Advertisement feature in association with Infacol

Did you know that September is Colic Awareness Month? No, me neither. Only I do now obviously, as do you. To celebrate, if that’s the right word, I’m hosting a giveaway in association with InfacolInfacol is Britain’s number one colic remedy and has been used by generations of parents to soothe trapped wind, colic and griping pain.* It can be used form birth onwards, it’s sugar, alcohol and colourant-free.Colic awareness month

The prize bundle includes lots of treats for a new baby, including a sleep suit, some Infacol, Izzie the elephant cuddly toy and muslin cloth – head to the end of the post for details of how to enter.

Before you do that though, Bee has written a letter to her partner about all the things she was worried about before baby Joey was born.

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Today I have a very interesting post from Bee about a course she’s doing with Kritikme to write a novel in three months. Please have a read! 

As some of you may know, I graduated from Creative Writing at London South Bank University a couple of academic years ago now, and what I got out of it was a first class degree, a complete, ready for publication collection of poetry that I’m never going to do anything with, and the feeling that I was just kind of done with writing.

I took a break and quit my freelance writing career to work full time in a café and clear my head of all these negative feelings I had about writing after my course was over. Now I’ve decided that, of course, writing is my passion and my little special gift I’ve been given by God or my mother or whoever, and I know that that’s what I want to do with my life.

I decided recently to pick up creative writing again and try and get a novel finished, along with the help of Louise Dean who runs Kritikme, an online service for serious writers which also offers an amazing plan where you can write the first draft of a novel in 90 days! I’ve written a little bit about it over on my own blog, but I just wanted to share with you 10 things that I feel I’ve gotten out of this plan that I didn’t get out of my three-year degree course. I was just a teen back then, and I didn’t take advantage of the opportunities offered to me as much as I should have, but this plan has given me a second chance to really get into writing fiction.

online novel writing course Kritikme review View Post

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Bee is on the blog today, talking toys. Please make her welcome!

A lot of the time I lie awake at night pondering life’s big questions.

“Can birds catch a cold?”

“What did I sound like when I was younger?”

“When do people stop liking toys?”

I was thinking about this one today. I can’t pinpoint a time when I stopped wanting or liking toys. I can’t even pick a particular age that I think it might be. There’s even a time when you’re just becoming a teenager that you see some toys and thank God you have a little sister so that you can play with them “because you have to” but secretly you just want to play with them, and I’m sure there are definitely still some toys I would want to play with if I saw them.

I decided to have a little look at the Smyth’s toys website to see if there was anything out there these days that I thought I could genuinely enjoy playing with. I do like gadgets and things, as my MacBook Air and brand new iPhone prove, and I’m not against the occasional board game, so I was sure there must be some kids toys out there that I might secretly want to buy for myself.

When I was a baby I had a toy kitchen that I really liked (I didn’t know about gender roles when I was 2.) I used to “feed” sweets to a toy owl and then secretly eat them myself when he didn’t want to eat them for some reason. This might have been the main reason why I liked it. Upon finding the toy kitchens on the website I found out they are INCREDIBLE compared to the mid nineties. Better than my actual kitchen in my actual house! Check out this bad boy. Magnificent.

toy kitchen Smyths View Post

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I have to say that it can be pretty annoying living in Somerset and constantly getting invited to events in London. Fortunately, I have Bee, my London correspondent, to attend things on my behalf. Over to you Bee…

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to a special lunch put together by Method, the lovely cleaning products people, and Ella Woodward aka Deliciously Ella. The lunch was held at The Mae Deli, a trendy new clean eating focused deli set up by Ella and her fiancé Matt after the success of Ella’s first bestselling recipe and lifestyle book. I had wanted to go there for a while to check it out because I absolutely love Ella’s recipes, so I was really happy to be invited and finally get to see it in real life.

The deli was absolutely lovely inside and as a result was very busy, so I would say if you want to go I would get there early and avoid the lunch time rush. For the lunch we were taken downstairs to the bigger room for our three course meal specially put together with recipes created by Ella. These weren’t just random recipes though, they were all based on the ingredients in Method’s new range of wonderful cleaning products to celebrate the new partnership between Method and Deliciously Ella.

The starter was almond soup, which I was sceptical about at first but turned out to be really, really nice. This was based on Method’s almond floor cleaner. I got some to take home and it leaves my wooden floors feeling and looking really clean as well as smelling great. I would recommend trying almond soup if you haven’t already, it’s eaten hot and has a really unique but lovely flavour. View Post

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A guest post from Bee.

Hello again. London correspondent Bee here. I’m basically writing stuff on here all the time so you would have thought she could have handed over at least one of her 2015 Vuelio blog awards to me right? Apparently not.

Sigh.

Well I hope you are all having a nice ‘run up to Christmas’, as adults say when they’re trying to make small talk during the month of December. It’s the Christmas version of ‘How is uni going?’ (The answer to which is always ‘yeah great, thanks!’ when really you are silently crying inside.)

London is really nice around Christmas time though. Unless you are on Oxford Street. Then it isn’t nice and it’s like one of those dreams where you’re stuck somewhere and you’re trying to move but you can’t and you’re not sure you’ll make it out alive. But in general, London is all lovely and twinkly and everyone has some kind of hot beverage on the streets, which makes me happy because I barely ever see people on the street with drinks and it makes me wonder if they are hydrated enough.

Anyway, there are lots of things to do in the Christmas holidays here, whether you are a resident or you are taking a fun trip down for the day. I’ve got some ideas for if you’re not coming here to Christmas shop/lose your mind. View Post

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Bee wrote this post about Syria and World Vision. I felt a bit bad about it, as she text me afterwards to tell me she cried in a cafe while she wrote it, but as Bee says, optimism is about action. I hope it makes you think.

Recently I have pushed myself to be relentlessly optimistic.

I have complained about people putting negative Facebook statuses up about the government and current affairs, educated and researched or not. I have wanted to shut out every piece of horrifying news and walk around with a blind smile on my face to stop myself from falling apart.

But then I realised that optimism and hope isn’t just about faith, it is about action. It isn’t about avoiding difficult issues, it is about tackling them head on, doing anything you can, at least saying something, starting a conversation. So I decided that I should probably say something, because it is Charity Tuesday and if I can get even one person to read and help, then I’ve done something, and if we all just do a little bit and spread awareness then hope becomes change and optimism is no longer something we have to fight for.

In this video, Zeinab is 13 years old. The same age as my little sister, but she seems so much older. I felt like she was older than me, just by the way she spoke about her situation. She had dreams of being an artist. In Syria, she was happy and went to school with her friends. She had everything that you or I would take for granted, from a TV to clothes to a real mattress to sleep on.

After the arrival of ISIS, it was no longer safe for Zeinab to be in Syria. The only way that she could protect herself was by leaving her family behind and going to marry a grown man in Lebanon. She now lives in an informal refugee settlement with only the bare essentials. As the winter draws in, temperatures in Lebanon are dropping to below freezing and water is leaking through Zeinab’s thin tent. The things that Zeinab has had to go through at such a young age are completely unfathomable. I would stop at nothing to make sure that my sister didn’t have to go through the same thing, so I see no reason why we should let thousands of young girls like Zeinab suffer through it either.

It could happen to any of us.

Despite everything, Zeinab remains a strong young woman in the face of adversity and is making the best of things that are happening to her. The most chilling thing about the video for me was that she did not break down once or look upset at all. SHE has relentless optimism. And thanks to World Vision, she has hope for the future as well. When Zeinab arrived at the settlement there was no clean water or sanitation, but World Vision has now built latrines and water tanks to greatly improve Zeinab’s quality of life. World Vision are also providing warm winter coats to the children in the settlement to help them through the winter months.

There is a lot that we SHOULD be doing to help people in the Syrian conflict and there is NO reason why we can’t be doing these things. Even just going to World Vision, seeing more of their work and spreading the word can in turn help young women like Zeinab survive the atrocities folding out before us at this very moment.

People say that humans have destroyed this planet, but I believe that if a small percentage of them can knock it down then the rest of us can work together to build it up bigger and better than before. With optimism, help, support, awareness and whatever else it takes. Because there isn’t a life on this planet that doesn’t matter.

Please consider making a donation now. Just £14 can buy a winter coat, to help one of the two million refugee children living in tents and poor housing to survive the cold conditions.

 

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Today I have a guest post from Bee, about her favourite Christmas traditions.

Christmas presents

All of my 20 Christmases so far have comprised of the same basic elements that I rely on to officially make it Christmas every year. Things generally happen in about the same way every time and I like the way things are. This year, however, I am going for my first Christmas in Ireland. I’m going for four days, which I am currently trying to manage in my mind as I really don’t like being away from London, let alone being abroad. Hopefully Christmas will still be nice though, even if I have to get my head around not having the usual Christmas traditions to look forward to. View Post

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Sometimes my Mummy asks me if I would like a glass of wine or a tumbler full of gin or something.

For a second I am confused. “Hmmmm,” I think, “has she forgotten that I am a baby? Maybe if I just slowly accept the drink she won’t realise…”

And then I remember that I am a whole 20 whole years old and that basically I can do whatever I want, because I am a real life grown up.

*Eats seventh Jaffa Cake in a row because nobody can stop me.*

My journey of discovery with alcohol has taken many paths over the years. Currently I don’t think I will ever be able to drink cider ever again after, well, spending the first few years of being a teenager in Somerset. White wine I just plain don’t like and rose makes me feel like I’m on a “cheeky night out with the girlies”. You know what I mean. Red wine is usually my go to if it’s before 8pm and it appears to be socially unacceptable to drink hard spirits.

My favourites though are gin and whisky. I had heard the name of gin whispered around the parent blogging community for many years before I actually first drank it at a wedding this summer. I was absolutely hooked and the best thing is it never makes me vomit because it is sugar free. Aces.

A great drink I also discovered this summer at Standon Calling festival was slightly warm Lidl multivitamin juice carton (you know the ones that you always seem to have on a long car journey even though usually you don’t shop at Lidl and you’re not quite sure where they came from) with what I’m pretty sure was Famous Grouse in it. It sounds totally dog, but it was great, especially for taking the edge off putting up a tent with Belle. (She was better at it than me.) View Post

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A few nights ago I had a phone call from Bee. (She’s 20 now remember, and lives in London – who’d have thought I could have a 20 year old daughter when I only feel about 23?! You’d think there would be some sort of law or test or something.)

Bee was having a bit of a panic, and had phoned me for some moral support. My tactic in these sort of situations, after some soothing deep breathing, is to try and get the other person to laugh. To me, laughter feels like such an important thing – if you can still laugh about something, even when you’re in distress or despair, then that must be a good thing. Unfortunately for the person I am ‘supporting’, I sometimes accidentally laugh at them, which is probably less helpful, but I always mean it in a friendly way, to try and get them to see a slightly lighter side of a situation.

So, once Bee was chuckling a little bit, we tried to come up with a fun activity for her to do that would distract her from worrying about her arm feeling numb, and give her something to focus on. I love that quote about always having your diaries to hand for something interesting to read, so she had a flick through, and confirmed that she did often say hilarious things. I set her the challenge to read through the archives, and pick out some of the funniest, sweetest or most random things she could find.

“Will you put it in a blog post?” she asked.

I paused, worried that I had become the sort of parent whose children felt they couldn’t say anything without it being documented.

“I hope you do,” she added.

So I did.

daughter's diary

In-between literary theory notes: “Rhubarb – in a pan with sugar honey ginger raspberries. Greek yoghurt. Granola.” View Post

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A guest post from my clearly emotionally damaged daughter Bee. Opps.

People always assume that I am from my personality, but I’m not a romantic person. This could be for a number of reasons.

1) Being in love is effort that I just don’t have time for.

2) As I so bluntly put it to my therapist once, “I’m not bothering, because I’ve never seen a successful relationship before, so why the hell should I try? I could be going to the post office or something useful rather than gazing into someone’s eyes who I am inevitably going to end up despising.”

Anyway.

I’m not totally cynical, it’s not that I don’t love people. I love my friends and family. I love Paul Rudd. I just can’t stand any kind of romantic mush, whether it’s idiots on my Facebook timeline, people kissing on the street, (get the hell out of my way), or slightly boring men who think they can whip up a ‘romantic’ and ‘original’ proposal to sweep their equally dull girlfriend off her feet.

This morning I was watching marriage proposal videos on YouTube (as you do) and found some totally cringe proposals that had me chanting “say NO, say NO!” like the lovely person I am. Here are some of the videos where I wanted to actively run in and stop it from happening, Hollyoaks style. View Post

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Today I have a guest post from Bee – please give her the pep talk she badly needs!

Hey guys. It’s Bee here. I know what you’re thinking, go back to your own blog right?

I basically just wanted to write this post because I need a kind of pep talk from you all about this new fitness journey I am about to embark on. I know this isn’t really the place to do it, seeing as I wouldn’t exactly call this a pro running blog, but I thought you could help me anyway.

So when I was young and naive, all those years ago when I was about to start uni, bright eyed and bushy tailed and about two stone lighter than I am now, I decided optimistically that I would run a marathon before uni was out. Then a couple of months ago, when I was starting my Major Project (dissertation for those who basically did a real academic course with exams and stuff) a thought popped into my head.

“Oh, crap. Got to do that marathon. Eh. It will be fine.” View Post

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bedroom makeover tips

A guest post from Bee

Recently I moved into my first very own flat. Well, I mean, I rent it, with other people. But still. A couple of days ago I moved rooms to the best room in the house (because I’m the best, obviously) and made a start on decorating it. I put on some music and lit some incense and set about making it my own. I’ve moved house enough times now to know exactly what I want my room to look like. But if you are about to redecorate your room and don’t really know where to start, I’ve got a few extremely wise tips to share with you. 
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