There is no denying that 2017 has been good to me and to my family. From celebrating Darcie’s first birthday to falling pregnant with baby number two, there have been so many wonderful things to celebrate this year. I won’t deny that there have been tough times too, but I’m here today to focus on the good bits. The bits that made 2017 one of the best years of my life so far. Here are my highlights: (more…)

The savvy amongst you may have noticed that my heart has not been in Blogmas lately. I’ve found myself with nothing to post and having to rack my brain for ideas just to quickly get something up that day. And so for this reason, I have decided to call it a day on Blogmas. I’ve always been a quitter, I write that with pride not shame as I firmly believe that if your heart isn’t in something or it isn’t making you happy, then it is time to walk away, to quit. I don’t want my blog to become a chore and just something to tick off my to do list. I want to keep it my hobby, my passion and so I won’t be forcing myself to write content just to fill the days and tick ‘Blogmas’ off my to do list. (more…)

A little while ago I wrote a post called The Great Thing About “Non Mummy Friends”  which had a great reception and I think a lot of you could relate to what I was saying in that post. I firmly believe that you need a mix of mum friends and non mum friends in your life but I recently realised that I had never actually written a post about how amazing Mum friends are. I feel fortunate to have a couple of really great mum friends, lots of mums that I regularly chat to at baby groups and also a whole load of amazing fellow mum blogger friends. I’m so grateful to all of these girls for making Motherhood less lonely and way more fun. We all need a mum friend sometimes, and this is why:

We all need a mum friend to tell us that everything we are feeling is normal. That they’ve had days when they’ve considered selling their kid on eBay too and that it’s okay to sometimes crack open the wine at lunchtime just to get through. (more…)

Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas, but even I’m getting a bit sick of the word. The run up to Christmas is my absolute favourite part but once we get to this point in December, the excitement turns to stress and I start realising how much I still need to do before Christmas and how much money we are going to end up spending even though we almost certainly shouldn’t. With that in mind I’ve decided to put together this list of some amazing pamper products that I think we all need in our lives to take the edge off the stress that is Christmas preparation. These could make excellent last minute gifts for anyone in your life that you think deserves a little pampering or maybe you should just treat yourself to a pre Christmas pamper. Whether you’re a busy mum, an overworked teacher or a hardworking nurse, we all deserve a little pick me up pamper session some days. I’ve got a wide range of products here so I’m hoping there will be something here for everyone. (more…)

As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I knew exactly the sort of mum I wanted to be. I wanted to be doing crafts every day with my children, making all of my meals from scratch and living a totally eco-friendly and organic lifestyle in my Pinterest worthy family home. It is safe to say that I have fallen short on all of those things (as most of us do!) and as much as I try I will never be the Pinterest mum that I envisioned. One thing I knew I wanted to do at Christmas time was to make salt dough ornaments with Darcie. Last year was my first attempt and to be honest it was nothing short of a total disaster. She was only 7 months old and so she was too young to be involved with making the dough and she just wailed when I tried to get her chubby little hands to make a print in the decorations. Then when I put them in the oven, I must have had the heat too high because instead of coming out perfectly formed and ready to decorate, they rose and basically any trace of those chubby little hand prints that I’d struggled to get, disappeared.

This year however we had much more success, Darcie absolutely loved helping me to make the dough. She sat up on the counter and helped me mix it and then roll it out. She loved using the cookie cutters to make all the different shapes and then was thankfully distracted by putting them all in and out of the container so that I was able to get on with putting the salt dough shapes on the baking trays and into the oven. (more…)