Mummies need bathroom breaks too!

Argh! Do you know how difficult it is to use a public toilet with a small baby in tow?  Without a handy daddy, grandparent or friend to take over baby-wrangling duties for a couple of minutes?

Nightmare springs to mind.

So, on that basis, let's give a big hand to the following:

• Mothercare in Cardiff - "normal" cubicles big enough to push a trolley or pushchair in to.
• Charnock Richard services on the M6
• Waitrose in Abergavenny
• Morrisons in Barry, all of which have the sense to put a cubicle in the baby change room (as opposed to putting the baby change in the disabled toilets)

Baby change in the disabled toilets is all well & good, if you can deal with the queue, but a cubicle in a baby change facility means more than one baby can be changed, and Mommy can deal with her own call of nature as well as baby's.

I thank various deities for a cast-iron bladder, and make the most of every opportunity to pee I get now, I never know when the chance will next arise!

Olay Total Effects Wake Up Wonder Review

I'm a girly girl, even though motherhood has meant I've rarely had time for anything more than a quick swipe with a hairbrush over the last 8 months, so when the nice people at Olay sent me a bottle of their new Total Effects Wake Up Wonder to try out, I was very pleased.  I go back to work soon, see, and they're not going to be overjoyed if I turn up covered in porridge, looking like last week's washing.

Anyway.  Olay.  That's the point.  I've been a loyal devotee of a certain other moisturiser for years (it's yellow and different, in a dramatic way, if you get my drift), but I'm up for a change.  The bottle is really nicely packaged, a subtle gold sheen to the outside, and a pump action dispenser which is invaluable when you have to do everything with one hand (baby wash companies, please take note!).  And the dispenser pumps out just the right amount for a single application - no waste, no mess.

On first application, the cream is lovely and light, and easily soaked up.  This is what surprised me most, I've found anti-ageing creams to be too heavy in the past, but this was lovely.  A really nice refreshing scent, and easy to use.  And now, after a week?  My skin genuinely does look brighter, and I look more awake (SqueakyDaddy's words, not mine), even after being woken by a teething Squeaky numerous times a night. 

Do you know, I think I might be a convert!

Disclosure: I was provided with a bottle of Olay Total Effects Wake Up Wonder free of charge for the purpose of this review.  I was not told what to write, and all opinions are my own.  Links are provided for your convenience only, I am not a member of any affiliate scheme & will not receive reward for their use.

Double Nappies, DUR!

We've been at this double nappy malarky for a month or more now, the appointment with the paediatric orthopaedic guy is in a couple of weeks, then maybe we'll be sorted.

So why has it taken me this long to realise that double nappies can actually make things easier, not harder?  For ages I've been completely removing the outer nappy before starting on the inner, cleaning, etc.  Then getting the inner nappy out of the way, putting the outer in place as the new inner, then a new outer.  And one day it occurred to me - if I leave the outer nappy underneath, then when I remove the inner, it's already there underneath the (hopefully) clean bottom, ready to be stuck down & I only need to do half as much "bum in the air" getting a nappy underneath.

Some days I really do wonder about myself, you know.

In other news, the new curtain rail is now up, and having a 24 hour cooling off period before I try putting curtains on it & putting Squeaky back where she belongs at night.  I don't trust curtain rails, never mind our DIY skills (apologies to anyone following me on twitter, I had a bit of a meltdown).

A quiet week (or two?)

It's been a while, however long it is.  Bad Blogger, no biscuit.

What's been happening in Squeaky World, then? We went to Grandma & Grandpa Squeaky's house last week, so SqueakyDaddy & I could go to the theatre, and she could menace my parents.  And menace she did.  Even though one tooth has come through, the other bottom tooth is still giving her all sorts of problems, and she squeaked and squawked and squealed and generally refused to go to bed until we got home.  Oh dear.  She's 8 & a bit months now though, I think a lot of it is separation anxiety, though I don't know how to deal with it.  Apparently she would settle and go to sleep on either of my parents, but wouldn't go in the cot, and just created every time they tried, so she kept them up all evening.  Little minx.

And then, she was having a dodgy evening at home on Tuesday, and it took both me & SqueakyDaddy to calm her.  During this time, SqueakyDaddy spotted that the curtains were slightly apart, and gave them a quick tweak.  Which somehow turned into Total Existence Failure and a curtain rail on the floor.  So Squeaky has had to spend the last couple of nights in the travel cot in our bedroom while we get the gear together to put a new rail up and rehang the curtains.  Grrr.

But is this child ever mobile?  I can't believe it's been only a month since she mastered the art of crawling.  Seemingly that's not enough for her.  Now she's pulling herself up with ever-greater confidence & ability, and starting to try and walk.  Hasn't she read the books?  She's not meant to be doing this yet!  I took her into Clarks' on Monday to get her feet measured, so I could *consider* buying shoes, and her feet are still too small for even the littlest size, so she'll just have to deal with socks or tights.  She takes shoes off as soon as I put them on her, anyway, so it's probably not a bad thing.  We'd only end up losing a shoe somewhere silly.

Moving on

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the big news items in Squeaky's world over the last couple of weeks is that she's moved into her own bedroom at last!  It's taken time, for a fair number of reasons, not least being that I needed to sort out the junk that had accumulated in her room & decorate it, but now she's there.

With teething at the same time, maybe it wasn't the ideal moment, but it was overdue, and it's done.  We've kept a single bed in there for the time being, and so if she has a bad night, I can sleep in there with her to be able to comfort her without waking SqueakyDaddy.  And we have had some difficult nights.  I've spent a couple of full nights in there, and a couple of half nights, but I'm determined to make it stick, and I'm not bringing her back into our room.  Not now.  I guess it's a combination of things - being in the room on her own & not being able to hear us, it's darker than our room, it smells different (new furniture, etc), the light from the baby monitor & smoke/co alarms, and the ever present teeth.

It's done though, and I'm so pleased.  The room's lovely, and almost finished, though I want to add a few more stencils when I get chance (this weekend, maybe?).  The walls are a slightly terrifying shade of peptobismol pink, the carpet's denim blue (chosen long before Squeaky came along, but it's the only new carpet in the house & I'm not changing it), dark red curtains.  I wanted to put some sort of design on the walls, not a frieze, and nothing too complicated because I've painted over the textured wallpaper (the walls in this house are craptastic & I really didn't want the hassle)  So I went looking for some sort of simple stencils I could use, without costing me a fortune.  And I found shaped cookie cutters in the pound shop - hearts, flowers & stars, in varying sizes.  Look! 

There's more that I haven't photographed - bright BRIGHT green stars over the top of the window, and stars in 2 shades of blue around the cot, but this gives you an idea.  The paints I used for the designs were all sample pots from B&Q's kids range. I don't think I could live with any of them for an entire wall, never mind a room, but for details, they're great.

Honestly, I could have spent a fortune in doing this, but 7 test pots at about 75p each = £5.25, plus £3 for the stencils.  If telly hadn't moved on from interior design to antiques & property development, I'd be camped outside the BBC right now demanding a job.  In fact, maybe I will do anyway, can't hurt, can it?

Eeeee!

I was going to do a post about how Squeaky's finally moved into her own bedroom like a big girl, but!

Something more exciting!  Finally, after a couple of months of moaning, her first tooth has broken through the gum!  Not enough to really be visible, but enough to hurt when she bites you.  Now to break out thebaby toothbrush & toothpaste.

*melts*

We're getting quite distinct "mama" and "dada" now, in addition to "baba", and of course "baboon" and random screeching and raspberries.

She doesn't really know *when* to use them yet, though she can manage some impeccable timing through sheer coincidence.  Like when I've taken her off to the bathroom for a wash, and she calls "Dada" to come and rescue her, or when I'm not delivering her weetabix at the desired rate and I get nagged "Mama" to hurry up.  And that one time where she broke off in the middle of a feed to announce "boob" at my boob.

Also, I love how babies have conversations between themselves.  They really do, they take it in turns to say something, then the other one reacts, and oh it's adorable.  I wonder what they're telling each other?