They're coming to take me away, haha!

So... who have I been today?

Early Riser Mummy - to negate the fact that the car was at the garage, Husband was away, the school run called, and some personal grooming was required as doing the drop-off in my gym kit just wasn't going to wash for the third time this week...

Stressed Mummy - when it took ages to find a taxi to take the boys and I to school (and don't say I should have taken a bus - it would have taken just as long as walking... And don't say I should have walked; arriving for a school day starting at 8.15am after a 30 minute walk was just never going to happen. Especially after the effort I put in on the grooming front.)

Yomping Mummy - walking the 30 minutes back from school through rush-hour traffic pushing an increasingly heavy Boy #2 in a buggy on it's last legs. Who needs upper arm exercises at the gym anyway? (And personal grooming? What personal grooming?)

Domesticated Mummy - washing, tidying, admining, ministering to an increasingly bored younger son...

Organised Mummy - heading off to buy supplies and a present for Boy #1's girlfriend's party this afternoon. I had been issued with strict instructions that my usual present of choice - a talking book - was not acceptable for the object of my son's affections, and that anything fairy (except a book) was quite the thing.

Relieved Mummy - when I found 'quite the thing' in the ELC.

Yomping Mummy - again - heading off - via the park to placate Boy #2 for all the to-ing and fro-ing - to pick the car up from the garage (I worked out that I walked around 5 miles today. And in the wrong shoes, of course).

Relieved Mummy - for the second time - that the car was ready to be picked up.

Frustrated Mummy - that despite the fact that the exhaust had been repaired (meaning our car no longer sounds like an Alfa Romeo - which secretly I quite liked), by the time I reached the end of the road it became clear that the sinister clanking noise the car makes when I apply the brakes is still occuring. Our mechanic had assured me that it would have been fixed, but also gave himself a let-out clause with the following non-pausing for breath sentence; "Is not serious, see, because PM, I check, you see, and everythin' is sol-id, I mean sol-id under there PM, and you drive it, right, you drive it an' if eet still there you come back in week or so PM, and you take me for test-drive and we work it out..." Fabulous.

Delighted Mummy - to take the boys to a birthday party this afternoon that was not in Gambado, downstairs in a pizza restaurant or similar but OUTSIDE, thank god!

Domesticated Mummy - again - clearing up wee on the floor of the bathroom when a post-party Boy #2 was too exhausted to make it to the loo, and simply delivered where he sat as I ran the bath (will 'my potty hell' never end?).

Scientific Mummy - when, after putting the Boys to bed, I decided that I needed to do some research before I could put on my Jimmy Choo's, satin slip dress and resume my occasional role as...

Disney Blu-Ray Ambassador Mummy.

'Research' I hear you say? What kind of research could I possibly do? I simply need to put the disc in the machine and switch on, surely? Well, I could have done that. But the disc I was going to review was Sleeping Beauty (Platinum Edition), and what's to review there?

Everyone knows the story of how poor old Maleficent, that outrider for female empancipation, expelled from Elysium for refusing to pander to male egos, decides to make her point about the emptiness of a life lived only for beauty and grace by - admittedly slightly excessively - cursing the only daughter of King Stefan and his wife to die before she reaches her sixteenth birthday. (His wife, by the way, who's name I'm not even sure we're ever told, but what the hey, she's only a woman, right?)

OK, OK, I don't really see this movie like that. It's beautiful, and a classic, and yes my sons have seen it already. But that's not what I was going to write about. Because I have no doubt that you do already know the story.

No, what I realised is that I have repeatedly said in my reviews of the Blu-Ray technology is that whilst it is fantastic for live action movies, I really wasn't sure it made that much of a difference to animated ones. And then I realised that I have both a normal dvd and a blu-ray version of Sleeping Beauty. And it was not such a large leap for me then to think; well, why don't I put my money where my mouth is and watch both? Not all the way through, you understand. Just for long enough to see if I could tell that one was high definition and the other was not.

(Initially I had an even better plan. We still have both our normal DVD player and the blu-ray player hooked up to the tv, you see. Nothing simpler, surely, to put them both on simultaneously and flick between the two.

Nothing simpler, that is, assuming you can find the remote control for your DVD player.)

After a fruitless search when it took me all of 10 minutes to ascertain that yes, the remote control for the DVD player was indeed lost, I gave up on that idea, and had to watch the first 15 minutes of each, one after the other... (Because, btw, you can do that on a Blu-Ray player.)

And the results?

Drumroll....

I was wrong. You can tell the difference. The Blu-Ray version is clearer, brighter, and oh, alright, higher definition.

Curses. (But in a good way, obviously...)