Since writing my post Confidence in Motherhood// Getting Personal, I’ve had a complete turnaround in how I’m feeling about myself and motherhood in general. I can honestly say I feel like a different person. When I wrote that post, I just needed to get it off my chest that I had been feeling that way. I’ve said many times before that this blog really is like therapy and that session definitely worked. I had so many lovely comments from you all, some expressing concern for me (seriously, I’m fine!) and a lot saying that they had been feeling exactly the same way. Since then I have been making a conscious effort to focus on myself a bit more and that in turn has brought my confidence back up. When I became a Mum I wrongly assumed that to be the best Mother I could possibly be meant that I had to sacrifice every other part of my personality and give up everything else that I loved in the process. It’s that ‘all or nothing’ side of my personality that sometimes leads me to great things but other times causes me to crash and burn. (more…)

Last Saturday we paid a visit to The New Forest Fairy Festival in Burley. We’d taken Darcie last year when she was four months old when she was too young to really appreciate what was going on but the excitement of having a baby girl to take to a fairy festival was too strong for me to resist! This year however she was able to enjoy the day a lot more. As she is now walking, she just loves having space to roam and explore and all the bright colours and music at the festival were an added bonus too. (more…)

A month ago we went out to get Darcie her first pair of shoes, she’d just began walking and I’d seen the most perfect pair of pink bunny shoes on the Clarks website and was thrilled when they had them in our local branch.  (more…)

I love reading other blogger’s round up posts of their monthly favourites so this is my first go at creating one of my own.
Darcie is at an age now where she has a new favourite thing almost daily but I have tried to just round up the best of the bunch otherwise we would be here all day, and I’m sure we’ve all got more productive things we could be getting on with! You might notice that I’ve called her a toddler properly for the first time on this blog so I think we all need to take a minute and have a little cry about that. (more…)

Looking back through this blog I realise that I talk about breastfeeding a lot. I’m not actually as obsessed by breastfeeding as it would seem, but there is no denying that it has been a big part of my life for the last fourteen months so it is only natural that I have a lot of thoughts on the subject. I think it’s easy to assume that because I am still breastfeeding now, that it has been plain sailing. This is not the case, I never thought I would still be breastfeeding at six weeks let alone at nearly fifteen months, but here we are. So how did I accidentally become an ‘extended breastfeeder’? (more…)

With childhood obesity on the rise there is a lot of debate and conversation on the topic of how we can raise our children to have a healthy diet and to discourage them over eating. As somebody who always strives for a healthy lifestyle, this is a particularly important subject to me and I feel so strongly about raising Darcie to have healthy food habits and a really positive relationship with food. For me this doesn’t mean banning chocolate from the house, forcing vegetables into her or restricting her portion size, instead it’s about balance, about eating your five a day but also treating yourself to a piece of cake every now and then. (more…)