Merry New Year

Happy New Year if I haven’t said it already. Yes, that just about sums it up. I want you all to have a year that is both new and happy 🙂 and just like last year, that’s what I hope for myself too.

Christmas has come and gone and was as good as we hoped. The week leading up to Christmas saw both Ben and I (ok mainly Ben) up to our eyes in flat pack instructions and Allen keys. We bought Oscar a KidKraft Kitchen as his main present, which took two full evenings to assemble and my mum gave him a book case that took at least an hour of Christmas Eve. But it was all appreciated by the little guy, who loves his kitchen (he’s taken to microwaving Thomas the Tank Engine poor old chap) and being able to access his books easily.

Flat pack to the max! But how gorgeous is this KidKraft play kitchen? It’s nicer than my actual kitchen!

As we weren’t visiting family over Christmas, they’d all managed to get the boys presents to us before hand. What a very lucky young man!

As, we did the year before, we went out for lunch on Christmas Day. Unfortunately it wasn’t the roaring success it was in 2013, which was a real shame. Our booking was for 2.30pm but we didn’t get our main course until 5pm! Thankfully Oscar was an absolute trooper and sat, in a high chair, for nigh on three hours without any real complaining. I was so proud of him. However it has made me think next Christmas I want more control over said dinner, as I can’t guarantee he’d cope so well every year. Short of moving house or building a giant extension in the next twelve months, the issue of not having anywhere to sit to eat at home will remain, so a bit more lateral thinking may be required. Hmmm, watch this space!

Clever mama keeping some gifts back to entertain the boy at the table. If I do say so myself 😉

Boxing Day was really the triumph of the holiday. We literally did nothing and it was superb. We stayed in our Christmas jammas all day, watched TV, played with our toys (if you follow me on social media you may have heard I got an iPad for Christmas. Oh, you didn’t hear? Well I GOT AN IPAD FOR CHRISTMAS!!!!!) and ate enough cheese and chocolate to put us into a lactose induced coma. It was bliss.

Pyjamas and playing. Superb.

All in all it was a lovely festive break. Ben was at home for nigh on two weeks, which the boy took full advantage of. Daddy’s such a softie compared to mama and many a time the boy simply took Ben by the hand and dragged him upstairs to play in the bedrooms. We also took advantage of Ben being home more to transition the boy from a cot to a bed. I know at 2 years 9 months we’re pretty late to this particular party, but I wanted to make sure Oscar was really really ready for it and besides he’d never manage to climb out of the cot so why change it 😉 . We had to slightly rearrange home room to fit in the new bookcase so took the opportunity to remove the cot bars, just from one side to begin with. We left him in his grobag for the first few nights, but he coped so well we decided to buy him a single duvet (turning it sideways and tucking it right under the mattress) and proper pillow. I still can’t get over how easily he’s taken to it. It didn’t upset him in the slightest and he’s slept brilliantly. What a star!

Reading bedtime stories in his big boy bed

New Year was as uneventful as the year before, but I know we weren’t the only ones staying in. That’s what having small children does for you I suppose. I cooked steaks and we drank prosecco at midnight. Gone are the days of me running in to the street at midnight, shouting my drunken head off. At least for now!

So a New Year, what does it hold? I remember being so thoroughly pumped for 2014, more excited than I’ve ever been. 2015 has me feeling more cautious. I can feel this is going to be a year of big changes (I don’t know why I feel this I just do!) I feel a need for things to happen. Does that make sense. Less excited more purposeful. Older? Wiser perhaps. I want to feel I’m doing the best by everyone. I also want to enjoy life, learn and grow. Not much then 😉

I hope you had the Christmas you wanted for yourself and your loved ones and 2015 is everything it can and will be.

Cheers!

 

 

The One and Only…

A few weeks ago, my two year old and I were travelling home from Haslemere on the bus. He was fast asleep in the buggy, as angelic as they come. An older lady, sat opposite us, struck up a conversation of usual bus chit chat. She asked if I had any other children, to which I answered that I did not. Her next question was not unusual, and it’s one I’m getting used to variations of. “So when are you having more then?” I replied, truthfully, that I’m not. You’d have thought I’d told her I was going home to eat Oscar for dinner! I was then subjected to a litany of why I should have more children and how many children she had. This woman didn’t know me. Didn’t know my situation, my background, the reasons for my choice and yet felt perfectly justified in passing an open and very loud judgement on me. I smiled, pretended to listen and was grateful when my stop came into view.

The incident got me thinking, and not for the first time, why this unsupportive attitude exists towards women who only have one child. I should emphasise that I’m not talking about women who’ve had the choice taken away from them. The women who would have liked, more than anything, to have more than one (although without digging deeper, how did the woman on the bus know this wasn’t my situation?). I am in fact talking about women, like myself, who for a myriad of reasons, have chosen to stop at one.

I understand that everyone has a different definition of ‘family’ and quite rightly so. How you choose to form a family is a completely personal decision and one we all take in our lives. For us, one child was enough (hell, no children was enough) to consider ourselves a family. What I don’t understand are parents, of all generations, who consider those with fewer children than they deem ‘enough’, NOT to be a family. Out loud. To my face. Be they thoughtless, throw away comments (“Oh they know I want a ‘family’, not just one child”) or considered arguments, being told my family is not ‘proper’ because of the number of children I choose to have hurts. It’s also unbelievably rude! I would never say to someone who has chosen to have multiple children that I think their decision was wrong, that having to divide their resources and attention is ‘cruel’ and ‘selfish’. Yet it’s somehow acceptable for people to say those same things to me when they learn we only want, only ever wanted, one.

I did consider whether it was a generational thing. Our parents and grandparents grew up in a time when having large families was much more the norm. Did these women grow up in a time when having one child was somehow seen as wrong, shameful, against the norm? I do feel like I’ve seen this attitude from older women time and again. But the more time I spend with mothers of my own age, the more I see it’s definitely not just a generational issue. And that saddens me greatly.

I am by nature an honest kind of a gal. When people ask me I’ve, so far, only ever told them the truth; that having one child was, and is, mine and my husband’s decision. I don’t ever want to be forced into the situation where I feel I have to lie about it. A friend of a friend has spent so long fending off unsupportive and, to be honest, downright hurtful comments when explaining her decision not to have more than one child, that when people ask now she finds it easier to shrug, sigh and say “it would have been nice but…….”. It absolutely breaks my heart that she feels the need to lie, but I absolutely understand why she does it.

So the next time you get chatting to a mother about her children, I would urge you to consider what you say. If you want to ask about future children maybe ask “Would you like any more?” rather than asking when more are planned. And be satisfied with the answer. Unless you know that woman incredibly well it’s unlikely you’ll know all the reasons that have lead to that decision. And why should you? I don’t want to have to go through my entire decision making process with complete strangers. despite sometimes feeling obliged to.

I guess it boils down to mutual respect. I support your decision to have as many children as you want to. And I like to think you can support my decision to have just the one.

This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2014 edition of the Haslemere & Midhurst NCT Magazine.             It has been slightly modified here.

Silky Smooth Dough

OK, I know this looks like I’m writing a crafting/messy play series and I promise this wasn’t the intention. If I’d been more organised I guess I could have done. Ahh well, next time!?

So next in the line of crafty activities I’ve been doing with Oscar involves a different kind of play dough, that had been recommended recently by several friends. This one was even easier to prepare that the Easy Playdough I made recently. This one has two ingredients: cornflour and hair conditioner. I know right!!?

I don’t use hair conditioner myself (what? I don’t regularly use moisturiser either – it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just I never remember to), so bought the cheapest bottle I could find at our local supermarket. I plumped  for a pale green one, with a minty fragrance. I thought this would add a nice sensory touch to the dough. Which it did, although it did leave me with a craving for Soft Mints all day!

I mixed one cup of conditioner with two cups of cornflour. I didn’t use colouring this time, but you could!                       Mix and knead. Simples!

This dough is quite a different texture to the flour based ones. Its a smoother consistency once kneaded but dries quickly. A quick knead though and you’re back to silky smoothness.

Smooth!

The best thing about this dough is the stretch you get from it! Due to the non-Newtonian properties of the cornflour (can you tell we have a nerd in the house?) it can be both soft and hard at the same time. The boy played with it for ages, burying Thomas the Tank Engine in it, then pulling the train back slowly to see how far he could stretch the dough.

Poor old Thomas!

Like I said, a craving for chewy soft mints!

A real sensory experience

As far as it could stretch

It looks wet….

… but it’s crumbly at the same time

Despite it’s silky, smooth appearance, this dough is actually very crumbly, meaning it was also much more messy than regular dough. Had I realised this beforehand I would have let him play with this in the kitchen on the tiles, not in the lounge on the carpet! That said, it cleaned up with a damp cloth and a hoover, so it wasn’t all bad. The only thing I would say is I wouldn’t give this to babies or children with a penchant for putting everything in their mouths. Hair conditioner is really not something you’d want them to chow down on.

So , yes it was pretty messy, but clean up was easy enough. It wasn’t my fave, but the boy loved it and at the end of the day that’s what matters when it comes to messy play.

I need some more ideas of things to do now. Something less about the end product and more about the process. Any ideas would be greatly received. And before you ask I’m think I’m going to save Ooblek for the garden months! Well, wouldn’t you?