Sling Talk

Things people have said to me whilst wearing S in the sling:

• That's the best way to travel!

• She looks comfortable!

• He looks comfortable!

• You've got something on you...

• Is there something you want to get off your chest?

• Isn't she heavy like that?

• Nawwwww!

• You're not still carrying her, are you?

• I wish I could go about like that.

• I bet that's difficult isn't it?

• Doesn't your back hurt?

• Don't you have a buggy?

• There's a baby on you.

You get extra points if you come up with something amusing... or at least something I've not heard a million times before!

Review: Vistaprint Photobooks

I was fortunate enough to be asked to review a photobook from Vistaprint.

I've made photobooks before as wedding gifts for friends, but never made one for myself. As S's first birthday has just passed, I thought it might be nice to make a book of her first year.

The site itself is fairly easy to use. You can choose from several different shapes and sizes of book, and how you design your book.

I downloaded the photobook editor, which is a program you can keep on your desktop, and use to create your photobook stage by stage. So if you're like me, and you have a year's worth of photos to wade through, re-size, position, caption, fiddle about with, etc - you can save it and go to bed, then come back the next day and carry on.

I have to say, I've never used an editor before that had so many options. You can set backgrounds, set sizes, add captions...

... arrange the photos however you like them, crop or resize them, cut them out into different shapes, add frames over them...

Basically, it's like having a scrap book, some photos, glue, scissors and a marker pen, except the end result is a lot more professional. You can add more pages, move the pages around within the book, and design the front and back cover however you see fit. You can even write on the spine!

When you've finally finished with your design, you can decide on things like the paper quality and binding. I chose to have my book lay flat at the spine so that the pages lay flat when opened:

Of course, all these little bits and bobs cost more - my book would have been somewhere around the region of £95 in the end - but I do think it's value for money. My book has over 100 pages of beautiful, glossy pages. The print quality is excellent and the book will last a long time.

Once you've finalised your order, the software takes you back to the website to place the order and make payment. Of course, if you weren't creating such a mammoth task as me, you could have done the entire project online!

My only problem with this entire process is that once you come to payment, they try to sell you lots of other things. Vistaprint specialises in printing business cards and other paraphernalia for businesses; so when you're trying to pay for your photobook, they're saying to you "look, you can have your business logo printed on a keyring!" This goes on for about 3 pages, but it is easy to just opt out of it all.

When I placed my order carriage was very reasonable considering the size of the book I'd just ordered. The site said to allow 14 days for delivery, but the finished product turned up a week later.

I was out when the postie tried to deliver my book, so I went to the sorting office the next day to collect it on my lunch break. When I got back to work I couldn't wait to get it out an inspect it - and obviously, because S is so gorgeous, everyone at work wanted to see a million photos of her too. General consensus was that it's a very well-produced book. A couple of people even said they're thinking they might use the site to make a book for themselves.

Disclaimer: I received my photobook free in return for this post, but that was not dependent on a good review. The views in this post are my own.

Picnic at Nana's!

S and I had a lovely picnic in Nana's garden last Bank Holiday Monday!

This is our entry into the Tots 100 Curious George competition!

Wordless Wednesday: Ted

The S my S is named after, gave her a teddy for her first birthday.

She loves him.

Kisses for Ted!

The Steep Learning Curve

S has been at nursery for a month now, and already she's learning things...

• She's learned to eat off a plate/from a bowl without giving in to the urge to turn it over and launch her food across the room.

• She can now turn individual pages in a book, and will sit and read through her books, one page at a time.

• She can now take several steps unaided - has started doing it without me holding my arms out... or even watching her (that she knows of)

• She can, on occasion, take a drink from her cup without immediately spitting it all down her front.

• She will now let an adult wipe her nose, rather than covering her face with her hands and opting instead to wipe the snot on the nearest available leg.

• She points to things. A lot.

• She says "Hi" and "Bye" a lot more than she did before, and waves at every available opportunity.

• When she is eating, she has learned to put her hand to her mouth to push errant bits of food in, rather than just moving her head to try and catch what was trying to escape.

• She has learned to eat all sorts of new and exciting foods she wouldn't have had at home.

• She's learned to go to sleep without me, and sleep for a reasonable amount of time, on a regular basis. In fact, I think she now sleeps better at nursery than at home.

• She says "ta" when you give her something

• She appears to have learned that when I leave her, I'm coming back.

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SPAG without the Bol

I hate to admit it, but I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to spelling, punctuation and grammar.

If you can't tell the difference between "your" and "you're," 

If you post on Facebook that you are "on route" somewhere 

If you constantly use txt spk 

If you don't know that an apostrophe denotes ownership or a missing letter, and think it just goes between a word and the S at the end of it 

If your sentences never feature commas 

If you randomly use colons and semi-colons mid sentence for no apparent reason 

If you don't know the difference between "there," "their" and "they're" 

If you use ie when you mean eg or nb 

If you put Random Capitals at the starts of words that do not require capitals

If you use "too" when you mean "to" and vice versa

If your sentences run over several lines because you've forgotten where the full stop button is 

If you hyphenate words-that-should-not-be-hyphenated 

If you say things like "2am in the morning" or "3pm in the afternoon" 

If you say "seen as" instead of  "seeing as" 

If you write "loose" when you mean "lose"

... you can pretty much guarantee I don't read your Facebook updates/Twitter feeds/blog posts past the second mistake.

And I judge you.

Time to Sort The Diet...

Do you ever think perhaps the universe is trying to tell you something?

First my friend Simon Anderson invited me to join in a free week of his fitness bootcamp. I'd heard great things, and seen amazing photos, so I jumped at the chance... and then realised there was a diet element to it too, and I had to give up all sorts of dietary crutches like Coke and sugar and bread. I did it for a week, and felt very... clean. When the week was up I thought, "well, one little can of Coke wouldn't hurt..." and fell off the wagon, just like that.

Then I noticed Amy at Curls & Coffee was doing a sugar detox. She was Instagramming her meals and I asked a million questions: "what's that?" "how'd you make that?" She also seemed to be really loving it, feeling happy and healthy.

Then I went back to work. Each day I go in and sit at a desk, and I eat my way through whatever I can get my hands on - my nice, healthy home-made salad, but also Coke, crisps, chocolate, cake, biscuits. I've put on weight in the last couple of weeks, and I know full well I'm eating out of boredom (or something else) rather than hunger. I know this needs to stop. I'm exhausted, and the amount of crap I'm eating is making that a lot worse, as well as contributing to my mood being the lowest it's been in a year. This needs to stop.

My body doesn't look *too* bad... but it feels awful!

This week a PR company contacted me, asking if I'd like to try the Patrick Holford Low GL diet. We had a brief chat, and they're sending me some books about it, a cookery book etc, and I'm to report back to them periodically about how I'm getting on. I'm fairly sure Patrick Holford does not suggest eating 3 bars of chocolate per day, even if they are on 3 for £1.20 in Tesco. May need to knock that on the head!

And finally, last night a lady I met at the bootcamp came round. She is training in systematic kinesiology, and I offered myself up as a case study - having no clue what that entailed. It's one of those things where the person tells you what they're going to do, and you go "oh right, yeah" and in your head you're thinking "hmmm yeah right" But blow me if it didn't seem to actually work. She was able to tell that I drink a lot of caffeine, that I don't get enough water, that I don't eat fried foods... and she made my hip stop hurting for the first time in months. Not to mention my complete lack of back pain when I got up this morning! It was embarrassing to have her figure out just how much crap I must be eating, that every part of my body was quietly suffering for it.

So it seems that perhaps it is time I sorted my shit out, diet-wise... Watch this space... 

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