Let’s get this out of the way first. I know I’m a monster. If I was any sort of mother, I would have arranged for someone else (in an ideal world, my doting husband and babyfather, for example, if such a person existed, we are talking about a hypothetical IDEAL world here, not the one…
Category: the perils of toddlerhood
Diary of a Bedtime
“You were sleeping through by his age!” My mother’s words, uttered at regular intervals since my son turned three months old, are reaching a fever pitch. My son is almost three. He is still not “sleeping through.” OK, that is a slight lie. He has slept through, at least once, but to do so on…
Five Things Toddlers Are Obsessed With
OK, so this post should really be titled, “Five things MY toddler is obsessed with,” as I have no other benchmark from which to make my ridiculous generalisations, but here goes. Sticks Really we are talking branches here. Some would say entire trees. Check this bad boy out. This is not a new phenomenon. Yes,…
Pushed to the Limit By Small Child
There has been many a day when I have returned from work to find my mother slumped on the sofa, a look of exhaustion and despair etched on her face. “It’s been a difficult day,” she would croak, as Piglet played with his cars around her, in front of Abney and Teal, making cute little…
The Terrible Twos: This is Normal, Right?
My mother is convinced that Piglet is afflicted with the developmental curse generally known as the Terrible Twos. I am going to assume that in ordinary parlance this means that toddlers are expected to have a lot of tantrums. Now tantrums I can handle. I think I understand them. I definitely read some stuff on…
Bridget Jones’ Baby
I have yet to see the new film, but I like to imagine that Bridget Jones’ baby is rollin’ something like this. At least they will be if they are anything like my, um, toddler. 10th September 2016 Weight: About a stone, apparently (Mummy says scales not entirely accurate as keep saying she is half…
I Am Not A Strict Parent.
Before having my son, I didn’t give much thought to what kind of parent I wanted to be. However, there was one thing I knew for certain. I was going to be Strict. Nine years of being a secondary school teacher, and observing countless children-and therefore the long-term consequences of the actions of countless parents-and I…
The Twenty Stages of Getting a Toddler to Sleep
When you are 20 months old and a tiny tyrant, there comes a point in every day, sometime after the closing bars of the CBeebies Goodnight song, when the time has quite literally come to say goodnight, to say sleep tight until the morning light. That time rarely comes until at least an hour and…
The Public Badge of Good Motherhood: What’s so great about it anyway?
Picture the scene. You are in a cafe. Your toddler, having just had a floor-hugging, rigid back arching, high-decibel screaming meltdown over not being able to push his own buggy into the centre of the cafe and then spend the next twenty minutes using it to bash tables, and the legs of anyone who happens…
Life: Perfectly Instagrammed?
This is a nice photo. Everything on Instagram is nice. Sometimes I almost think I could be a photographer, or at least someone with a lovely lifestyle blog full of beautiful soft-focus shots of their immaculate home full of spotless white furniture and inspirational quotes. However, as we all know, life doesn’t come packaged up…