I am having some MAJOR swings up and down about moving house.

The estate agents told me if I want to get this Stamp Duty holiday which ends next March, I need to have found a buyer and a house I want to buy and exchange contracts by Xmas, as it’ll take at least 3 months to process everything. And that all the solicitors and banks are already getting backlogged with so many people desperate to move house right now, so a bank mortgage valuation that used to take 1-2 weeks now takes 4-5 weeks to get done and so on. So if I want to move I have to move fast.

One minute I think fuck it, I really love it there, and I really want to live there, and the kid’ll be fine and it’s SO lovely and there’s a great school and we’ll have so much more space and there are lots of other factors that will decide our future besides race and so on.
The next minute I think no, I can’t, it’s too much pressure to move and find the perfect house instantly and it needs to be somewhere we’ll be happy living for the next 20 years, and I can’t find that so fast, I need more time.

And I just can’t shake off the niggling feeling that I’m wrong about it all. Continue reading →

“Came home from a full day’s playing at nursery SO TIRED I CAN’T REMEMBER ANY WORDS, and ALL I asked for was ice cream and chocolate and sweeties and my stupid mummy said no, so I was forced to lay on the floor and scream, and THEN she said I couldn’t grab the handle of the pan of boiling water on the stove so I screamed right in her face and punched her with my tiny fists so she would feel my wrath.

Then she said I could have an orange and I quite like oranges so I relented and agreed to stop screaming, but only for about 2 mins because the stupid woman peeled it wrong and I became INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE!!!!

Then I needed the potty and in spite of my terrible roars she insisted I wasn’t to put my hands into the poo, which is like totally oppressing my human rights, I mean I’m a strong independent woman and I can touch my own poo whenever I damn well please!!
Then I screamed some more so she would know how cross and oppressed I was, and threw a toy, which backfired and broke, so I cried about that for a while.

Then mummy said it was probably bathtime (the woman is OBSESSED with cleanliness) so I staged a protest on the stairs and decided hair-pulling would count as non-violent defiance.
I finally conceded to having a bath after my attempts to knock her over by head-butting her in the groin didn’t work. I pulled out the plug immediately because that’ll teach her to try and wash me! But then I got really sad because all the water was disappearing and I wasn’t actually finished playing in the bath. So I screamed some more, just in case mummy hadn’t noticed my displeasure.

She’s developed a slightly manic far-off stare and I can never be sure if she’s really listening to my concerns, even when I scream them directly into her face.

Mummy just DOES NOT understand what’s it’s like to be nearly three. Honestly it’s exhausting.”

Well, we’ve decided to attempt potty training….

This is something I had not realised everyone and his dog has an opinion on. It’s really hard to navigate when you are a first-time parent and you hear these type of comments ALL THE TIME…

• “Oh god it was horrendous, one of the worst things we’ve ever had to do”
• “Isn’t she potty trained already? Shouldn’t you be doing it now?”
• “Just wait til they are ready, then they just do it by themselves, and it’s easy”
• “Most of the other kids her age are already potty-trained…”
• “With boys it’s so much easier”
• “Oh you don’t need to read any books about it, they don’t need to be “TRAINED” – when they are ready they’ll just know how to do it and you won’t have to do anything”
• “Good luck – that was the hardest 6 months of my bloody life”
• “No but really, when are you potty-training her?”
• “Don’t rush it, I see so many parents trying to do it before their kids are ready, and it takes ages”
• “Don’t bother about all that – just let them run around naked for a while and accept that there will be piss and shit all over everything”
• “Seriously though, when ARE you going to potty-train her?”
• “My kids were potty-trained at 18 months….”
• “My kids weren’t potty-trained til they were 3 or 4”
• “My kid learned in 2 days and it was easy”
• “My kid took 7 months to learn and it was hell”
• “If you’re having to read a book about it, or ask for advice then she’s probably not ready yet, and you should wait”

and so on…. Continue reading →

Both myself and my daughter have had a fairly seismic shift this week, as we go from 10 weeks locked down together and not really seeing anyone or doing much of anything, to suddenly the kid being at nursery, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and me going back to work. Continue reading →

In amongst all the grim lockdown drama, here are a few more little snippets of things that have happened over the last few months, odd little anecdotes from our lives. Spoiler alert – these are mostly boring stories about some adorable thing my precious baby girl did – I’m aware that when most parents get in the zone droning on about their little darlings, most people reach for the sick bag or nod politely while fantasising about pulling the fire alarm to make it stop. In other words, these anecdotes will be mediocre at best, and you have been warned – read on at your own risk.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Continue reading →

Recently we had a really bad day. I started writing it all down in excruciating detail before remembering that I’m an incredibly boring mum now and have nothing interesting to say nowadays apart from the minutiae of our tiny little lives and not many people actually care. So I decided (for once) to edit myself.

In a nutshell, I made the wrong choice as a parent, I did something which I thought would be ok and things went wrong, and it was upsetting for both of us and led to an extreme amount of mum-guilt and tears all round.

Suffice to say I have now made more work for myself and also learned a valuable lesson.

Basically that’s all you need to know – I felt really crappy and beat myself up about it but it’s all fine now and I suppose parenting is all one massive learning curve so occasionally you will get things wrong. It’s inevitable, and it’s hard not to feel crushed by guilt when it does, but all you can do is have a good cry, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try to do better next time.