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Internet safety can be a really overwhelming topic for parents. It seems as though every week there’s something new we should be looking out for online and it’s becoming ever harder to monitor everything our children come into contact with on the internet without physically looking over their shoulders all the time.

While many apps and content designed for kids can seem safe at first, it feels as though some people online are going to new lengths to get inappropriate content in front of children. It’s easy for kids too to accidentally find themselves Googling inappropriate images, as evidenced recently by my 10 year old nephew, who is not very good at spelling, trying to search for Pokemon.

As they get older though, is it really reasonable to ban them from all social media and video content, especially when they’re coming up to being teenagers and want a little more online freedom? How do we really know what they’re seeing on their phones and tablets if we can’t watch with them every single time? Do you feel confident that your child would highlight unsuitable content to you and know how to correctly report it to stop it from happening again, or do you think they would they be more likely to be drawn in by things they knew they weren’t allowed to be seeing? View Post

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GAWD 23 years is a LONG TIME isn’t it?? More than half my life in fact. Over 8000 days.

Oh hang on, 8000 days somehow doesn’t sound as much does it? Let’s stick with 23 years.

Donkey Sanctuary

Any excuse to use the ‘Belle looking like the very small host of a donkey documentary’ photo.

Anyway, you’d hope that over that time I would have learnt a few things – you know, picked up some tips and tricks, stuff not to do. So here’s a list I came up with of some of the things I’ve learnt as a parent.

1.  You will always be a parent. Even when they grow up and leave home they still need you, just in different ways. (Mainly cash based.)

2.  Don’t take a toddler into a big Asda when they are tired or hungry. It WILL end in tears, probably yours in the car park.

3.  There is never a ‘right’ way to cut sandwiches – what was right yesterday will be wrong today so always check.

4.  Even when they get older and should have realised by now, your children will still think you know the ‘answers’. Belle asked me yesterday when the right amount of time is to tell someone you love them.

5.  Every school concert you ever go to will make you want to poke forks into yourself and then your youngest will leave school and you will cry quietly to yourself at the thought of never going to another badly performed nativity.

6.  Having pizza for two meals in one day is totally legitimate. View Post

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Now don’t get me wrong, I rate Camp Bestival massively as a festival in of itself for families. It’s ace.

But when you go with teenagers and they don’t want to hang out with you and you’re forced to strike up creepy sounding conversations with seven year olds in toilet queues about their Max and Harvey VIP lanyards, well, let’s just say it’s a different kind of experience from when I first went over ten years ago.

I’ve never been ‘maternal’ in the traditional sense. I’ve never longed for children and not had them. I’ve always joked about how annoying children are generally and how they cramp your style when you want to do fun things like go to pubs/sit in silence/not hang out with children.

And then they grow up and you think ‘oh right. Only hang on a minute because actually you were pretty cute.’

I walked around Camp Bestival by myself for two days and all I saw were happy families. And yes I know that that wasn’t actually what I saw but that’s what it felt like. I saw wives looking chilly and husbands fetching them fleeces. I saw dads pushing babies in wagons and mums dancing with toddlers. I don’t know what was the matter with me to be honest. When I got the chance on Friday night to hang out with a friend with a one year old I offered to carry her and danced with her and sneakily kissed her on the head when no one was looking.

I was like a 37 year old single women with no children and a ticking biological clock. View Post

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Post in association with Uncle Ben’s

Do you have a particular meal that reminds you of your childhood?

Our family went through a vegetarian period in the mid 1980s, when I was about eight or nine years old. I’m not sure if it was an ethical choice, or whether we were just too poor for meat maybe, but I think vegetarianism was quite a thing in the 1980s. My mum has a recipe book I remember very well called ‘The Vegetarian Feast’. Inside the book she kept an empty Tesco brown rice packet, with a recipe on the back for a rice and bean bake.

My mum sent me a picture of the best before date on it as proof of how long she has had it tucked inside the front cover.

rice recipe

It’s this rice and bean bake that I would think of if you asked me to pick a favourite family meal from my childhood. This and Jaffa Cakes, but that’s not really a meal is it? (Although I did eat seven Jaffa Cakes yesterday, so probably should have counted it as a meal.) When Uncle Ben’s got in touch then recently to see if I’d like to cook a family meal that reminded me of home comforts and family memories, I knew exactly what I was going to make.

We talked about it on the family WhatsApp group.

‘I always use one of those packets of rice,’ said my sister, ‘it’s much simpler than faffing about cooking it.’

She actually said that WITHOUT PROMPTING, I didn’t set her up for it at all. It’s true though isn’t it? Wholegrain rice seems to take about two weeks to cook from scratch. View Post

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Post in association with Harris & Jones

It’s a common misconception in my family that I have absolutely zero sentimentality.

If you ask my mum, I would throw away a precious family heirloom soon as look at it, and while she’s right that I’m not a hoarder and don’t keep old stuff just for the sake of it I DO keep things that I think are worth keeping. Just because I don’t keep bags of twenty year old linen skirts and boxes of cracked China doesn’t mean I don’t care.

I mean sure, I’ve had my fair share of having to deal with children pulling paintings out of the recycling and asking ‘how did THIS get here?’ whilst looking sad, but every parent has that don’t they? Not every single thing your child ever touches is worth keeping. But some are, and so I do.

This post is here to prove that point.

For years I kept all of our special family bits and pieces in a battered old suitcase – one of those old ones that you imagine Laura Jesson in Brief Encounter would have used to run away with Alec Harvey, had he ever been interested in more than just sleeping with her.*

When that became too small – (you see Mother how I amass these treasures?) – I upgraded to a very sturdy plastic box with a clickable lid. Practical maybe, but it doesn’t exactly say ‘precious memories’. Also, it is just one massive box, so everything is jumbled up in a messy heap.

What I needed was something a little more personal to organise things into, something pretty that would make our family memories feel cherished rather than just STORED.

And it was exactly at this moment that Harris & Jones got in touch to see if fancied having a look at some of their beautiful keepsake boxes. (Sometimes these things are just meant to be aren’t they?)

The lovely thing about Harris & Jones keepsake boxes is that they are all handmade. I mean PROPERLY handmade, by husband and wife team Steve and Vanessa and two helpers, Zoe and Clair, all working from converted chicken huts just a few miles from the family home.

(I’m assuming that it’s one very large chicken hut that they’ve converted into a workspace rather than the four of them individually crouched in separate coops or anything like that.)

baby keepsake boxes Harris & Jones View Post

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I had a bit of an odd moment of parental pride in myself last week. Belle had been complaining about having problems with her reading – she says that it’s difficult to concentrate and sometimes the words look blurry or have lights in front of them – so I said that the next day I’d make her an appointment for an eye test as a first step. Off we went to bed. My memory is terrible, so I set a reminder on my phone. The next day when the reminder popped up I called them straight away.

When Belle got home from school it was the very first thing she asked.

‘When is my optician’s appointment?’ she asked as she took her shoes off by the front door.

‘I made it today!’ I said proudly, thinking how impressed she would be with me for remembering.

‘Well I knew you’d make it,’ she said, ‘I just wondered when it was.’

And THAT was the bit that made me proud. The fact that it had never occurred to her that I WOULDN’T do something I had said I would do, when I said I would do it. I felt reliable and solid and lovely.

Anyway, that little anecdote was my silky smooth way of leading you into a story about National Eye Health Week and the importance of getting regular eye tests. It’s something I’ve always been good at remembering for myself, as I wear glasses, and Belle has been having them since a young age as she really enjoys them for some reason. I remember how disappointed she was for the first few times she went, being told she DIDN’T need glasses.

If you’ve not had an eye test in the last couple of years though, then you MUST. (I have mine booked with Optical Express so watch this space for my next pair of colourful new glasses.) As well as it being important to take care of your eyes themselves, there are quite a few serious illnesses that often get first picked up in eye tests.

why do i need an eye test?

Take 12-year-old Alan Watson from Edinburgh as an example. (That’s not Alan in the photo.) When Alan attended his local Optical Express clinic with his mum for his annual check-up, Optical Express Optometrist Amna Bashir noticed blurred margins on comparison of previous photos.  As a precaution, Amna called the hospital and arranged for him to be seen that day. View Post

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Last year I got an email from a couple of lovely ladies who run a company called Masked Pony Productions. They asked if I’d be interested in writing a short comedy sketch based on my blog for a new mum comedy short series.

‘Absolutely!’ I said, Googling how to write comedy sketches.

They wanted something that was in the style of my usual writing, perhaps inspired by some of my most popular posts. One of my personal favourites is the one where I get dressed up nicely for a smear test and the nurse can’t find my cervix, so I had to include reference to that.

Bee’s favourite ever post is the one where I go to a cafe and a random family come and sit down ALL AROUND ME while I’m just trying to have a coffee. That had to be in there too. (Have a read – they are both funny.)

I set to work.

‘This will be easy,’ I thought to myself. ‘I’m HILARIOUS.’

Turns out though that it’s actually pretty hard to write things that sound funny when they are said out loud by someone else. I mean sure, I can write stuff down and it sometimes makes people laugh when they read it, but writing a script is a whole different thing.

Still, I had a bash. The idea is that the mum is so desperate for a bit of time away from her kids that she has pretended she has to go to a smear test. (Hopefully you’ll get that – otherwise I have done a BAD job.)

This is the final result:

(Try to laugh remember.)

My best bit is the Granny saying ‘I’ve no idea’. It’s EXACTLY how the real life Granny said it to me in the coffee shop when they’d invaded my table, and that was always Bee’s favourite bit of the post I wrote about it.

So what do you reckon? Be honest – should this be the start of a new career or am I best sticking to looking pretty for smear tests?

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This week Bee and I came up to London for a couple of days for her to have gamma knife treatment. A gamma knife sounds like a pretty scary thing, although weirdly it doesn’t actually involve knives. We decided to say we were going for a relaxing spa break anyway, just to take the edge of.

The gamma (not) knives were to treat Bee’s AVM, which is a tangle of blood vessels in her brain which was discovered accidentally when she had an MRI for something unrelated.

I thought this post was going to be all about how worried I was, and how you never stop being a Mummy even though your child is grown up, and all of that sort of stuff.

And then I realised, sat in the waiting room while Bee had a metal frame screwed into her head, how selfish that sounded.

‘Woe is me, having to sit in this big comfy leather chair while my daughter undergoes complex brain treatment! Poor me having to worry about her!’

The primary emotion to come out of the whole experience was actually pride. As I sat in that comfy chair I could hear Bee having the frame fitted and I could hear her afterwards chatting to the staff. The woman who had gone in before her had come out in the wheelchair, crying and saying she couldn’t walk, so fair to say I was nervous on Bee’s behalf.

Until I heard her little voice from next door.

‘That was fine,’ she said, ‘not as bad as I thought it was going to be.’

‘Really?’ Said the nurse, sounding surprised. ‘That’s good to hear!’

‘Yeah, it feels a bit like when I had my braces fitted.’

I felt a swell of pride and love in my chest and nearly had a little cry. (There WAS a box of tissues in my little wairing room so it would have probably been okay.)

She was just so calm and brave and I was so proud.

Of course being Bee, beneath the calm exterior she was quietly coming to terms with her own death, but you would never have known. Bee has written her own account here, so please do go and read it because it made me cry all over again.

As it turned out I had even more reason to be proud coming up. Bee had come back from having an MRI and an angiogram, ahead of the treatment itself, and we were waiting for them to get the laser all loaded up and aimed.

The doctor came in, along with FOUR other members of staff.

‘We found something a little unusual,’ said the doctor, which I felt was a rather cruel way to begin – it wasn’t exactly the X Factor. I was worried that they’d discovered a pair of old scissors or something in her brain.

‘Since we did the last angiogram it turns out that the AVM had started to heal itself.’

Heal itself?!

‘So we don’t think we need to do the treatment after all.’

Well. I knew Bee was special, but I never imagined she could miraculously cure her own brain.

So there we go. That’s what story of when Bee didn’t need have her brain radiated.

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Getting the balance right as a parent can sometimes be really hard.

On the one hand you want to help your children in any way you can, do things for them and make sure they happy and relaxed. On the other hand you want them to learn how to do stuff for themselves, to take the initiative, and to discover that NOT doing stuff has consequences.

For example, Belle starts year 11 tomorrow and roughly three times a day for the last six weeks I’ve reminded her about homework, and to do things like wash her PE kit. I’m not going to do it for her though. There comes a point where they have to appreciate that not washing your PE kit means going to school with a dirty PE kit and that’s that.

The downside of all this ‘teaching’ though is that when you enquire about the whereabouts of their lunchbox on the last day of the summer holidays you get presented with this:

Mouldy sandwich

*throws up a bit in mouth*

This, as far as I know, was once a sandwich. View Post

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What does tea time look like for your family?

This is dinner time in our house:

typical family dinner time

Ha ha! Not really.

Who has family dinner times like that?? Everyone is so attractive! And all those white units and place mats and teeth? What I love most though about this picture is that the caption is ‘family laughing around a good meal in the kitchen.’

I do my own voice over as I look at it:

MUM, laughing: Oh look everyone at how big our bowls of peas and carrots are!

DAD, laughing: Ha ha! That’s so funny! I love vegetables! Isn’t that funny kids?

DAUGHTER, laughing, but also crying a bit: But Daddy I hate peas!

DAD, laughing: Just keep laughing Angelica!

DAUGHTER: But it hurts my cheeks…

MUM: Ha ha ha! What a lovely family dinner we’re all having!

ANYWAY.

Family meal times in our house don’t look like that. In fact, weekdays are pretty quiet. Bee has long since left home, so it’s more often than not just me and Belle.

That’s okay though. That’s the beauty of a modern family – it can be anything you want it to be.

(DUM DUM DUM!!)

According to new research from potato brand McCain, as part of their We Are Family campaign, we often find it hard to identify with the portrayal of family life as shown in the media. 84% of families surveyed claim they haven’t seen anything in popular culture that depicted a family like their own in the last six months and 45% of Brits think more needs to be done to show the reality of everyday family life.

I agree, and to illustrate the point, Belle and I created a mini fly-on-the wall documentary of tea times in our house. (Does this video count as popular culture?? It definitely shows the reality of family life…)

View Post

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I am in partnership with Argos to launch the new range of My Little Pony accessories and toys.

I wrote recently about our trip to the zoo and the importance of embracing our inner child, so it shouldn’t really come as a surprise to see me tweeting things like this:


Yes, that’s Rainbow Dash. I’ve decided that she is quite possibly my favourite ever My Little Pony because she has HAIR THE COLOUR OF RAINBOWS. (You can’t see it all in that photo, because I especially curled the red section neatly around the front and the other colours are behind her.)

The night that I took that photo, I sat with her on my lap for two hours while we watched TV, combing her hair, winding it around my fingers and separating out the colours. There was something quite magical about it – a bit like having a pet. I felt relaxed and content.

And also slightly jealous.

I remember as a child being jealous of my ponies’ hair. I’ve always had pretty rubbish hair – it’s very fine and won’t do anything at all that you ask it to – but my My Little Ponies, well, their hair was special. There was something about how it came out of the top of their head and curved around their face in a way that I knew mine would never do. It made them look demure and sophisticated and mysterious – all of the things I imagined I would be when I grew up, if only my hair would wave around my face like that.

Alas, it never did. View Post

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Because we’ve already been. Sorry.

I mean you can still go obviously, but we won’t be there. Which might be preferable.

I didn’t really expect that I would get to my 23rd year (GAH!) of parenting, and have my oldest child ask if we can go on a trip to the zoo in the summer holidays, but that’s kind of why I wanted to write this, because I think more people should do things that are FUN, like going to the zoo and buying tiny lion fridge magnets in the gift shop and making them ride around the revolving doors at Pizza Express.

Just as an example.

*coughs*

Or you know, climb into a giant penguin egg, or whatever.

Bristol Zoo View Post

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