Fancy getting creative this Christmas and making your own wrapping paper?
I’ve cracked open the paints already and have been putting Belle to work making our own printed robin gift wrap. Fancy making your own? Find out how over on the Robert Dyas blog where I am guest posting today.
If Christmas crafts tickle your fancy you should also check out my post on personalising your baubles. View Post
Today’s post is written by Bee.
I am writing this post now because I have been blocked from my Driving School online account for 15 minutes for entering my details wrong too many times, even though I KNOW they are right, because I just changed my password.
This happens every week when I try to add money to my account for my lesson. Bloody technology. Whatever happened to cash in an envelope, or cash rolled up in a video tape, or trading 4lbs of goat meat for a driving lesson? Those were the days. It’s like they don’t want my £60 (which I don’t even technically have.)
Now I’m sure you are all whispering to each other, ‘she can’t even get onto the internet, how is she supposed to pass her driving test?! Duuummbb!’
Well you would be right. Because after much money and many hours screaming at buses to ‘get out of the bus lane’, I still don’t know how to drive.
The conversation at the end of each lesson with my instructor goes like this;
“So, have you booked your theory test yet?”
“No.”
“Well if you don’t do your theory, you can’t do the practical. Best just to get the theory out of the way as soon as possible.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t answer the questions.”
“Have you practiced?”
“Yes. Every day.”
“And you still can’t do them?”
“No. I can sometimes do one. I don’t think one is enough.”
Then I am thrown that look which is specifically reserved for use by a man who is pitying an apparently useless and helpless woman.
It also doesn’t help my usually extremely high levels of anxiety that I have to learn to drive in Central London. With my last instructor, I was learning to drive in the quiet residential back streets of my small home town, and he described my driving technique as ‘fast and furious’. I had a lot of confidence because there was nothing to crash into apart from the pavement.
Now at the wheel in London, it tips my anxiety over the edge, to a point where I’m not even thinking and I’m just blindly gliding through traffic, unable to blink. I go round a roundabout with 10 buses, 8 bikes and 100 cars thinking ‘this is what it must feel like to be dead’, because I’m so anxious half of my brain has shut down and I actually feel calm. Then after two hours I get to go home and have a cheeky chocolate soya milk. View Post
Belle likes to educate me.
“Do you want to hear some facts?” she asked me in the car yesterday. The tone was casual but the implication was ‘I’m not sure your general knowledge is good enough.’
“Sure,” I said.
So, she began to tell me all about different phobias. She had been looking apparently for the official name for her phobia of being eaten by animals in the night but, funnily enough, she couldn’t find it. Instead she told me the name of the ‘fear of getting out of bed in the morning’. I couldn’t remember it today so googled it, but couldn’t find anything. I suspect she made up the whole conversation just to plant the seed that her not being able to get out of bed and go to school is a medical condition.
As much as I dislike getting out of bed and as gloomy as the sky is looking this morning, I am making an effort at the moment to actively have a more positive attitude to things, so have come up with four things I like about Monday morning.
Monday mornings are a fresh start View Post
“Can we have delivered pizza for tea tonight?” asked Belle on Saturday as we walked past Papa Johns. Delivered pizza is her favourite meal. Normal pizza is second.
“No,” I said.
“But we haven’t had pizza for aaaaages!” she complained.
“We had Domino’s on Wednesday,” I reminded her.
“Exactly,” she said, “that’s ages ago!”
“No,” I confirmed, “we aren’t having pizza for tea.”
She was quiet for a little while. I thought she might be hatching some sort of bribe based plan where she would try to negotiate pizza in return for doing a chore that she should be doing regardless, but I was wrong. View Post
Whenever I am nursing a hangover, moaning and groaning and complaining about feeling sick, I like to think that I am teaching my children a valuable lesson about what not to do when it comes to alcohol. I am kidding myself of course, but with a hangover you need something to feel good about.
Is seeing me lying forlornly on the sofa going to be enough to put them off underage drinking though and if not, does that really matter?
There is a bit of a misconception that underage drinking is just one of those things that all teens go through, a silly and often messy phase that although worrying as a parent, is relatively harmless in the long term. When I look back on my teenage drinking experiences I certainly don’t do it with a great deal of angst. If anything, they are fond memories; ‘Ah, remember that night when we thought it would be fun to see if we could drink ourselves into a coma?’ Happy days.
My teenage drinking years were curtailed by becoming pregnant at 16 – not a drinking related accident – but nothing awful ever happened to me. Sure, I did ‘accidentally’ get off with a second cousin, I may have wet myself in a field once, and I’m sure my teeth have never really recovered from having me open Diamond White bottles with them, but in the grand scheme of things those are hardly disasters.
As Belle approaches the dreaded teenage years then I’ve been thinking more about all of those new things I’m going to have to worry about and I decided to talk to her about alcohol and what she perceived as the risks. I knew she would be pretty savvy as she has been known to raise the odd eyebrow when I’ve dared to pour a second glass of wine of an evening. View Post
There are very few things I love more than Christmas.
My children obviously, just about, and Millionaire Matchmaker if it’s an episode I’ve not seen before and I have a bottle of wine and bag of cheese and onion crisps open, but apart from that, not much.
Things I love about Christmas include:
Buying presents is my Best Bit. Good presents mind you, none of your tat. There is nothing that makes me want to poke myself in the eye with a sprig of holly more than those nasty gift box sets you find in places like BHS where someone has thought that a miniature jar of Marmite and a cheap, branded butter knife in the large box makes for a considerate gift. I like Marmite, but come on, just add it to your Ocado shop like a normal person.
To help you escape the horror of the Marmite gift set I have picked out some of my favourite gift ideas for all the family: View Post
Belle has been writing her Christmas list over the last few weeks and it has been very heartening not to be presented simply with a request for half a dozen different electronic devices. Of course this could be because she already has half a dozen electronic devices, but I’m going to pretend it’s because I have brought her up to be wholesome and traditional and to enjoy life’s simple pleasures.*
To be fair to her, although she likes the internet as much as the next 12 year old, she does enjoy a lot of non-internet based things too. She is really into dance for instance and I am quite happy to spend a few minutes every day watching her perform her latest dance routine if it means she is at least moving around for part of the evening and not just designing virtual cheesecakes for me on the iPad that I then have to pretend to eat and, worse, enjoy.
Even better of course is that low tech Christmas gifts tend to be much cheaper and bulkier, so they fill up the space under the tree nicely and make it look like you have been really very generous indeed.
So if you can’t bear the thought of a small pile of tablets under the Christmas tree this year, what can you buy instead? I’ve been browsing at The Works for some ideas:
Board games
Board games are a Christmas classic and I personally think that everyone should be made to play at least one board game on Christmas Day, whether they want to or not and regardless of how drunk and/or full of Elizabeth Shaw mints they are. If I was Prime Minister I might even make it a law.
I suspect Belle might rather enjoy the QI board game as she is always regaling me with ‘fascinating’ facts that she has picked up from Horrible Histories and the like.
Books View Post
Now I’m not saying I want another baby, I promise I’m not, but I do miss buying adorable baby stuff, especially with Christmas coming. Things are just so much cuter when they are small and squishy aren’t they? A pair of jeans for a 12 year old really isn’t the same as a velvety soft pair of dunagrees in size 0-3 months.
*sigh*
In lieu of my own bundle of writhing, screaming, never-let-go-of-your-nipple joy then, I am going to live vicariously through you reader and assume that you have someone small in your life to buy gifts for. And where will you buy said gifts from?
Lucy and Belle of course.
Lucy and Belle is a lovely new site full of fabulous gifts for babies and generally small personages – it’s all things adorable, luxurious and velvety soft. Seriously, I challenge you to put a baby in these rabbit booties and not want to gobble them up on the spot. View Post
This weekend I am off to Blogfest, a big blogger conference in London, courtesy of my sponsors Coca-Cola. (Thanks Coca-Cola! More on that in another post.) In fact I am in London already at my hotel, (it’s currently Friday afternoon), staring wistfully at the mini bar and writing poems about it for Twitter.
Mini bar haiku
Gin and Fever Tree
Stop whispering so loudly
I will be there soon
What normally happens with things like this is that I forget that I’m going to be handing out my blog business cards to loads of new people and end up with some sort of crappy post about garden sheds or something as the last thing I have published. I arrive at the conference, immediately realise, and feel too embarrassed to even tell anyone who I am.
This time it’s going to be different.
I planned to think up something Extremely Interesting and Important to put here in order to woo potential new readers (*waves to new readers*), but to be honest the gin is whispering so loudly at me that I can hardly think, so instead I am going to post some beautiful pictures of my daughter Belle that I have just found on my laptop.
That should do it.
Regular readers will know that this is the third year now that I’ve been involved in the Tesco Mum of the Year Awards.
Every year it is an absolute joy to follow the journeys of the inspirational women who are doing remarkable things to improve the lives of others. It’s a bit of an annual wake up call for me; a reminder that there is a lot more to life than posting funny pictures on Twitter and complaining about ridiculous things like having to walk all the way upstairs to get my phone charger.
(Although this picture that I posted today is very funny.)
The shortlist for the Tesco Mum of the Year Awards has been announced this week – 26 incredible women chosen from literally thousands, 26 women who have made a difference to their communities.
To mark the fact that 2015 is the 10th anniversary of the awards, Tesco is donating £1,000 to a charity of each shortlisted mum’s choice. Since the Awards began in 2006, Tesco has helped over 80 mums raise the profiles of their charities and causes.
I will be following the awards and am already looking forward to the winners being announced early next year. In the meantime I’m going to try and think of these women the next time I leave my phone charge upstairs.
Disclosure: I am a blogger ambassador for the Tesco Mum of the Year Awards.
I never really went to university.
I mean I went – I have a degree and everything – it’s just that I didn’t go in the sense of moving into halls, staying up all night playing drinking games, sleeping all day and generally dossing about eating pizza. (That’s what students do right?). I lived in a little house with my toddler, Bee, drove in for lectures and went to bed at a sensible time. Drinking games with a two year old are generally frowned upon.
Said toddler is now in her second year at university and has gone in the proper sense. She lives in halls near Waterloo, with a lovely view of the London skyline, and I’m sure eats less fresh fruit than she should. She is doing an amazing job of living on her own in a big city and is working really hard on her course too – I am full of pride and admiration for her. Well done Bee.
Not having had the full student experience myself then, I turned to Bee’s instagram feed for some inspiration to help me come up with some top tips for students. Here’s what I picked up:
Make the most of wherever you are
The temptation I’m sure is to spend as much time as possible asleep or in a Wetherspoon’s but don’t! Any decent university city is going to have a lot to offer culturally and you may very well look back in ten or twenty years time and wish you’d made more of the opportunities on your doorstep.
I remember one particularly ill-prepared Halloween; I had forgotten completely that it was October 31st and the house was definitely not well-stocked with suitably spooky sweet treats. Blissfully unaware of the ghouls that would be waiting for me, I happily opened the door when the doorbell rung.
Fortunately it was one of those groups of pre-teens who see Halloween as an excuse to wear a black coat and hassle vulnerable people for sweets rather than a collection of adorable five year old witches, so I didn’t feel so bad when I came back from my rummaging in the kitchen with a handful of apples. They did not look like the sort of children who considered fruit a ‘treat’.
Still, at least I made the effort to give them something. According to a recent survey from Webloyalty, over half of you aren’t going to even open the door. Worse than that, there are a small proportion of people who will actually open the door, get their visitors’ hopes up and then crossly send them away! Shame on you.
Alongside their extensive research into the nation’s Halloween plans, Webloyalty has produced this fun animation highlighting some of the most interesting findings.
I’d love to know what your plans are for Halloween. Will you be thoughtfully carving a pumpkin and fashioning yourself a hand-crafted costume or will you be of the 50+% of people closing the curtains tight and pretending not to be home?
This year I’ve decided I’m definitely going to be better prepared. I’ve bought apples and bananas.
Don’t forget – you still have until Monday to enter Webloyalty’s quick competition to win £50 to spend on Halloween fancy dress so go and enter now!
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