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I’m going to be completely honest here and say that in my younger days I would have found the idea of personalised Christmas gifts a little tacky. I say ‘my younger days’ like I’m referring to the 1870s or something – I just mean when I was maybe in my early twenties and still clinging to the illusion that if I just tried hard enough, and walked with enough nonchalance, that I could be COOL.

Obviously I can’t – I have a collection of Nancy Drew books and the Inspector Morse box set – but the lovely thing about getting older is that you don’t actually care any more. I love that sassy girl detective and you can like it or lump it. Plus I just remembered that when Belle was a baby I had a photo of her and Bee put on a mousemat, so, perhaps I’ve always secretly loved personalised gifts.

If you fancy putting the face of someone you love on a DIY Christmas bauble this year then you’ve come to the right place! I put this post together with the help of Funky Pigeon’s range of first Christmas gifts and with the exclusive code JO20 you can get 20% off baubles, cushions, snow globes, and photo blocks until December 23rd.

This Christmas will be our first with baby Joey, which opens up lots of opportunities for personalised ‘baby’s first Christmas’ items. Joey is adorable – put him on a personalised cushion and seriously, what’s not to love?

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Yep, that’s right. Who doesn’t want a life free from ‘worrying about vaginal inconveniences’? It’s a quote from the Silk’n website and the turn of phrase made me smile. I pictured trying to get into a car park, late for a meeting, and being blocked by a row of inconveniently placed vaginas.

It’s not that obviously.

What it actually refers to is all of those issues that come with age, childbirth and menopause – weakening vaginal walls, urinary incontinence, diminished sexual pleasure – all those really FUN things that we experience as women. God, it’s a great life isn’t it?

You may remember that a while ago I went and had my vagina zapped at a clinic in London to tackle the same issues, and as great as it was, that was a one off treatment that only lasted for around 18 months. It was also pricey and had to be done by an expert. The Silk’n Tightra has a similar aim, but it’s the first of these kind of ‘women’s intimate health’ devices that you can use at home. It’s also a lot more affordable – buy it direct from the Silk’n website at the moment for £309.

Silk’n Tightra uses clinically tested and proven Bi-Polar Radiofrequency energy – the same technology that’s used a lot in facial treatments to tighten and rejuvenate skin. Home facial devices have become increasingly popular as an alternative to paying for expensive clinical treatments, and the Silk’n Tightra is just like this, only for your downstairs bits.

Here’s a proper video explaining exactly how it works, in case my incredibly high tech explanation wasn’t enough:

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It’s no secret that I once cut my front lawn with a pair of scissors.

I was maybe 20 years old and living for the first time alone with Bee, who must have been about three. It was around the same time that I had a couple of candles to light the kitchen because I couldn’t afford to replace the strip light when it blew, so a lawnmower wasn’t exactly top of my list of priorities. When I say it like that it sounds rather Dickensian, but honestly I don’t think I minded the lighting. Who doesn’t love a candle for a bit of atmosphere?

The lawn wasn’t massive either – it was just the little patch outside the front of our tiny house – but it had grown to embarrassing lengths, the kind of length that makes you feel bad about yourself every time you come home and have to look at it while you open the front door and run inside as quickly as possible.

As I’ve got older I’ve got much better at doing sensible grown up things like mowing the lawn, but it’s still not one of my most favourite jobs, and if I don’t keep on top of it it can quickly slip back to those ‘get in the front door quick and avoid eye contact with the neighbours’ days.

The last month or so has been like that.

We’ve had all of this random rain, which is always tricky for lawns, and the house is north facing so it’s hard for the grass to dry out properly between showers unless the weather is really warm. Then I had that broken leg to contend with… not really on the leg thing, I’m just making excuses.

It wasn’t horrendous, but it wasn’t not GOOD exactly, especially around the edges, which were distinctly bushy. View Post

Some of the plants mentioned in this post were gifts from Tree2MyDoor

I bloody love houseplants. Some women have shoes, I have houseplants. I just did a little count around the house and I currently have 42, about a third of which I’ve cultivated from cuttings, which I feel rather smug about. I have everything from tiny pilea babies, newly separated from their mummy, to huge Swiss cheese plants, the largest of which is currently sat in my old cat litter tray (litter removed) until I find a pot big enough for it.

My oldest houseplant is a peace lily that I bought when Bee was small and we lived alone for the first time, making it about 23 years old now and I even got an avocado stone to sprout recently in a jar of water after about four years of trying. NEWSFLASH.

My two newest additions were gifts from a lovely company called Tree2MyDoor – a fiddle leaf fig tree and a pineapple plant. And when I say pineapple plant, I mean it has an actual pineapple growing out of the top. (Ornamental not edible.) I’ve never seen one before but it’s AMAZING. Love love love the pineapple plant.

Tree2MyDoor specialises in outdoor plants really, but has expanded recently to include indoor plants too. Their thing is plants as gifts – rather than sending someone a bouquet of cut flowers for a birthday or special occasion, only to have them die in a couple of weeks, (the flowers not the friend hopefully), send a tree or a rose bush or a houseplant instead and you’re got the gift that keeps on giving AND growing. It’s such a lovely idea and way better for the planet than a huge bunch of plastic wrapped cuts flowers.

While not everyone loves houseplants quite as much as me, (I had a boyfriend once who threatened to throw them out the window if I grew any more spider babies), houseplants are more than just pretty accessories for your next Instagram shot. Houseplants have all kinds of important health benefits, meaning that really it’s your DUTY to buy a houseplant. It’s basically self-care. Best go to Tree2MyDoor right now and tell them I sent you.

If you’re not sure that you’re up to caring for a real life houseplant but still want something pretty to look at, you can always try your hand at making some DIY paper plants. They can look as impressive as real plants, if not more so because you actually had to put the effort into making them. Plus they staying looking just as good even if you forget to water them.

In case you’re thinking ‘what is this crazy plant lady blabbering about? How on earth are houseplants good for you?’ then READ ON. View Post

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I was the ripe old age of 38 before I bought my first house. I’d put it off for a long time, partly because I didn’t think I could afford it, (I was right on that one for quite some time), but also through fear.

Growing up we mainly lived in rented houses, and so I’d never really had any experience of how owning a home worked. ‘Call the landlord’ was all I knew as a response to any kind of house related problem, and the focus was always on not staining the carpets or doing anything that might mean not getting your deposit back, rather than actually thinking about designing and creating a space that you wanted to live in.

I would absolutely love a breakfast bar, but my kitchen is pretty small and I don’t think I’d be able to achieve it without blocking off the back door, which would leave the cats VERY confused.

When I thought of owning my own home, I just thought ‘trouble’. How would I know what to do? What if something went wrong? Could I just put a satsuma in front of any problems, like I did with that car, and hope they went away?

It turns out that owning your own home is far less scary than I thought, that you can get insurance to cover you for lots of different emergencies, and that things feel easier if you can find yourself a decent ‘no job too big or too small’ type maintenance person. (I have a lovely chap in the next street who has so far fixed my leaky roof AND put up a blind for me.)

Although I’ve been relatively lucky so far with my house, touch wood, (apart from the leaky roof), I would probably have benefited from a little more planning when it came to choosing my first home. I basically just came in and thought ‘this seems fine’ and made an offer. I didn’t know what I should be checking, I just saw that there were coloured LED lights around the bottom of the kitchen units and I got over-excited. View Post

Can you believe I’ve been in my new house for over two years? It’s weird – it’s one of those things that hardly feels like any time at all, and yet I can’t imagine being anywhere else.

When we moved in I spray painted my bed pink in an act of newly single rebellion, and then I had the wardrobes built, but apart from that I’ve done very little to my bedroom. (Can you imagine if I had had to share the wardrobes? What a nightmare. It was almost worth breaking up just for that.) For ages my bedroom has been basically like a cheap hotel room – a bed, the wardrobe and a couple of bedside tables, and that’s it.

For quite a while I didn’t even have curtains, which added a fun, extra dimension to getting dressed, but then I got the new blind and it started to feel a bit more like a space I wanted to enjoy being in, rather than just somewhere to go to sleep.

The next step then was pictures.

I always say that plants and pictures are what make a house into a home, and yet for the last two years the only picture I’ve had in my bedroom has been a black and white photograph of the inside of an abandoned factory. I love the photo, but it’s not exactly bedroom vibes. It doesn’t scream sexy.

What I needed was some kind of lovely collage of beautiful images that made me feel uplifted and inspired and like I might at any moment fly to Venice or stand in a field of wheat with my hands in the air. You know the kind of thing.

Enter Desenio.

Desenio sells a massive range of primarily Scandinavian inspired prints, posters and frames, some from well-known artists and photographers and other designed exclusively for Desenio.

Desenio is really big on gallery walls, so they have loads of collections of pictures put together on different themes if you want to choose and customise something that’s been curated for you, or they have a brilliant tool to help you create your own gallery wall, where you can pick your favourite prints and frames and see how they look in different combinations.

You even get to choose the background colour so you can see how it would look in your room. It’s a really useful tool.

I spent a loooooong time choosing my pictures and in the end I took a couple of different routes. On the wall above my bed I picked out a couple of text based prints – one to replace the abandoned factory photo and one to create a cute mini scene above one of my bedside tables. I will say here that I’m not a fan as a rule of motivational quotes – the whole ‘dance like no one’s watching’ thing – but I can be swayed by a sassy affirmation.

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Collaboration with Just Landlords

Do you have Britain’s most beautiful garden? This post is my entry into the competition from Just Landlords to find the most beautiful garden in the Britain. The winner will receive a £250 Love2Shop voucher. Find out how to enter here.

We don’t live in a big house. It’s two rooms downstairs, one bathroom and two and a half bedrooms. It feels spacious because it has huge windows and I try not to fill it full of clutter, but it’s essentially NOT BIG.

There are only two of us of course, plus cats, so it’s not a massive deal, but sometimes, when Belle is into her fourth episode of *insert some random Netflix series here* in the living room, I want somewhere to BE that isn’t sat on my bed like a despondent teenager.

My garden is that place.

Luckily for me, Belle isn’t keen on ‘outside’ as a concept, and so the garden is the place that’s totally mine. Even in my bedroom I can’t be sure that she won’t be hiding under the bed to grab my ankles in some kind of hilarious (for her) prank, but the garden… I’m safe there. The garden is the place I can go to be by myself.

What’s extra special to me about my garden is that when I bought my house two years ago, it was essentially a gravelled prison yard. I mean literally nothing, just a square of fenced in misery, complete with spider nests, one random patio slab, and patches of pink where I had taken advantage of the space to spray paint my bed after a break up.

It was not a thing of beauty.

(The bed is though.)

It’s wasn’t exactly the kind of place you wanted to escape to. More escape from. Possibly by tunnelling, or bribing a guard for a length of rope.

One of the things I love most then about my garden, is the transformation. Transformation of any kind gives us hope doesn’t it? It’s why we love before and after pictures so much – we want to know that anything is possible, even if we never get round to it. The idea of it is comforting.

Once the basic landscaping had been done, the garden was a bit of a blank canvas. I wondered for a while how on earth I would make it look like an actual garden. How did you make things grow? I wasn’t sure.

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