May 2012

Archive | May, 2012

Jubilee Outfit Emergency!

By Mum's the Word on May 30, 2012 in Fashion...that's what I want., Style

Don’t you just love that thing that kids do?

“Mum, can I have a drink please? Oh yeah, by the way, I’m going to a party tomorrow…”

Cue parental panic and frantic searching for details of said party, but after a quick phone call to Nursery, we discovered that the party is in fact on Friday, but there is a Jubilee theme, so the kids should be accordingly attired.

Right. Okay.

Off we went to town to look for something for Sausage to wear. First stop, Next. They had loads of pretty dresses, shoes and what-not made of various Union flag print material, but we wanted to get her something that she’d wear more than once, so we went for this:

Which will be teamed with these:

and maybe some Union Flag hairclips and white ankle socks. What do we reckon? Jubilant enough?! It’s nice for little girls to wear dresses and I can be quite old fashioned with Sausages clothes at times but I thought this was a funky little outfit that she can wear all of the items of again and again.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

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Mum’s the Word Recommends: H&M Summer Basics

By Mum's the Word on May 29, 2012 in Opinion, Review

Just so you know, this is in no way, shape or form a sponsored post or a review, it’s just a genuine shout-out for something we love, totally unsolicited.

I tend to find it a bit difficult to find summer dresses for ladies who are slightly larger of bust. Cotton dresses have no give in them and never fit over my chest and anything that is big enough for the girls is usually like a sack on me everywhere else. During our recent trip to Lakeside (the day after we got our car!) I dragged Husband and Sausage around the massive H&M in there and found these dresses:

It’s as though someone made them specially for me! They aren’t too low cut so you don’t get major boobage on show, they’re a perfect length (I can put Sausage in the car and not show the world my bottom), they have a tie round the middle which gives you a bit of shape and they’re cool and light. They also come in loads of colours, I think there are yellow, orange and white in addition to the ones above and can be dressed up of down, accessorised in a million ways and are just generally super versatile. But do you want to know the best bit?

They’re £7.99 each! I have the five above (and I only don’t have the others because the yellow and orange don’t suit my colouring and I have issues about fat girls in white!) which will basically see me through the whole summer for less than £40!

It gets better.

Got a little girl?

£2.99 EACH! The pictures don’t do them justice, they are really pretty little dresses, a great length and perfect for summer. The prints are gorgeous and at less than three quid each, Sausage can roll about in the mud in them for all I care! They actually wash up very well too and have withstood some serious stain-remover soaking! Sausage teams hers with leggings on cooler days and if it was really cool you could every put a t-shirt underneath. They look great with trainers, Birkenstocks, all sorts!

Hennes have properly sorted us out this year and I think Husband is secretly glad to have been dragged in there as, in the long run, we’ve saved him a small fortune in more expensive summer clothes!

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Silent Sunday

By Mum's the Word on May 27, 2012 in Silent Sunday

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Parental Choices: Consider Me Shocked.

By Mum's the Word on May 25, 2012 in Anger, Family, Parenting, Rant

Last night, I went to the chip shop to fetch some tea after a busy day for all of us and after I ordered I stood outside because it was frightfully warm with all of the fryers going. Our local chippy is along a busy main road which is mostly residential but has shops at various points along it, a busy dual carriageway at one end and a large alley running next to an allotment opposite the chip shop.

The reason I bring all of this up is this:

I want you to focus on the lighter silver coloured Ford car in the picture. Can you see, the rear passenger window almost all the way open? Can you see how far away it is from where I’m standing? It’d take at least 4 seconds for me to get to that car from inside the shop and that’s if the traffic is clear, which having lived along this road I can tell you it rarely ever is.

Now, consider this: there’s a kid in the back of that car.

I watched the Mum get out, lock the doors and tell her little boy who was probably a little younger than Sausage, so around three maybe three and a half, “I’ll be back in a minute”. I then watched the mother disappear inside the newsagents next to the chippy, which has completely papered over windows so no view out once you’re inside. I stood there for over 4 minutes watching that car with the little boy inside. I stood there thinking how easy it would have been, even with locked car doors, to drag that little boy through the open window, get in my car and drive off.

I realise I’m in danger of gaining a reputation of being judgemental, but I’m begging you, tell me, it’s not just me who thinks this is mental, right? Even if the kid was slightly older, the windows were shut, the car was closer, I’d still think this was a stupidly risky thing for that mother to do. Does she not read the papers? Do the names Madeline McCann, James Bulger, Danielle Jones mean nothing to her?

I’m genuinely sitting here unable to get this event out of my head. Something that the other mother probably hasn’t thought twice about, a non-event in her day to day comings and goings. All I can say is, I pray and hope my anxieties are never realised for this woman, no matter how careless she may seem to me.

Is this something you’d do? Am I a mental, over-protective mother? Does it make you sad that we are forced to think this way because of crime? Let me know.

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Parenting FAIL – Naming and Shaming Myself

By Mum's the Word on May 23, 2012 in Anger, Parenting, Personal

Today, we got to nursery and Sausage’s keyworker asked me “Does she have any sunscreen on?” – Er, no, I had to answer.

“Okay, no problem, does she have any in her bag?” – Errr, no…

*feels (correctly) judgemental glare of keyworker*

Despite everything that has happened to our family in the past three years, despite Sausage being fair of skin and red of hair, despite having a ‘dodgy’ mole removed myself last year, despite me tweeting and Facebooking to remind everyone else, I am still and absolute failure, a fucking JOKE of a person when it comes to remembering sunscreen.

I am utterly ashamed of myself, which is why I’m writing this, to shame myself even further and make sure I never again forget sunscreen.

Oh. And when I picked her up, she was wearing a ‘nursery hat’. Looks like I failed on that front too.

Off to the shops I go.

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Rescue Your Videotapes – A Giveaway

By Mum's the Word on May 23, 2012 in Competitions

Anyone who has precious memories saved on video tape will know that as the years go by, those tapes become even more delicate. It would be a tragedy if the tapes were to break, leaving you without your mementos of births, birthdays, graduations and all of those other wonderful occasions that we like to watch over and over.

Here at Mum’s the Word, we have 5 copies of ‘Rescue Your Videotapes v4.0′ to give away, each worth almost £50, which gives you everything you need to convert your VHS to watch on your PC, DVD or Blu-ray disc. Just fill in the entries below to give you up to 4 chances to win!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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Mental Health Awareness Week

By Mum's the Word on May 21, 2012 in Mental Health, Opinion, Personal

Today I learned through Jo Middleton’s blog Slummy Single Mummy that today is the start of Mental Health Awareness Week. We’re all aware that ‘mental health’ or mental health issues exist, so what does this really mean? Raising awareness for something that we all already know about?

But, how much do you really know, and how much of it is an assumption?

If I said to you that someone was a paranoid schizophrenic, you may assume that said person was dangerous to be around. Did you know that, actually, people with paranoid schizophrenia are actually extremely unlikely to be violent to either themselves or others?

If I told you that I knew a person with severe post-natal depression or even post-natal post traumatic stress disorder, you’d probably assume, through no fault of your own, that I was talking about a woman. Did you know that it’s estimated that up to 25% of new dads experience some form of PND or PTSD?

Did you know that, despite certain terms being bandied about and used as common language, true cases of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder actually only account for between 2-7% of the population, whilst people with bipolar are around 0.9% and 2.1% of the adult population?

For me, Mental Health Week is not about making us aware that metal health problems exist, it’s about educating ourselves, smashing the stigma and the stereotypes and trying harder to be compassionate to others. It’s so easy to label people, put them into a box and write them off as ‘mental’ or ‘mad’, but have you ever stopped to think what it’s like to live with these afflictions? NO-ONE would choose to live with these illnesses, people who seriously self-harm don’t do it for attention. I guarantee you, the people who self-harm because they are mentally compelled to are the ones you’d never know about, not the silly school girls comparing chicken scratches on their arms.

Take the time to educate yourselves and perhaps suicide rates, which are higher in the UK than anywhere else in the EU, would drop.

Or don’t. It’s up to you. Just know that no-one is immune to mental illness and knowing how to help someone you love could make all the difference.

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Cybher – The Mum’s the Word Run Down Pt. 2

By Mum's the Word on May 21, 2012 in Cybher, Personal, Review

So, this is the second part of my Cybher debrief and the last post ended just before lunch…

Sian To, interviewing Zoe Margolis.

Lunch was…well, how do I put this? I found the food to be pretty mediocre. Some bland sandwiches, crisps in jars and not much else. The sandwiches were okay but they didn’t seem all that fresh and I was all that keen on eating crisps out of a jar that literally hundreds of other people had put their hand in. I know it’s not about the food, but I had hoped for better, given the price of the ticket.

During lunch, I had a mill about, got myself measured by the ladies at Freya and spoke to some people, as well as getting a sneaky peek at the rooms of the hotel, thanks to the lovely Laura (The Mummy Life), who let me use her loo and charge my phone! We were late down to the next sessions, which wasn’t too much of a problem as I wasn’t that into any of the sessions on offer straight after lunch. We went back into the main room and did a bit more milling (as well as me, furiously picking the brain of Jax, who is my new guru, about homeschooling!

I noticed, at various points throughout the day that the atmosphere at Cybher seemed very subdued compared to the atmosphere at last years Cybermummy and I do have a theory about why this was. Last year, from the moment we arrived, we had dozens of brands, vying for our attention, giving away freebies. People (myself included, to an extent) seemed to go into a bit of a frenzy for seeing how much loot they could collect, most of us had to decant things into smaller bags or leave things with the coat check to enable us to carry on. I also know several people who went to barely any sessions because they were too busy being courted by PRs.

This is by no means a criticism of either CybHer or the attendees, I would hazard a guess that Sian’s exact intention was to strip away the commercial maelstrom of last year and focus on content, which I admire greatly, but it did seem to affect the atmosphere. The content of the sessions was a vast improvement over last year but people didn’t seem as excited as they did at Cybermummy. Everyone loves a freebie, I guess.

As I said, I managed to miss the session straight after lunch, but for session 4 I attended ‘Is There a Book in Your Blog?’, which I found really informative, I love hearing about Violet Fenn’s site and thinking about niche writing. The final session was ‘Revamp Your Blog for Under £50′ with Peggy Poyser, which I think was my favourite session of all (did anyone else find it really cute they way she said about three sentences then said “Oh, I’m French, by the way. That’s what the accent is”!). Peggy gave us some brilliant tips and I think I’ve thought about the content of her session the most since the day, spending ages looking at complimentary colour swatches and background patterns!

All in all, I’m glad I went to Cybher, it was a great day which had far more positives than negatives and the whole Cybher team did an amazing job. When I got home, I told Husband that I probably wouldn’t be going to any more blogging conferences, as I didn’t think I had anything more that I could get from them…until I got my hands on a ticket for BlogCamp London that is!

(Technorati claim code 6ETC6N6E7UUR)

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Silent Sunday

By Mum's the Word on May 20, 2012 in Silent Sunday

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The Best Advice I Can Give…

By Mum's the Word on May 14, 2012 in All About ME!

Don’t ever go glasses shopping by yourself. It is HARD and you will fill up your photo stream and bankrupt yourself by sending dozens of MMS’s to anyone who can help. You will spend over an hour in your local Specsavers, trying on the same dozen pairs of glasses, over and over and over again. You will get very frustrated and start asking bewildered strangers “Does my face look too big for these frames?!”.

(Just FYI, I didn’t actually end up buying any of these styles!)