the blog page in the coming weeks so that everyone can comment so bear with us until that is completed. In the meantime, please feel free to send any comments to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

I am new to this blogging business so it will be a learning curve for all of us.  I do not pretend to be an expert on anything in particular but hope that some of our topics will appeal to some of you.  We will be talking about setting up a new business and what worked for us; life with teenagers; trying to balance work and life – usually by not sleeping!; and probably snippets like favourite recipes and books.  In fact, probably anything that we feel may be of interest to someone somewhere.

Don’t forget our Special Offer on our Spotty Dotty Swag-bag. It is a bargain at just £14.99.  Taking my son to school for his final year this morning there was definitely an autumnal ‘nip’ in the air and I am sure that there are already retailers out there who will have Christmas cards on sale! So, if you are unlike me and plan well ahead, then Spotty Dotty could be the perfect solution for Christmas!

For those of you who use Twitter follow @StylishSwagBag for news and special offers.  If you don't already, I would suggest you also follow marksandspencer on Twitter - they have some great offers and currently if you donate M&S clothes instore on 8th September to Oxfam you can receive a £5 voucher http://bit.ly/msoneday for more details.