In association with Aviva

At 15 years old, Belle is much easier to keep entertained on road trips than she used to be.

When she was little, she did NOT like cars. I’d read all these articles with top tips to get your baby to sleep – ‘take them for a drive in the car!’ – they’d say – ‘they’ll love watching the world go by!’

Nope.

Belle was not ‘lulled by the gentle driving motion’ and she really did not enjoy ‘looking out of the window at passing scenery.’ In fact she screamed constantly unless you sang Agadoo by Black Lace over and over again in a loud voice.

travelling with kids

She looks like butter wouldn’t melt doesn’t she? Casually sat up on the kitchen counter, playing her favourite game of ‘put things in the toaster’, but don’t be fooled. She’d scream in your face soon as look at you. (Please note toaster is switched off.) View Post

In association with Ageas

What’s your worst driving habit?

Generally I’d say I’m a pretty good driver. I check my mirrors all the time, I indicate, mostly when I’m meant to, and I always check my blind spot. I get bad motion sickness, to the point where I can feel sick while I’m actually driving, so I always try to drive nice and smoothly too.

I *sometimes* twist the car sharply from side to side just to scare the children, but only if there is nothing behind me, so I think that’s totally acceptable. I also like to freak them out a bit sometimes by taking both hands off the wheel, but if you’re going in a straight line, how important really even IS the steering wheel?

Apparently VERY.

worst driving habits

I took part recently in a little driving experiment with insurance company Ageas. I was told that the project was all about parents teaching their children to drive, and as Bee has had her provisional licence for years now, and had about 20 lessons while she was at university in London, I figured she’d be pretty good. She did keep telling me that she felt VERY NOT OKAY about the whole thing, and that cars make her anxious, but I assured her that it would all come flooding back once she got behind the wheel.

Things did not flood. View Post

In association with Pumpables

I never expected to breastfeed a toddler.

I breastfed Bee for about six weeks, which on reflection wasn’t a bad go really. I was only 17 at the time, I lived in a house full of people and I went back to college about a month after she was born. And the MILK – my God, the milk. There was so damn much of it. At night I had to cut nappies in half to stuff in my bra otherwise the duvet, sheets and mattress would be soaked through. There was no way I could have gone back to college OOZING like that.

Second time around then, I was open-minded. I was prepared to give breastfeeding a go, but I was also prepared to stop if it didn’t work out. I wasn’t putting myself under any pressure.

When Belle was about six weeks old I went to a breastfeeding group. I’ve written about it before here, so I’m not going to harp on about how life changing it was, you’ll have to read the original post for that. Needless to say that it was, and I ended up breastfeeding Belle for two and a half years. I also trained as a breastfeeding counsellor, volunteered as a breast pump hire co-ordinator, wrote about breastfeeding for The Green Parent magazine and starred in an international breastfeeding calendar.

I was ALL about the boobs.

breastfeeding upside down

This was just an experiment – not a recommended feeding position

There were a few things that surprised me about breastfeeding a toddler: View Post

I was on Twitter this morning (for a change) and I saw a tweet from Women’s Hour advertising one of their shows:

‘New Late Night Woman’s Hour pod out now! We’re talking Upskirting, Abortion, whether it’s OK to call a woman Feisty (clue: no) and self-care…’

Now first of all obviously my senses were assaulted by all of the capital letters, because you know how I feel about those. BBC, what is the matter with you??

But then I read it again because since when are we not allowed to call a woman feisty? To me it feels like a positive word. It reminds me of the Shakespeare quote – ‘though she be but little she is fierce.’

I looked up the definition to check I wasn’t missing something:

can I call a woman fesity

View Post

‘What on earth is a SuperMocio 3 Action XL Mop?’ you ask!

Sounds pretty awesome doesn’t it? Well, it’s just a mop really. It’s a good mop, don’t get me wrong, and it has three different cleaning actions, which is about three more cleaning actions than I tend to have, but it’s not the mop bit of the title I want to focus on.

It’s Vileda’s free Kids Pass pack that’s the interesting bit. (Unless you’re my friend Lucy and then you probably really are more into the mop.)

Kids Pass is a very cool thing, giving families access to over 3,500 offers and discounts at hundreds of attractions including theme parks, activity parks and even holidays across the UK and Europe too. It gives you lots of ‘kids eat free’ deals at restaurants like Bella Italia and Prezzo, up to 40% off child AND adult cinema tickets – all sorts of stuff that is going to make a massive difference to your bank balance.

(You can find out more about it here, but remember that loads of the deals are exclusive, so you may not see the best stuff until you’ve registered.)

As of RIGHT NOW, you can get your hands on a free Kids Pass by looking out for on pack promotions on any of these Vileda products: View Post

In association with VoucherCodes

Today was a bit of a momentous occasion in our house. After 12 years of ‘I hate school, don’t make me go,’ Belle sat her very last GCSE exam.

*pours stiff gin*

It was a bit of a funny day in the end. I did think she might want to go out afterwards to celebrate, but when she got into the car outside school at about 3.30pm she just seemed exhausted.

‘Take me home’, she said ‘so I can get into bed.’ And there she sat, seemingly quite happy, eating Krave out of the box.

Luckily I had expected that she might not be feeling at her most sociable, so I decided to take her out to eat on Monday instead – a kind of last supper. Except it was lunchtime. And nobody got crucified. Otherwise it was EXACTLY the same.

We went to Zizzi as we had an exclusive 30% off mains offer from VoucherCodes.

prawn starter Zizzi VoucherCodes

(When you go to Zizzi, make sure you have this prawn starter. The flavour of the sauce is AMAZING.) View Post