In the strange and slightly unpredictable world of blogging you never quite know where it will take you and who you will meet as a result. So it felt a little surreal to be packing up and heading off to Northumberland, to a place I didn’t know, to spend time with people I’d never met before.
Easy to turn down such an opportunity, as I might have done in the past, but thankfully I didn’t because it all turned out to be a little bit perfect.
Securing a sponsor for Cybermummy was exciting enough, but the fact that my sponsors have turned out to be lovely people, and now good friends, is something I could never have predicted. And it makes representing Little Dodo at Cybermummy all the more worthwhile.
I travelled via Newcastle to the ‘Very Far North’ to have dinner with Maddy and Owain from Little Dodo, to meet their two young sons and visit their shop. This post is obviously very one sided, but it’s fair to say we really got on. It was a relief all round, I’m sure, that I didn’t have two heads and neither did they.
I thought they were great. We talked for hours during my stay and occasionally they were able to get a word in edgeways.
Their shop is a gorgeous little baby boutique in Hexham – beautifully presented with a fabulous range of stock, and run by the two of them. I like the idea of independent family-run businesses and in this case Maddy and Owain turned their gift shop into a baby shop when they became parents. They are parents supporting parents, and I’d say, they are doing a pretty good job of it.
By pure coincidence I was staying in a local bed and breakfast with a couple from Derbyshire who knew the Little Dodo shop well. In their words it is competitively priced selling a mixture of modern and traditional items and offering a high standard of service. Nothing I saw during my visit differed from that.
It’s an impressive operation, a gorgeous shop and a really lovely family. It would have been perhaps added to this post if I could have thrown in a little drama, invented a highly amusing scenario in which I discovered a little dodo costume hiding in the storeroom that they wanted me to wear at Cybermummy, or if in fact they had turned out to have bright pink hair and an unusual interest in historic re-enactments.
But not so, although I am still wondering about that little dodo costume.
Little DoDo are sponsoring me to go to the Cybermummy conference in June. They can be found online at Littledodo.co.uk. Their shop is in Hexham, Northumberland and well worth a visit. They also have their own Little Dodo blog.
