Knees Up Mother Brown

Silent Sunday

15 years ago

by dawniebrown in Silent Sunday, Zara

Three months ago today

15 years ago

by dawniebrown in Family Life, Oscar

Has it really been 3 months since Oscar arrived in the world, back then he was a tiny, scrawny little thing…

Just look at the size of him back then… (excuse the dodgy photo of me but my excuse is I’d just had an emergency c-section so a girl is entitled to look a bit rough around the edges)

And 3 months on just look at my little man now…

He certainly isn’t quite so scrawny anymore

It seems like it’s been a long and difficult road to get to where we are today, it’s slowly getting easier and at some point in the future I’m hoping to still be asleep at this time in the morning and not writing blog posts whilst waiting for him to go to sleep

Oscar

Cybermummy 2011 Meet and Greet

15 years ago

by dawniebrown in Cybermummy

Carly over at MummysShoes Blog is hosting a Cybermummy meet and greet and seeing as the date is fast approaching I thought I’d better get round to introducing myself

I’m attending Cybermummy this year thanks to my lovely sponsor B Websites so please pop across to their website and see if they can help you

Name: Dawn Brown (or Dawnie)

Blog: Knees Up Mother Brown

Twitter ID: @Dawnie_Brown

Height: 5ft 10inches

Hair: Long Blonde (with a little bit of help from my hairdresser )

Eyes: Green

Likes: Sleep, Chocolate, Sleep, Vegetarian Food, Sleep, Horses, Sleep, Twitter, Sleep, Pretty things and oh did I mention Sleep?

Dislikes: Lack of sleep, being cold, bitchy people, the current state of my nails,

The Real Nappy Challenge

15 years ago

by dawniebrown in Family Life, Oscar, Real Nappy Challenge

Next week 16th-22nd May 2011 is Real Nappy Week and I have been asked by Bambino Mio to take part in The Real Nappy Challenge along with 7 other bloggers.

Real nappies are something I’ve always been interested in, I always planned to use them with Zara. I decided I was going to use disposables initially over the newborn period and switch to real nappies once things had settled down. In the end this never happened and I have always used disposables with her and now she is almost 18 months old and we are considering potty training so hopefully it won’t be too long before she is no longer wearing nappies at all. Unfortunately that won’t be the end of nappies in this house though because of course I now have Oscar who is 12 weeks old. In this household we are currently getting through a crazy amount of nappies between the two of them and I do admit to feeling guilty every time we put the bins out, we recycle everything we possibly can in this house but because of all the nappies we use our bin is always full despite this.

This time round with Oscar I didn’t have time to consider real nappies as he caught us a bit by surprise arriving early, when he arrived I didn’t even have a hospital bag packed or any clothes for him so nappies were a quick afterthought and an emergency trip to the supermarket once he came home from hospital. The last 12 weeks have been playing catch up so when I was emailed to ask if I wanted to take up the Real Nappy Challenge I of course said yes. Maybe now is the time to see whether real nappies could work for me.

So what is The Real Nappy Challenge? It is actually quite simple (I hope!), all I have to do is use one reusable nappy a day for a week during Real Nappy Week. One nappy a day, how hard can that be? We have been sent a pack from Bambino Mio containing 2 mionappies, 1 miosoft nappy cover, 50 mioliners, some miofresh nappy santiser and 3 mioboost inserts for extra absorbancy. This should be enough to keep me going over the challenge.

I’m looking forward to taking up the challenge however my husband did look at me with a look of horror when I mentioned it and has told me that I’ll be changing the real nappies, let’s see if the Real Nappy Challenge can convince him aswell. Towards the end of the week on the 21st May I’ll be visiting The Baby Show at the NEC so you never know, if I’ve been convinced I could be turning up to buy myself some more real nappies Check back here over next week to see how I am getting on with my Real Nappy Challenge and to see whether it can convince me to ditch the disposables and switch to real nappies full time.

The Gallery – Chilling Out

15 years ago

by dawniebrown in Oscar, The Gallery

This post is this weeks entry for The Gallery over at Sticky Fingers

The prompt this week is Chilling Out.

Now having 2 children under 17 months old, I don’t personally get much time to chill out anymore, pretty much the only time I get to relax is in the few hours sleep I manage to snatch each night, Zara is 100% livewire at the moment and so the only person in this household that really gets to chill out is this one…

Today could be the start of something beautiful

15 years ago

by dawniebrown in Family Life, Oscar, Zara

Well it could be You see this morning I woke up to silence and not the sound of a baby crying for the first time in about 12 weeks. After the inital panic I realised something special had happened.

After the recent weeks of battles with reflux, vomit, hours of screaming and general new baby lack of sleep – last night Oscar slept and when I say slept I mean I put him in his cot at 10:30pm after his 9pm bottle and that was the last I heard from him until 8am this morning. Yes that’s right Oscar slept through the night for the first time To top this off Zara also slept all night without waking due to teething etc

It may not last, it may just have been a blip in my chaotic life at the moment but maybe just maybe this is where things start to get better. I daren’t count any chickens but Zara started sleeping through at about 6 weeks old and Oscar has just passed 6 weeks corrected age so maybe just maybe he is finally going to start sleeping.

Yesterday he was awake most of the day, feeding very frequently and generally not settling inbetween feeds and so when I put him in his cot last night I was really expecting to be back downstairs with him within half an hour, there is no way within my wildest dreams that I would have expected to be only getting him up at 8am the next morning.

This morning I managed to get Zara ready for nursery and have a leisurely cup of tea with my husband at the kitchen table whilst Zara had her breakfast, I managed to have a shower, sort out my daily chores and have some breakfast all before Oscar woke up. This is how I like my life to be, organised, on top of things, peaceful, filled with nights of sleep and days of fun.

Will it last? Well probably not, tonight could be back to the old routine of 4 hours sleep if I’m lucky, 2 if we have a particularly bad one, Zara could be unsettled and refusing to sleep. It could all go pear shaped again but you know what? I will forever remember this morning and the night of the 9th of May 2011 as the day when I woke up feeling positive and smiling, when the sun was shining and I felt like singing. The day after the night I have been longing for for weeks So Oscar I would like to thank you, my clever clever clever little boy

Oh the indignity of being made to wear a pink bib

Musical Monday – The song I walked down the aisle to

15 years ago

by dawniebrown in Uncategorized

I was listening to this in the car the other day and it brought the memories flooding back so I thought I’d share a song with you. Not a traditional wedding song choice but hey I’m not your traditional type of girl And yes it’s true I walked down the aisle to a Morrissey song – well ok it was the instrumental version. I give you Interlude by Morrissey and Siousxie

PS dont panic when you see the start of the video – its clean I promise

I’m linking this up for Tracks of My Years over at The Mad House Blog

Silent Sunday

15 years ago

by dawniebrown in Family Life, Oscar, Silent Sunday, Zara

Today I will deliberately spoil my ballot paper

15 years ago

by dawniebrown in Uncategorized

Today the nation goes to the polls to vote in a referendum, a referendum to decide whether we want a new voting system here. Well yes I do want a new voting system, I think that the current first past the post system is unfair and I think we need to change but what we have been offered as an alternative (the alternative vote system) is a very poor substitute for what I really want which is proportional representation which is by far a much fairer system than either of the two options that we have to vote for. Its not like I don’t understand the options or haven’t researched them. My husband teaches politics so I am probably more informed about the options that your average Joe Bloggs on the street

It means that I am facing a dilemma here, I hate the Tories and really don’t want to side with them by voting for FPTP but I have also fallen out with the Lib Dems who have sold out in a coalition, gone back on half of their election promises and generally proved themselves to be a weak party. I will add at this point that whereas I used to sometimes vote for the LibDems, in the general election I voted Labour as I could see this happening and decided to use my vote tactically and vote Labour instead.

So there we have it, I don’t want to vote for either option thank you very much. Now having come to this conclusion it would be very easy for me to just not bother turning out to vote but I can’t do that. You see many women fought hard to get me and every woman the right to vote and I appreciate this, I don’t want to be recognised as one of those people who can’t be bothered to turn up and be part of the no show statistics.

And so today I will turn out to vote, I will go to the polling station, pick up my ballot form and when I get to the booth I will add another option to my form, I will add proportional representation and place my X next to that. Yes it won’t achieve anything, it will be classed as a spoilt ballot but I will still be included in turnout figures, I will still be one of those people that exercised my right to vote, I will still be showing my appreciation to those who fought to get me that right, I just won’t be voting for either of the options available.

alternative vote FPTP referendum

Baby’s First Calendar Review

15 years ago

by dawniebrown in Oscar, Reviews

I originally did this review as a guest post over on my sisters blog Mummy Loves and I thought I’d share it over here as-well

I was kindly sent a Baby’s First Calendar to review which was timed fantastically with the arrival of Oscar, although with his early arrival I’ve only just got around to decorating his nursery and putting up his calendar

Baby’s First Calendar is an A1 poster chart where you can record of all your baby’s firsts and create a lasting record of that manic first year when everything seems to happen so quickly. I never had anything like this with Zara and although we have hundreds, possibly thousands of photos I couldn’t tell you when she first smiled, crawled etc, I could tell you roughly how old she was but not a precise date. I’ve seen the memory books that you can buy but I never got one as knowing me it would just end up in a cupboard gathering dust and never get completed, the great thing about this calendar is that it’s on the nursery wall and the stickers that come with it allow you to record memorable occasions as they happen.

The stickers that come with the calendar allow you to record events such as:

• Due date (which with Oscar was 6 weeks after his birth!)

• Birth (14th February 2011)

• Home from hospital (16 days after his birth)

• First smile (still waiting )

• First step

• First tooth

• First shoes

• First laugh

• First clap

• First wave

• First bath

• First time they say Mummy & Daddy

• And a lot more!

Rather conveniently for me Baby’s First Calendar has bright colours and a cute woodland animal design which fits in perfectly with Oscar’s woodland themed nursery (well it will do when I finally put the finishing touches to his nursery in the next week or so!). The calendar also has a place to put in their first photo and first birthday photo and all the details of their birth such as weight, place of birth and name etc. It really does allow you to record everything important that you will ever need to remember.

Another important and extremely useful feature of the calendar is the build in thermometer. Temperature is a very serious matter when it comes to your baby’s sleeping environment. It needs to be just right – not too hot or too cold. A thermometer is included on the calendar so you can instantly see the temperature and make sure it’s perfect for your baby. Important safety information is also included on the calendar to help you remember the vital points about laying your baby to sleep. This advice is from the Foundation for the study of infant deaths (FSID) to keep your baby as safe as possible during sleep.

I really like this calendar and think it’s a great idea, they sell for £15 and can be purchased from their website here Baby’s First Calendar Website