The world isn’t always geared towards mums with babies in prams and so quite often I find myself in situations where I am really grateful for the kindnesses strangers. If you want to see the true colour of someone’s heart, walk around with a pram all day and see who helps you.There are two types of people in the world, people who see a woman approaching with a pram and wait to hold the door and the people who stand right by the door pretending not to see that she could use help. See how many people open doors for you or help you to get the pram on the bus. See how many people smile at you when you’re breastfeeding or give you that reassuring look when your baby is having a meltdown. (more…)

It is International Women’s Day today and it got me thinking all about the little woman that I am raising, my daughter. It’s hard to imagine Darcie as a 5 year old let along a 25 year old but I know that the person she becomes will be heavily influenced by the way that we choose to raise her. There are so many things I want to teach her, while always encouraging her to think for herself and to know her own mind. I can’t wait to see the glimmer of excitement in her eyes as she tells me about something she loves and in turn teaches me things that I have never known. (more…)

It’s a strange time, those first few weeks at home with a newborn. Especially if it is your first baby then your life has completely changed. Suddenly you are in charge of keeping this tiny delicate human alive and happy, your body is completely alien to you, you may be trying to suss out breastfeeding or recovering from a c-section, and you also have to co-ordinate literally everyone in your life coming to visit the new baby. (more…)

I’m writing this at 3.38am, I’ve been trying to get Darcie back to sleep for a couple of hours now, feeding her and rocking her, whilst using the rest of my energy not to fall asleep. She has been up 4 times so far since she went to bed at 8 which was an hour later than her usual bed time at 7. Our problems with sleep are extensive in this house, on any one night she might be hard to put to bed, wake up anywhere up to 5 or 6 times and sometimes she’ll decide that 2am is playtime and take up to 2 hours to go back to sleep. The 4 month sleep regression hit us hard and at nearly 10 months it still hasn’t got much better. Whoever came up with the phrase ‘sleep like a baby’ definitely didn’t have kids! (more…)

With the summer steadily approaching I’m sure I’m not the only Mum that is ready to shed the last few pounds and get back into my pre-baby Summer clothes. I’ve been on the look out for Mum and Baby workout classes for a while so when I saw a Buggy Fit class on Southampton Common advertised online I signed up straight away. I wasn’t sure exactly what the class was going to be but I’m at the point now where I’m actually craving to do exercise so I thought I’d just go along and see. When I was at college we used to go to The Common for free periods and at lunch time and we would always see these groups of Mums jogging along and as much as I found them amusing at the time I always knew that when I became a Mum I was likely to end up exactly like them. (more…)

At the grand old age of 9 months and 5 days old, Darcie has started to crawl. After weeks of wriggling backwards on her tummy, rocking back and forth on her hands and knees and then about a week of being able to crawl but only two paces, she has finally cracked it. I actually think she’s had the ability for a while but has inherited my lazy gene and milked the whole ‘I’m a helpless baby’ thing for as long as possible until the urge to put her fingers in the plug socket got too strong for her to resist any longer. (more…)