- The omnivore vegetarian
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7 May 2008
Watch out bugs, baby's about! Wiggle your tasty little abdomen in front of him and you're dead meat, honey!
- Freedom!
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29 April 2008
First he doesn't want to be left with a babysitter, then he'd rather hang out with the babysitter than with us... so it is to be 5 years old, I guess!
- Thinking ahead
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15 April 2008
During a lecture from one of the visiting profs we learnt that among British teens/young adults, 21% are likely to use cannabis recreationally, compared to just 11% of Germans of the same age.
- Like riding a bike
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25 March 2008
What else do you do on a wet, stormy day but find a long, preferably super-slippery hallway and teach your kids to ride bikes?! I can't believe I didn't think of it before!
- Functional Female Unit Day
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4 March 2008
The first person to wish me happy mother's day on Sunday was my mother in law, on my mobile, in the toilet, about 5pm. Can't get much more depressing than that...
- Club Penguin
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12 February 2008
Anyone else’s kids into this? It's like Other-Life but with penguins and for kids. No, I'm not joking at all....
- Institutionalised family life
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5 February 2008
We're now halls supervisors, living in a quiet block and eating in the canteen with 230 students where every night is a potential party. It's great fun, but a bit out of the ordinary... how can the kids keep a grip on the real world?
- Batman wouldn't wear an old curtain
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21 January 2008
I try to get it right, I really do, but ds1's a total perfectionist and there are only so many attempts at Batman wings a girl can make (before she resorts to buying the goddamed things online...)
- Am I too late?
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16 January 2008
Hello, my name is Rhianon. I'm thirty five years old. It's been a month since my last blog...
- Santa Fixations
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11 December 2007
After being pretty much indifferent to who gives him his presents, this year it seems that ds1 is DESPERATE to believe in Santa Claus, and the man’s lifestyle, generosity and ‘big brother’ watchfulness are now daily discussion topics needing the kind of quick-thinking answers I can only hope to stumble through.
- Rubber Knickers
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5 December 2007
Of course in hindsight I see it's a little naive of me to trot around searching for rubber knickers, but you see we have this Poo Emergency on our hands (literally, as it goes)...
- We have locomotion!
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4 December 2007
Yay! Ds2’s started to crawl at 8 & ½ months! He has been doing this thing for a while where he goes on all fours, sticks his bum in the air and then pumps up and down in a very wobbly and treacherous fashion. He was happily doing so on the rug last night with ds1 and I in and out of the room getting dinner ready when lo! He wasn’t there anymore!
- Making Friends 101
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19 November 2007
We' ve moved somewhere new and we - I - need some buddies. So how do you meet mothers you'd be glad to hang out with anyway, kids or no kids? It's all a bit of an effort for someone like me...
- Daylight saving? Tell that to the kids
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29 October 2007
I knew I'd seen a tip about getting them into this new sleep routine somewhere...
- Mummy's little helper
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22 October 2007
The kids are both ill (so's their Dad, and who do you reckon is the more vocal about it?) but do I jump to the Calpol too quickly?
- Quack quack!
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8 October 2007
An hour on an amphibious car round the sights of London with five four year olds yelling ‘quack quack!’ to passers by: more fun than it sounds!
- Personal Hell: what's yours?
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26 September 2007
Ds1 used to think this whole 'they don't understand English' thing was a big joke, until he spent a few weeks ostracized in the spielplatz...
- Back to Kindergarten
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8 September 2007
It may take a while to settle my four-year-old and six-month-old into their new, German nursery.
- Cocoon
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4 September 2007
So here we all are – we’re in our wee flat in Germany with just a few boxes, some raincoats and wellies and a couple of sleeping bags. Like Glastonbury without the mud, drugs or music....
- Snakes on a plane.....
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30 August 2007
My God if you’d told me the flight was going to be like that, I would have run screaming to the nearest Eurotunnel...
- Stagger
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7 August 2007
Stagger, the ugly superhero who only comes out at night, is my son's new alter-ego...
- On the bottle
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1 August 2007
So, the baby starts nursery on 28th August... and hasn't yet taken more than a mouthful from a cup or bottle. It's an uphill battle.
- Amazon trebled profits in June!
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25 July 2007
Ha, I was right - June was a good month for sitting your kids in front of a DVD!
- Another rainy day
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22 July 2007
School holidays have just begun and already I can see ds looking more than a little dissappointed with being off school... and I've run out of fun things to do already!
- Here we go again
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7 June 2007
It's started: huge clumps of hair coming out when I brush my fingers through it. Plug hole totally bunged up when I have a shower. The old postpartum hair loss begins again...
- Oh baby where art thou?
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3 June 2007
So I think the happy hormones must be finally wearing off (fun while it lasted) and the incessant tiredness beginning to kick in. Or perhaps those are just my excuses for leaving the baby in the car seat at the end of the checkout at Sainsburys with someone chasing after me saying, ‘excuse me! EXCUSE ME! You’ve forgotten your baby!’
- Human Sheep Dip - why we need it
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23 April 2007
What is it with us? I might as well rub all our food in the mud and forget the baths - we haven’t gone a week without infection since the birth!
- The merry-go-round
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3 April 2007
Paranoia was only made worse by horror stories from other mums: one who walked in on her older son standing in front of the new baby wielding a pair of scissors...
- Revenge of the pox
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22 March 2007
So you can't get it twice eh? Ha! Another one in the eye for 21st century medical science - ds1* came down with dreadful, dreadful chicken pox again this week.
- Bringing baby home
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2 March 2007
Son no.1 couldn't have been more pleased with his new baby brother. He picks out the cutest nappy for him to wear, and seems charmed when the baby does a poo whilst sitting on him!
- Baby arrives! Not for the faint hearted
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26 February 2007
Unfortunately, the baby was slightly blue, floppy and grunting instead of crying. The concern was obvious in the room and people appeared from everywhere, red buttons were pushed and things happened quickly...
- Pox free and moving house!
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12 February 2007
We're pox-free, hooray! But a few days later ds broke out in hive-like red lumps - turns out that their wee bodies can have an allergic reaction to the chickenpox virus which causes its own rash. Poor thing!
- Curse of the Pox
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29 January 2007
The Pox has arrived and I'm getting spottier by the day. So, I'm off to see my lovely GP again tomorrow to see if I can be one of those 'rare' cases who gets The Pox twice... poor old baby! I just hope he hasn't grown nails yet so he can't scratch himself to bits!
- Bye bye, fat lass!
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15 January 2007
Finally got my first seat on the Tube on Wednesday – 6 weeks to go and I officially look pregnant, not just a bit post-Christmas chubby! Didn’t get one the next day though…
- The Christmas Burglar
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15 December 2006
Thinking I could tell the policeman which way the guy went, I popped my head out of the back door... but didn't get a word out before he shouted, "GET BACK IN THE HOUSE, LOCK THE DOOR AND CLOSE THE CURTAINS!" Thanks, Mr Christmas burglar!
- Mum, where's dad gone? Where's Germany?
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17 November 2006
As dp picks up a last minute PhD in Germany, Leto and I suddenly become a single parent family...
- Is that an eyeball up your nose?
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2 November 2006
We don’t go out trick or treating. We lie in wait for them to come to us. This year, ds dressed in his skeleton outfit and accosted passers by with sweets... All was fine until he stuck an eyeball up his nose...
- Inappropriate laughter and a bit of a moan
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19 September 2006
I caught myself doing it again this morning – poised at the mouse, ready to click on ‘pay now’ for the gorgeous, black turtleneck maternity dress I am obsessed with…
- Big School, big kid, big baby
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16 September 2006
After a very successful first day at preschool, my ds has settled into his routine, and I learn more about the baby...
- Preparing for Big School
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7 September 2006
Poor old ds really isn't looking forward to 'Big School'. “They won’t like me” he sobbed, “I’ll be in the corner of the playground on my own because I won’t have any friends of my own!” He thinks he's got trouble - we've got Kim & Aggie coming round...