So Judge Me!

Rightly or wrongly one of the common concerns of parents is the how we are judged by other Mums. The disapproving looks of others can be upsetting to even the strongest of Mums. But then, sometimes, you just look back and think, seriously!?!

Scoot!

As a last minute birthday purchase back in June Kit got a scooter. He already had a very rusty, large and pink scooter that I had got off freecycle, but it was for an older child and he couldn't use it so I'd never thought that he might (at 2) be reaching that age. I'd picked him up from his childminders a few times and he'd been playing on her daughters scooter and she said he was getting quite good. I thought it might actually be time for him to have a scooter he could ride. I may have been wrong! Here is a round-up of Kit's favourite scooter moves.

Versatile Blogger: Seven things you didn't know about me!

I was tagged by the lovely Rollercoaster Mum for this

The rules are...

• thank the blogger who has awarded you and link back to them
• share seven things about yourself
• pass the award along to 15 other newly discovered blogs

So my seven things.. um...
1. I'm left-handed, which apparently makes me naturally more inclined to being creative (it also could have got me hung as a witch)..
2. I'm also an Aquarius, which apparently means that I'm friendly, independant and intelligent, but that I also have a penchant for living with my head in the clouds (I don't believe that this would have got me hung as a witch though).
3. I have a Masters degree in Visual Culture, which I've yet to be able to use. (I'm still studying - I'll find something to do with all my qualifications one day!).
4. I have blue eyes and dark(ish) brown hair (something I've been told would have got me hung as a witch) - actually you might already know that from looking at photos on my blog - what you wouldn't know is that I once dyed the tips of my hair green (just to make me look more like a witch - kidding).
5. I wish I was Kirstie Allsopp (I might be watching Location, location, location while I write this!)
6. I'm scared of the dark (possibly because I'm concerned that someone might come and try to hang me as a witch!).
7. I am not a witch.

And I in turn am tagging Boo and Me, 2 Stars and a Swirl, Purple Mum, Aprons and Heels, Moors Mummy, Jennifers Little World, Rosie, My Mumoirs, Emma in Bromley I know that's not 15, and I'm sorry if you have been tagged already. It's more difficult to find people that haven't been tagged than you might think! :)

Make Your Own Play food: Felt Pasta

My son loves playing chef. He cooks me strange concoptions of wooden and material play food almost every day. I was treated to a biscuit with an eggy middle (apparently) and garlic on toast today. I'm sitting writing this post surrounded by plates of lettuce on toast. I always see things about making your own play food and I really want to make Kit some. He has quite a bit already but there are some things that are missing. One of the things that you don't often see in the shops is pasta, and yet that is one of most childrens favourite foods. Here is how I made some ...

I dragged Kit into a few charity shops at the weekend (only two) and for under £5 I got all the bits below.

The door hanger things are all different Christmas related characters, so will be a fun easy craft thing for Kit to do in a few months and decorate the flat at the same time (they are basically just sticking bits of foam together). I love wooden knitting needles, and one of the pairs were a beautifully marbled painted wooden pair - they had more pairs and I had to restrict myself to one of each size or I would have bought them all. More ribbons and buttons and elastic for hairbands, binding for some more bunting and some thick elastic ready for a skirt. Lastly, but definately not least, an awesome book full of patterns for sewing dinosaurs. I've already got a book of how to knit dinosaurs, Kit could have a very dinosaur heavy Christmas this year!

Every boy needs a bear

Kit feel in love with this bear at the weekend, and I had to get it for him. It came with pyjamas and a dressing gown that you have to make yourself (my next project) and glasses, slippers and a hot water bottle (which he keeps feeding the bear with?!). All for £3 too, bargain - and he carried him around all day - apart from when he was plugged into the buggy (which is an honour only previously bestowed on Elmo!).

Silent Sunday

Let them eat cake

I was feeling ambitious today. I had a box of cake mix (cheating I know), I made the early train (actually this is just the train - but I'm normally late picking Kit up), I knew if I mentioned cake that Kit would actually walk quickly and not insist on sitting on every wall on the way home, and quite frankly I wanted sugar! I never ever plan to do anything in the hour between picking Kit up from his childminder and him going to bed. We normally just come home and drink tea and play, until storytime and bed. Today, we made cake.

Chelsea Pt 2

Following an occasion where Kit ran, hands out, straight into a painting at the Tate Modern, I'm a bit wary of taking him to art galleries. He loves that painting - it's the room with lots of the same picture, where it looks like someone has been massacred in there (red smears all over white canvas) - I don't share his love so I have never looked to see who painted it. Consequently, trips to the Tate now involve buggy action only, apart from playtime on the awesome slide. I let down my guard yesterday, and embranced Kit's dinosaur rein as sufficient to prevent him from destroying any works of art and we ventured into the Saatchi Gallery.

Chelsea Pt 1

We spent the day over in Chelsea today as we had kindly been invited to the Pippa's Poppets launch party at the Chelsea Theatre.

Which would you choose dog or cat?

We got to spend a lovely weekend at my friend Carly's house (who lives in Brighton). Sometimes she has the family dog come to stay, and despite Kit having only meet him a few times, as soon as I told him that we were going to Carly's for the weekend, he kept asking 'doggy there?' We had a bit of a nightmare start to our journey as the petrol cap on my car was stuck and I couldn't unscrew it to fill up with fuel. Neither could the man at Halfords, or the man at the first open garage I managed to find, thankfully, 5 garages later (some open, some closed) a lovely man (for local readers he was from the garage off Chatterton Road - I think it's Pope Road?) managed to undo it with a wrench, and greased it and put it back on and it's fine! There was a point where I said to Kit that we might not make it to Carly's and he burst into tears!

Grow Your Own

We spent a bit of time at my parents last week. As my Silent Sunday post suggested, Kit did a spot of harvesting. In fact, he has done a lot of harvesting this week! The previous time we had stayed at Nanny and Grandads Kit tried his hand at first eating all the strawberries, and then when he had eaten all of them he turned his eye to the tomatoes. This time there were no strawberries left, but even with his mammoth appetite there was no way he could have even skimmed the surface of the tomatoes!

Button Rings and Earrings

I've been putting my glue gun to good use in the past few days, and have been working on getting together some button rings and earrings ready for sale at a craft fair.

Silent Sunday

Pretty...fun!

My lovely work colleagues got me some flowers as a congratulations for eventually completing the longest data entry task known to mankind. They are beautiful.

And a certain someone had a massive amount of fun avoiding bedtime, playing with the box!



How not to grow cress!

I bought some cress seeds a while back because I wanted to do some cress-heads with Kit. Weeks later I still had the seeds, in the packet, on my shelf. I wanted to grow them! I'm not the most organised person in the world, and the key to growing cress-heads is having some cotton-wool (which I don't have in the house generally). So I thought I had a brainwave. I thought, stuff cotton-wool, I'll just use wool (and maybe if I try cotton yarn it will be better). So me and Kit planted some cress seeds in little bundles of wool!

I think thought they looked quite pretty. I'm not sure that the poor little cress seeds enjoyed their lifetime in the wool though. Not many grew.

I might not have put enough seeds in. Or it might have been because a certain small person kept knocking them off the window sill when jumping up to see the recycling trucks, but whatever the reason, we didn't have enough for egg and cress sandwiches! Maybe we'll try again, with more seeds and a safer location. I may revolutionise cresshead growing yet! 

Eat cake, not fish

One of the stalls at the Thames Festival was run by Konditor and Cook, very yummy purveyiors of cake!

I was happy that it was as we were approaching this stall Kit had fallen asleep, as I didn't want to have to share my cake!! We had very yummy brownies and I did get Kit an amazing elderflower jelly ready for when he woke up (although I still ate a lot of that too!)

We didn't get a chance to eat any of their other amazing cake though...

Fish and chips anyone?

Weekend fun at the Thames Festival

I've been hiding from the blogoshere for a little while. Everything has been a bit manic. We did have a lovely weekend, before all the trauma of this week.

We met up with my lovely ex-housemates to go and explore the Thames Festival. We started off at the We Make London craft fair and were very tempted by lots of lovely handmade things. As we travelled along the river there were loads of kids activities but Kit decided to fall asleep while we were at that point so he missed out on decorating a hat, painting a fish and other fun looking activities.

He also missed out on meeting the baby vegetables, my friend Vicky was given the responsibility of looking after one of them.

We ended up at the Tate Modern playing in the under-5s area, Kit was enjoying the slide lots and lots, and dragging my poor friends around lots - he tells me to go away when there are other people to play with!

Ended the day browsing the Crafty Fox Pop-up market while Kit ate some yummy macaroni cheese from the macaroni cheese stall! Then we headed back home so that Kit could sleep and we could drink lots of wine and natter.



Silent Sunday

Breastfeeding Welcome

I'm a Breastfeeding Welcome ambassador for the Bromley area. Basically, I approach local venues to see if they are interested in joining a directory of places where mothers are welcome to breastfeed their children.

When I first had Kit I wasn't really prepared for breastfeeding. I knew I wanted to feed him that way myself but I didn't know anyone who had breastfed (I didn't really know anyone when they had a small child either - I'm the first of my friends to reproduce!). When I was pregnant I was so caught up in preparing for the big event (the labour) I really didn't prepare for what came after that. I just fed him, and I wasn't really sure if he was latching on properly or anything, and then the midwife told me we was jaundice and I wasn't feeding him enough (I had no idea that I should be waking him to feed if he didn't wake up) and then we ended up at A&E because I couldn't wake him up to feed. It turned out he was fine he just takes after his mum and didn't like the heat so wanted to sleep through it!

Anyway, after all of that, once I was sorted feeding him, I faced another hurdle. I wasn't really comfortable feeding my son in public. I started by planning so that I could come home to feed him, or I fed him in the toilets! I was lucky that my local shopping centre (The Glades in Bromley) has a feeding room, so I was always comfortable feeding Kit there. It took me a while to be able to start feeding him at my local cafes though, and the whole time I was feeding him I spent a lot of time in the toilets!

The thing was, I hadn't seen anyone feeding their baby in public. I wasn't likely to really, because most mothers are discrete about their feeding, and you wouldn't know that was what they were doing. Plus it wasn't really something I'd been looking out for until I had my own son. I didn't know where it was 'acceptable' to feed my son. I love the idea of the Breastfeeding Welcome scheme because it identifies places where the owners/managers have declared that they are happy for you to breastfeed in their establishments.

I know that the law now states that you have the right to breastfeed pretty much anywhere, but it being legally acceptable wouldn't have made me feel more comfortable about where I was feeding my son. I think it helps to know that the place you are feeding are happy for you to be feeding there to make you comfortable to do so.

I hope that identifying the venues in my local area who are happy for you to breastfeed will help all the breastfeeding mothers, who were shy to feed in public like I was, to step out of the toilets and enjoy the freedom of feeding their children in nicer surroundings!

The venues in my local area (Bromley) signed up so far are

The Lavender House, Sundridge Park
Belleberry Deli, Beckenham
Brodies, Bromley High Street
Bloomingdelis, Bromley High Street
Chislehurst Sandwich Cafe, Chislehurst
Cake, Downe
The Crown, Bromley Common
Taste-Bud (Love Food), Chatterton Road
Thorntons Cafe, Nugent Shopping Centre, Orpington
Mothercare, Orpington
Fired Up, Petts Wood
Roxby Hair Design, Beckenham
Taste of Cyprus, Beckenham
Risto Italian Restaurant, Beckenham

Five things I want you to know about your father

I thought I'd join in with the Friday Club on Notes from Home this week. If you haven't picked it up from my blog so far, I'm a single mum, so it may seem odd that I would want to write a post to Kit on...

Five things I want you to know about your father

But I do want my son to know his father. And I don't want him to know him negatively (no matter how I may feel towards the man!). I've worked hard to try to ensure that Kit has the best possible relationship with his Dad and it is one of the biggest guilts that I have to live with, that he won't grow up seeing him everyday. So here are the five things I would like him to know, and I will try to focus on him knowing as he grows up to ensure that no matter what, the relationship that Kit has with his Dad is something that he treasures.

Your Dad..

1. ..cried when you were born, happy tears. I'm sure you'll cause him to cry many more happy tears in your life.

2. ..is a parkaholic, and when he is around he will take you to the park come rain or shine! I think that is why he bought a house right next to one!

3. ..is the best chess player I know. If you ask him to he'd love to teach you how to play. In fact he would love to play any board game with you.

4. ..was awarded a medal at his work. He must have been doing something right, but I'm not sure what so you'll have to ask him yourself!

5. ..might not always be there, but he does love you and always will.

I hope that Kit can think of a better five things that he likes to know about his father as he grows up.

Science Museum

So we survived freezing water and scaling walls at the V&A, and then when we were all rested we headed along the road to the Science Museum. I think the Science Museum is well and truely a child's idea of heaven. I've yet to meet a toddler that doesn't love cars (girls and boys), aeroplanes, or rockets.

Victoria and Albert Museum

Whenever I meet up with friends in central London I try to organise to meet them somewhere that Kit can have a play. I think it not only improves the chances of me actually being able to hold a conversation with my friends for longer than thirty seconds, but it is also fairer on him, as he gets something out of the day as well. One of my favourite places to do this is South Kensington. To those of you unfamiliar with London, this is the area that hosts, within minutes of each other, The Science Museum, The Natural History Museum, and The Victoria and Albert Museum, and believe me any child would be delighted to visit any one of these three, and they are all free!

Silent Sunday

Hayes (Kent) Horticultural Society

Today we went to the Hayes Horticultural Society show.

I'm still on a mission to engage with my local area, and I'm a sucker for fruit, veg and home-baked cakes! The society put on four shows a year so we might have to pop by for their next one in November. I loved that they had a junior section, including a competition for a vehicle made out of recycling. They also had a photography competition for photos of pillarboxes!

More Elmo!

I think Kit's love of Elmo grows every day. He was very happy to receive some Elmo books from my sister (who recently went out to the US of A) - one of them has a drs kit attached to it, and Kit has had great pleasure in testing everyones reflexes with the hammer (and not just on the knee!).

The first ask I get each morning is 'Elmo D-D' (dvd), sometimes before breakfast!

My shop!

I opened a shop!

The shelves are a bit bare at the moment but I'll be adding more soon. Let me know if you have any requests.

'Vintage' Fisher Price

My parents brought down a box of mine and my sisters old toys from the loft a little while ago. Kit is rather taken with our old fisher price school set. He kept moving it to wherever he was playing at the time (mainly in the garden - bench and playhouse).