Three Reasons You Should NEVER Take a Toddler to Choose Their Own Birthday Present

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…

Parenting Judgement: I’m All Over It

As a parent, there are many things to fear. Potential abduction, getting lost at the beach and disappearing forever, the dawn of World War III, threadworms…. And those are just the things that you worry about happening to your child. There are also things that you worry are going to happen to YOU, and I don’t…

Boys and their Toys

I had high hopes for my son. I imagined that he would be the next John Stuart Mill. Studying the classical languages by the age of three, and a master of the ancient Greek philosophers by eight; most importantly he would be a visionary, a man ahead of his time, a frontrunner in the fight…

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…

My Top Five Toys, by Piglet

5. Fire engines. There was this one time that Mummy took me into a charity shop.  I think she was hoping that she would find vintage clothes in there.  Mummy likes vintage clothes, even though they are old and smelly.  Personally I prefer not to wear clothes at all, but for some reason Mummy seems…

Uproar at Gender Segregation Taking Place on UK High Street

Just come back from a visit to the health visitor where, in typical fashion, Piglet did an enormous wee on the baby weighing scales and I was told off for not taking vitamin supplements, despite the fact that (as I protested to the health visitor) they have been repeatedly shown to be useless.  Better just…