Today I have a guest post from my fiancé, because he knows about football and I wasn’t sure who Sir Geoff Hurst was. I did pose for the picture though:

Sir Goeff Hurst

Think of Mcdonald’s, and you’d be forgiven for not associating them with sport at grass roots level in the community. All right, you might think of their logo blazoned on sponsorship boards at every football World Cup in recent memory, but you probably wouldn’t think that they’re that heavily involved in getting children active and involved in their local football clubs.

We were pleasantly surprised too.

“Do you want to come with me to interview Sir Geoff Hurst? “ Jo asked, adding, “is that a thing?” to confirm her understandable ignorance to English footballing history. I don’t blame her for this – mine is sketchy too, but it’s always nice to have superior knowledge to Jo when the majority of the time, on most subjects, I’m metaphorically in her rear-view mirror. View Post

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It’s almost that time again.

The Summer Holidays.

Dum dum dum!

That seemingly endless six weeks that comes with the daily struggle of balancing childcare, keeping your children entertained while you are looking after them and trying not to blow all of you summer holiday cash in the first week by taking them to the cinema every day when things get a bit too much.

The best strategy I have come up with, after 15 years of practice, is to really plan your time as a whole, rather than taking it day by day. The key is to have some chunks of time scheduled out with fun activities throughout the six weeks, so that you don’t feel too guilty if it’s the third day in a row that they’ve been watching TV under a blanket instead of doing some wholesome crafts. If you’re looking for some fun activities for kids during the summer holidays, I’ve got some great ideas that I’m roping Belle into:

Camp Wilderness

If your kids like going off to camps, that’s one whole week of the holidays ticked off already. Summer camps can be great for both parents and children. The kids get some independent time away from home, have fun, meet new friends and learn useful skills, while the adults don’t have to worry about childcare or having to miss work for a week. This year Belle is going to Camp Wilderness, which is run by The Bushcraft Company, who are experts in children’s outdoor education. More time to work for me, more learning how to make fires by rubbing two sticks together for Belle.

Camp Wilderness

Photo – Camp Wilderness

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Are you busy on Sunday June 28th?

Now you are!

No, you’re not coming to my house, this isn’t a party invitation. Sorry, but I only have a two seater sofa – it wouldn’t be much fun.

No, you’re off to the Barclaycard British Summer Time Family Event. (If you want to.) Standard general admission tickets for the day are £19.50 but Slummy single mummy readers can pick them up for the bargain price of just £10! Cracking deal isn’t it? That means you could take a family of four out for an amazing day of fun for just £40.

What else could you do for £40?? Even a trip to the cinema costs about that nowadays, way more when you factor in overpriced popcorn. View Post

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fathers day present ideasYes, yes, I know, Father’s Day is about home made cards and breakfast in bed and pictures made of glitter and pasta, but I’ve found that at 37 years old, you can’t get away with a pasta picture in the same way you once could. It seems cheap somehow.

If you’re looking for a gift for Father’s Day and really aren’t interested in novelty golf cufflinks or mugs saying ‘World’s Best Dad’ then look no further, I’ve picked out nine Father’s Day gift ideas for you, suitable for a variety of interests and budgets. If you can’t find something your Dad will like in this list then, quite frankly, you’re doomed. Best stick to the farfalle.

Here are my nine ideas for Father’s Day gifts: View Post

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Looking for ways to get children to eat vegetables? You’ve come to the right place…


ways to get children to eat vegetables

“I’m not eating that,” says Belle, practically spitting as she speaks. She is pointing with her fork at some broccoli, as though we have heaped actual excrement onto her plate alongside the fish fingers.

“It’s fine!” I say, with forced good humour. “Just eat it with something else and you won’t even taste it.”

She looks at me as though I’m possibly the stupidest creature that’s ever been allowed to roam the earth, let alone be in charge of meal planning. “It’s disgusting,” she says, with a look of genuine repulsion.

This is how I have spent almost every meal time for at least the last 12 years – coming up with new ways to get children to eat vegetables has become the bane of my life and to be quite honest I am just about done. I am teetering on the brink of not giving a toss. “It’s only your health and well being,” I want to say, “have Poptarts for every meal for all I care.” View Post

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We had a big clearout of Belle’s room this month. If you have ever seen Belle’s room you will understand why this is a big deal.

Picture a bric-a-brac shop, run by one of the those people from the programme about obsessive compulsive hoarding. Then take a tray of old cups and place them at strategic intervals around the room. Now mix everything up, as though you are playing a game where you try to get people to remember what was there in the first place.

There you go, that’s it.

The tally of things we took out of her room in the end stands at:

  • Two items of furniture
  • One bin liner of clothes
  • Four bags of books
  • Two bin liners of rubbish and recycling
  • Six bags for the charity shop

You’d not imagine a child would have that much stuff in the first place, but even with all of that gone her room is still nicely full. View Post

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When I asked the lovely people of Twitter for their top tip for travelling with kids, several people advised that the best thing to do was to leave them at home. This may often feel like the sensible option, but actually there are a lot of benefits to travelling with children.

  • You get to pack lots of fun snacks, take regular toilet breaks and go to bed early, all with the excuse that it’s ‘for the kids’.
  • You can do fun things like ride on steam trains, build sandcastles, play crazy golf and eat candy floss, because you’re selfless like that, and always thinking of the children.
  • Travelling with children actually gives you a completely new and fascinating view of the world because they notice all the little, fun things that grown-ups always miss.

travelling with kids

Travelling with kids also means you end up at some really weird places. Would I ever have visited the Portreath Bee Centre for example if I hadn’t been looking for something to keep us amused in the rain? Or the National Wool Museum? I don’t even want to think about how my life might have turned out differently had I never visited Williton’s Bakelite Museum. View Post

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I have been a parent for nearly 20 years now. Sometimes I forget, and then remember that Bee is 20 this year and come over all funny. How has it happened that I’ve had children for more than half of my life? When did Bee stop looking like this?

Baby Bee(Also, when did I stop being that slim?)

The very act of having those thoughts then makes me feel even older. Young people don’t sigh to themselves and lament the passing of time do they? And then I catch a glimpse of my hair in a mirror and it’s downhill from there. View Post

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Travelling up the motorway in the rain this morning I found myself trying not to look at the windscreen wipers, a tricky thing to do when you are the driver. In the back of my mind though was the fear of hypnosis.

I blame my mother.

As a parent, you say a lot of things that aren’t really true, I appreciate this now I have my own children. Most of the time you don’t even mean to lie, it might only be a joke or an exaggeration, but it’s amazing the weird things that stick in a child’s mind.

Here are five things my mum told me that stuck with me but that I suspect may not really be true:

Myth: you can get hypnotised by windscreen wipers

Truth: you cannot. At least it has never happened to me, even though I have tried hard sometimes. I can’t even remember how this one came about, I just remember being in the back of the car on a rainy journey one day and being told it might happen. View Post

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That’s six whole pounds. Be prepared for a rollercoaster of a story.

So, a couple of weekends ago we went off to Devon to stay at Ladram Bay holiday park. I’ll be writing more about that soon but I wanted to tell you a little story first about what may possibly have been the highlight of my whole weekend. My massive bingo win.

The weekend was a bit of a weekend of firsts. For a start, it was my boyfriend’s very first time in a caravan. Can you even believe that? I hadn’t realised that it was possible to get to 35 and not have had a caravan holiday. Perhaps this is just me though – when we were little all of our family holidays were in caravans in Devon or Cornwall, and Belle absolutely loves it, she’s all over any sort of mobile home mini break.

Secondly, he had never played bingo. This I could understand a little better, as bingo is not traditionally the preserve of privately educated men. I’ve had plenty of distinctly Glitzy Bingo experiences at random village hall ‘family fun evenings’, (I use the term ‘fun’ in the loosest possible sense), and have been once to Mecca Bingo with my mum, although I had a job to keep up with the regulars, fast as lightening with their bingo markers. View Post

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I was having a browse in the Marks and Spencer lingerie section this afternoon. I don’t personally find that M&S bras fit me terribly well, but with Belle approaching those awkward teenage years I thought I would check out the training bra section, just to see what I was getting myself into.

What I was looking for was that next step up from the crop top – something that’s barely worth wearing but that makes the teenager wearing it feel like they’re not just wearing a vest. What I wasn’t expecting to find was padded, underwired bras in a size 28AA.

Padded and underwired??

28AA isn’t even a size, so why on earth does it need underwiring? What the hell would a child need padding for??

I kept looking, sure that I must be missing something, but absolutely every entry level bra they had was either padded or ‘moulded’. I’m not sure what the technical definition of moulded is but it basically seemed to be another word for padded. It certainly wasn’t the soft, flexible cotton I was hoping for.

I asked a member of staff, wondering if I was looking in the wrong section, and even they were confused.

“Hmmm,” she said, “it doesn’t look like we have anything without wire. You don’t really need underwiring at this age.”

No, you do not, so why make teeny tiny underwired bras at all??

“I was really looking for something a little less inappropriate,” I said, “something without padding.”

The sales assistant agreed.

“Absolutely,” she said, “you want something soft and without wires.”

We both looked at the racks of mini push-up bras sadly.

“We don’t have any of those,” she said.

Am I being unreasonable to be so outraged by this? At what point did a design team sit down and think “I know, let’s create a range of underwear for pre-teens, girls barely out of primary school, that completely sexualises them unnecessarily and is uncomfortable! Hoorah!”

Just awful.

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I was 25 before I went to my first funeral.

It was my Gran’s, and a bit of a steep learning curve, as I was in charge of writing and reading the eulogy. I say reading, what actually happened was that I read about a sentence, and then stood there in front of everyone, sobbing and sniffing, until my mum came up and read it out for me. I stood next to her if that counts.

I had a hand in the funeral planning and although it was a privilege to be involved, I was at a bit of a loss – my Gran hadn’t left any specific wishes or plans, so how did we really know what she would have wanted? When I was little she always said she wanted to be pushed off a cliff at 65 and she quickly changed her mind about that one, so without any explicit instructions, who was I to say what music she’d want played at her funeral?

Funeral planning is a bit of a taboo, something we don’t want to talk about, but it shouldn’t be – we’re all going to die after all, it’s the one thing in life we can be certain of, so why not plan for it? Making a will last month really brought it home to me.

“Do you have any preference over whether you want to be buried or cremated?” the consultant had asked me.

“Not really,” I said, thinking I was being helpful and easy going, “I don’t mind either way.”

“OK,” she said, “but you might want to give it some thought as it’s often much easier for the people you leave behind.”

Do you know, as obvious as that sounds, I had never thought about it like that. If anything, I thought I was being accomodating by not stating a preference, but the more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed. I thought back to my Gran’s funeral planning, when we were all so overcome by the stress and emotion of her death, and about how much simpler it would have been if she had laid it all out for us and all we’d had to do was say ‘yes, go for it.’ View Post

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