He called this 'lady walking'.
Silent Sunday 5th February 2012
ShowOff ShowCase: The One That Should Have Done Better
This weekend is your opportunity to link-up a post that you wrote that filled you with a sense of satisfaction. You typed that last full stop, pressed 'publish' and thought "yes, this will be a good one!" and waited.
But no bugger actually bothered to read it, or if they did they certainly didn't comment on it!
Why? I can still hear you shouting it at the stats counter/comments log.
Heaven only know why. They didn't deserve it, they were good posts. It's not their fault that they were published on a Bank Holiday or when people were experiencing blog-apathy. They don't deserve to feel inadequate, not when they've done nothing wrong.
This weekend, I'd like you to help that post to hold its head up high! Brush them off, stick my badge at the bottom of the post and show them off for everyone to see. Don't be ashamed of them, help them shout at everyone:
I SHOULD HAVE DONE BETTER!
This linky only fulfills its purpose if you take the time to read other people's blog-posts that have been linked up; give them some love!
We're Going To London…
I'm very excited!
Before Christmas, I bought my ticket for the Britmums Live in London in June. Last year I had many lengthy discussions with other mums and bloggers on twitter about going to the equivalent conference held at the same time, but decided that it would be too much like an INSET day for me and therefore I didn't want to go. As it so happened, the closer it got to the big day, and the more twitter was completely and utterly taken over with plans surrounding Cybermummy, I became just that teensiest bit green about the hundreds of mummy bloggers going. It was made worse by the fact that I was having to attend the school Summer fayre and paint children's faces. As pink butterflies.
However, this year I am determined not to miss out again! So during a discussion with someone on twitter, they offered to sponsor me and bought my ticket for the blogging conference there and then. They offered to contribute towards my travel and hotel costs but I declined. I know! Foolishness? No, I don't think so at all. I won't be going there on my own you see, I will be accompanied by The Boy and Mr. TheBoyandMe. Friday to Sunday is a long time for me to be away from my boys and I don't honestly think I'd enjoy it as much as I should knowing that they're three hours and 150 miles away from me. Therefore we're turning it into a family weekend, hence paying for our own accommodation.
Doing it this way means that we'll be able to spend Sunday together as a family in London and show our (then) three year old son some of the sites which he will hopefully find exciting. Last Summer was filled with days out and weekend breaks away, one of which was to Cadbury World in Bourneville. I want this Summer to be filled with similar family days out and excursions, be it to the beach or our trip to London. I'm at a loss as to whether he will enjoy the London Eye or if that might be too chaotic for him? It might be better to go for a quieter (and cheaper) venue which he will enjoy, and will allow us to actually spend time relaxed in each other's company. Possibly one of the parks? I went to Kew Gardens in London on a school trip when I was a teenager and really enjoyed that, maybe it would be better as it is sited on the escape from central London back to the cooler and calmer climes of Cardiff?
It may only be January, but I'm starting to make preparations and get excited about our trip in June. I can't wait to see London again, it's been such a long time since we were last there. I'm just as excited about seeing all the other bloggers, but I'm possibly most jubilant that I won't be painting any pink butterflies that day!
And who is my sponsor? That's another blog-post.
#4:52
This week with nanny, he has made a train and a rocket. Last night in amongst all the chaos of two poorly parents, grandad was told to supervise him doing some sticking and let him use all the stickers in one go. What the hell, he had fun anyway! (I might prise them off to recycle, is that awful?)
Shake Up Your Wake Up!
I am a firm believer that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I can't cope and feel nauseous if I haven't eaten within about half an hour of waking up, and enjoy the traditional cereal and toast with a glass of milk (or coffee if it's been a bad night) most days. On weekends, we may indulge with a cooked breakfast or a maybe some naughty chocolatey cereal, but on the whole we do eat a sensible breakfast.
Or so I thought.
That was until I received a hamper from the people behind the Farmhouse Breakfast Week campaign who are encouraging us to shake up our wake up!
In the basket are a whole range of goodies including porridge oats, sesame seeds, mixed fruit, mixed seeds, jams and Marmite. There's also a rogue orange which is a little alien to me if I'm honest. Bananas yes, but oranges?
It made me realise that possibly the cereal I have isn't the best and most-filling cereal, especially to last me 'til lunchtime. And possibly I shouldn't be trying to persuade Mr. TBaM to buy white bread because it's not actually very good for you. We were also sent a loaf of granary bread which will make Mr. TBaM feel like he's won points, and a box of home-made, really yummy breakfast energy bars. Now I get what the seeds are for.
I must just add that the breakfast energy bars are delicious and if you'd like to know how to make them, then pop over and check out the Shake Up Your Wake-Up breakfast idea recipes. And this weekend when I would normally provide Mr. TBaM with a cooked breakfast, I shall do him a breakfast hash with bacon and eggs instead, the saturated fat content will be a lot lower than normal!
Check out the Shake Up Your Wake-Up campaign over on Facebook. If you take part in their breakfast challenge this week, then you could be in with a chance of winning £1000 in holiday vouchers! What are you waiting for?
I was sent a breakfast hamper to try out the challenge this week. It's healthy and I need wishing good luck! My opinions are honest and unbiased.
Listography: Top Five Tips For Bloggers
The fabulous KateTakes5 has come up with a cracking theme this week for her listography!
1. Use the same name on your blog as all your social media platforms.
Building up an identity is essential to helping people remember you easily. I follow several people on twitter who use a completely unrelated nickname to that of their blog, and then have a Facebook account that uses their real name. It's really difficult to remember all three, especially if they have obscure spellings. If you want people to find you easily then use the same name for all platforms, make it easy to spell, different to others (there's a lot of 'mummy' names out there) and preferably under ten characters long (saves space on twitter for conversation within 140 characters). And yes I know my name is eleven characters long, but there you go! Do as I say, not as I do.
2. If you want comments, make it easy for your readers.
Don't use word verification like captcha, etc. It is a big, fat inconvenience for your readers. If you are on blogspot, they'll probably give up halfway through because it is a ridiculous process to comment: write comment, fill in details, press publish, enter word verification, press submit, press publish again. It's not encouraging is it? Install Disqus and your readers will love you forever. If you don't have word verification and don't want to use Disqus, then enable the name/url option for commenting, self-hosted blog-owners will appreciate the effort.
And while we're discussing commenting; if you want comments, then you need to comment on other blogs. It's a two-way street!
3. Consider going self-hosted for more freedom
This depends entirely upon your reason for blogging, and the range of subjects that you blog about. I started blogging on 5th December 2010 and within a month had started the 365 photography project. I quickly realised that I wanted the posts on a separate page to my written content, but wordpress.com doesn't allow for separate posts to be made to any page other than the home-page. It was pointed out to me that by photograph 150, it was going to be difficult to find the comment box, and to know which photo each comment related to. By mid-January 2011, I'd transferred to wordpress.org which is self-hosted. It allows me to set up categories/pages and post to them separately, with individual posts and individual comment boxes per post. I hope it's easier for my readers, because it certainly is for me!
4. Subject matters!
Ha, like the pun? Please don't make me explain it to you!
In all seriousness, your blog is for you, yes. However, I strongly disagree with anyone who says that they only blog for themselves, and have had several discussions about this. If the only person that you wanted to read it was yourself, then why not keep a diary? Or make your blog password protected if just for family? The minute you press publish, then you are opening your thoughts up for anyone in the world to read. To think otherwise is naive (meant without offense).
Therefore, think really carefully about what you put on your blog. If you don't want someone to find you, blog anonymously. If you don't want to be open to criticism, then don't post controversial content. If you want your child to still talk to you when he or she is twenty, then don't post that photo of them naked in the garden. If you don't want your child to be the subject of ridicule in the playground, then don't divulge about his problems wetting the bed. If you don't want your in-laws to know about something going on in your life, then don't press publish.
5. Engage with your readers
Use twitter and become a part of the blogging community. I was using twitter before I started blogging, and I thoroughly blame MammyWoo and The Moiderer for getting me into blogging in the first place. They are two of the first 'real' people that I started following, apart from my husband. If you install a 'Follow me on twitter' button in the sidebar of your blog, then it will make it a damn sight easier for people to know who you are and 'talk' to you in 'real' life.
Another way of engaging is to install a plugin which enables your comment replies to be e-mailed directly to your readers. I saw GeekMummy had this and copied her. I've been told that it was a pleasant surprise to have my reply e-mailed across, and it opens up a dialogue and will encourage return visits.
And because it's my blog and I can, I've done another one!
6. Enjoy it!
It's a competitive world out there, full of stats and rankings. It's incredibly easy to get upset if you've found that you've dropped in the rankings, or haven't been invited to a major PR event in London that the world and his wife is going to, but don't. In all reality, could you make it to London for an event that lasted only an hour? Would you want to? Will the drop in rankings stop you from blogging? When you rise, someone else falls and think how that makes them feel. When I climbed 200 places in the Tots100 and made it into the actual 100, I was overwhelmed and overjoyed. Until I found out that one of my real-life friends had fallen 150 places. Swings and roundabouts see?
Do you have any more to add to the list?
My List Of Things To Do Before I'm 40!
Recently, I read this post from Two Point Four Children about the things that she wanted to do before she turns forty. It rang a chord with me and (despite commenting to someone earlier that I don't do goal lists or to-do lists) it made me question what I would like to do by the time I hit the big 4-0 in six years time.
When I was 25 I set some targets that were unfair on myself and didn't allow for the return home and almost starting my career again. Therefore, these targets are going to be (mostly) small and realistic, achievable and attainable. And there may be some ridiculous ones in there:
So I'll get the biggy out the way first and then carry on more sensibly:
- Have another child
- Train myself to go to bed by 11pm
- Train The Boy not to wake up before 7am
Lay the floor in the porch (it's been concrete since it was built in April last year!)(March 2012)- Finally get rid of all the rubbish in the attic
- Get my dad or husband to finish glazing the greenhouse with perspex not glass
- Lose the weight I've gained over past ten years and get down to the weight I was when we married
- Redecorate the kitchen
- Read that stack of books (that's growing) in my bedroom
- Sort out the second bedroom so it's not a dumping ground and is actually a bedroom
- Grow vegetables in the garden
Learnt how to use the manual settings on my DSLR(Getting there, November 2012)- Developed a healthy and successful relationship with the ironing pile
- Pay off my car loan
- Pay off other loans
- Learn to be tidy and not slovenly
- Start piano lessons (we already have a piano)
- Read Pride and Prejudice
- Go to see Father Christmas in Lapland
- Learn how to ride a bike (shut up you at the back who's laughing!) or at least manage to pedal it for further than 100 yards without falling off or crashing.
The original post had forty items listed and I'm not sure if that was related to the age set, but I need to be realistic because I'm rubbish at fulfilling objectives. I'll update this list as and when I achieve them!
I'm going to tag the following people to write a list of things to do before they hit their next decade (not just forty). They then need to copy the url of their post back into the linky tool on Two Point Four Children's post.
Winter Warmers
I like love Winter when it's cold and frosty, the sun is shining and the sky is blue, the grass crunches with frost underfoot and the birds are tweeting in the skeletal trees. And, despite the past week where it's been grim and grey, today it was just like that! We went to Roath Park in Cardiff for The Boy to practise some more on his balance bike, we fed the swans and the ducks, we froze our little noses and ears off, and then we went to soft-play.
Then we came home, had a little rest and I made a dinner ready for Nana and Grandad to join us. I decided on some serious warming food for a seriously Wintery day! Vegetable stew and dumplings, followed by this little beauty:
Plum, Pear & Apple Cobbler
Ingredients:
Serves 4-6
- 500g plums, stoned & quartered
- 300g Bramley apples, peeled, cored & sliced
- 160g caster sugar
- 2 tbsp water
- 300g self raising flour, sifted
- 85g unsalted butter, cubed
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 3 tbsp milk
- 150g Rachel’s Low Fat Natural Bio Live Yogurt
Method:
- In a saucepan take the plums, apple slices, 100g of the caster sugar and add the water, cook until the plums and apples soften. Tip: leave the fruit to cool before adding the cobbler pieces this will stop some of the fruit bubbling out over the dish.
- To make the cobbler, add the sifted flour, butter, baking powder and the remainder of the sugar (60g) and using a food processor or mixer whiz together for a few seconds on pulse speed until fine crumbs form.
- Add the milk and yogurt and whiz again until a soft dough forms . You can either spoon the mixture in scattered clumps over the fruit or add a little more flour and roll out the dough using a cutter. Leave some gaps for the cobble effect.
- Bake the cobbler for 30-35 minutes until the topping is golden and the fruit is visibly bubbling beneath.
It was seriously gorgeous. As discussed with @Jessies_online, I am not a fan of fruit crumble but this was gorgeous! The pear made the fruit much more mild, and the yoghurt in the dough topping made it rise beautifully which meant it was light and fluffy. I thoroughly recommend trying some of the gorgeous Rachel's Organics yoghurts, but in a cake or dough mixture.
I was supplied with some samples of Rachel's Organics products to try this recipe.
Where Has He Gone?
So today has been the first time that The Boy has been looked after by anyone other me, Mr. TheBoyandMe or my mother. It has been a monumental moment for me, not so much for anyone else, or it seems, for The Boy. Today, he started in playgroup.
Last night I dreamt that people were trying to take him from me, that they were trying to prove that I was unfit to be his mum. I slept fitfully as a result. Luckily, The Boy chose last night to have terrible teething pain and as a result he ended up in bed with us, so I was able to hold him and reassure myself that he wasn't going anywhere.
We've led up to this point by reading him a personalised 'Peppa Pig & The Boy start at playgroup' book, and last night he argued with daddy that he didn't want to build blocks in playgroup (like the him in the book) but that he wanted to paint. Result! This morning I explained to him that he would be staying there and playing with Little Miss Chatty (his friend) while I did shopping. I showed him his bag and explained that he needed to ask the ladies if he needed the loo.
I don't know why I was worried. He confidently strode into playgroup, looked around for Little Miss Chatty (who wasn't there yet) and started playing with the easel. I told him I was going shopping, kissed him and was kicked out politely by the nursery nurses.
I went shopping. I sat in Starbucks for twenty minutes. I checked my phone every thirty seconds. I came home and wrote a blog-post. I rushed out the door and raced into the building to pick him up. The Boy, was helping the ladies to stack the chairs and move them. When he saw me, he ran across the hall with the biggest smile on his face and leapt into my arms. We had an enormous cuddle while they reassured me that he'd only cried when his bike wobbled, he'd asked to go to toilet and had been a good boy who'd had a marvellous time.
When did this boy…
…become this one?
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