Stretch mark scars

Like many women, I have pale lines - scars left from where my body grew too fast and my skin didn't quite keep up. However, these are not on my tummy from pregnancy. I got my stretch marks during my teenage years. Although I did have a normally healthy diet, from what I can gather I just didn't happen to have the right vitamins at the right moment to keep my skin supple. As Piglet reaches an age where she will start growing, I have been looking into how to help her avoid teenage stretch marks. 

Piglet on Wheels

Available from Bikes 2U Direct.
 We bought Piglet's first bike online;
subsequent ones from a good local 
family shop (Damian Harris Cycles).

The Big Pedal starts next week! 

Piglet never had a tricycle; she started out on the Disney Princess bike with trainer wheels. It also of course had bangles, beads and other accessories stuck on anywhere there was space. She would cycle it fiercely round and round the park with great pleasure, dressed up as Snow White, while I dozed on a bench wrapped in a winter coat.

Barbie ... Makes a Mistake

There is a lot of swearing in this blogpost, which is a fairly critical review of the story of how Barbie gets into computing, LOL. I laughed so hard reading this poor mum's vitriolic comments on Barbie having to get Steve and Brian to help her when her computer goes wrong, and how she has a pink heart-shaped memory stick which she keeps handily on her necklace, that Piglet came running downstairs ... from tidying up her Barbies! to see what was going on. 

Safe Surfing for Piglets

Uh I didn't actually mean Zorro the Surfing Piglet, LOL. What I'm looking at here are some of the issues I faced as Piglet took to the World Wide Web.

Slice of Life

I am laughing cuz my friend in the States says that just like over here, when you have a party you have to bring your own knife. I mean, you can carry a gun but you cannot have a knife floating about at a play centre for the families to use on their Princess Cinderella Coach and Four Horses cake. 

If you are a proper over-achieving 
mom you can find out how to 
make this cake here!

I take our special cake slice, of course. It not only cuts the cake puffickly, you can use it to serve the slices out - if you are not hurriedly shoveling the slices onto napkins which your friend and the Fella wrap up and stuff into the party bags. (Yah, Outlaw Mom gave me the cake slice - she had two of them, of course, and let me have the spare one.)

The UnPacked Lunch

Gosh I was thrilled when Piglet came home and without any prior notice from the school, she announced: "Tomorrow I have to take in a packed lunch which is totally eco-friendly and has no packaging in it to throw away." I made a number of comments using inappropriate religious language.

The Sporting Piglet

From Playing with Pigs

Yesterday Piglet came out of school and said: "You have to get me shin guards for tomorrow."

I do not like to hear a piglet say "you have to," without some honorific title, I prefer something like: "O noble mater familias who bore me amid unbelievable pain and suffering and has nurtured me at considerable cost to your social life ever since, I beg of you humbly on my knees ..."

Pestilential Piglet

From Deposit Photos

Of the two, I prefer worms to headlice. 

Stickers not sticks

Continuing my thoughts on disciplining your piglet, let's move to the positive.  Apparently we spend much more time saying No to our piglets, than How brilliant and beautiful you are, I love you little piglet.  

Discipline and Piglet

Yes!  I have smacked my child.  I hold my hand up (in signification that I will never do it again) and confess.  

A (Bit of a) Day in the Life of the Mum

A couple of weeks ago while netbooking busily in my home- café, I met a mum with a baby who grumbled to me that her partner had suggested she was just slobbing about the house all day while he worked hard at that manly kind of bringing home the bacon stuff.  In fact, I can't quite believe this, but he might even have said it while she was obliged to sit on the sofa breast-feeding.  

The Princess Diaries 2 review

Lace wedding dresses and women's rights, that's my kind of Saturday teatime movie!

Civilising the Piglet

 

“What’s going on now?” grumbles the Good Fella emerging bleary-eyed into what has become a regular screaming row going on between myself and the Piglet – although not normally at 7.20 am.

The Loss of Immummity

Until recently I had immummity.  Immummity is the opposite of man flu. 

Zen and the art of crossing the road (saving chldren's lives)

Since becoming a mother, I've become a bit of a zealot about crossing the road only when the 'green walker', as my even more politically correct friend calls it, is flashing.

The Return of the Slut

Yummy and slummy mummies move over.  Tiger mothers retract your claws.  It's time for the return of the slut. 

Sexualisation of young girls' underwear

Sexualisation of young girls' underwear was not a problem when I was young .  As I progressed into my teens it was really difficult to get a bra for a young girl in the small rural town I grew up in.  (It probably still is!)  A while back I watched a programme on the sexualisation of young children Too Much Too Young, on the whole a well-balanced discussion with interesting insights from the young people themselves.  Inevitably it didn't go too deeply into the way in which a misogynistic pornographic ethos rife in our culture might be at the back of training young girls early on how to be sexy.