Michelle Tant

As the network is likely to crash shortly I thought I would get my new years wishes in early to my lovely readers. So here it is, I wish you your happiest year yet. Filled with things that make you laugh, surrounded by people who love (and like!) you. Happy new year 2011! xx Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.9

In a few days I will be thinking about what to pin down as my new years resolutions. Never mind that every year they invariably fall by the wayside mid February (cough... January) but I like to remain optimistic and make them anyway. Starts the year off with an excellent sense of purpose I always feel. However today, we are in the middle of what is known to some as Crimbo Limbo. That awkward space between Christmas and New Year. No one really knows what to do with themselves, the kids are going nuts because nowhere is open for us crazed parents to take them and I can't (read 'wouldn't inflict on myself willingly) take the children shopping with me to bag me some bargains in the sales. So now seems as good a time as any to reflect on the past year. There's been some highs and lows as with any year. A big high goes to giving birth to my beautiful baby daughter on 1st June. Unexpectedly at home and what an amazing experience. And what a delightful child, so sunny ...

When I was pregnant I had a vision in my head of our new daughters first Christmas. She would be nearly 7 months old and by that point she would have tried a few tastes of pureed vegetables and fruits, certainly enough to make up to a Christmas meal. I decided that I would puree them separately so she had a variety of tastes then for dessert perhaps some stewed apple and raisins for a festive finish. That was also other peoples expectations of her Christmas meal and in fact any of her meals, I frequently feel like I'm being watched. My Nan came out with it the other day... "isn't she a bit young for that?" when I handed her a rice cake with a slice of cheese and apple. I was at that point a bit fed up of constantly explaining our choice to allow our daughter to lead her own journey to weaning. So I just said "watch her!". So she did. And was amazed to see her happily eat the lot, barring obviously the little bits that get tucked in unexpected plac...

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I was worried about Wednesday. My husband was still working from 9am and then leading the carol service in the evening so wouldn't be home until late. All the friends I would normally meet up with were busy sorting out Christmas stuff. So *gasp* we would need to entertain ourselves. All day. Not really that bad, but I did have chores to do in the morning, but turns out the kids wanted to watch Wallace & Grommit so happily lay out in the sofa in the morning and I got loads done. To say I was surprised is an understatement. Those of you with kids will know how hard it can be to get the jobs done with children hanging round your ankles. At lunchtime I realised I hadn't bought any 'lunch' food as we won't be in much this season. So we went to the local shopping centres cafe. All three behaved so beautifully! They picked out what they wanted and sat down and we talked about whether we wanted it to snow again (yes because Jayden didn't get to make a snowman...

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I have one last present to get. Though in fact I did already buy it on Amazon, I got an email saying they (amazon) hadn't heard from the seller about despatch. So I emailed the seller asking for a delivery update, no answer. Then another email a week ago, then one yesterday telling them not to bother. *sigh* Annoying particularly because this person is hard to buy for at the best of times, and now I'm just going to have to pick up a gift card which to my mind lacks imagination but I suppose means they can at least buy what they really want. I feel like I have loads to do before Christmas still though, and not all of of it particularly Christmas related either. Tidying and cleaning the house so I don't need to do it over the Christmas period much. Buy tea for evening tea at the in-laws. Buy meat for our Christmas Eve meal... I don't eat much meat so goodness know why this task falls to me each year. Wrap the last of the presents. Bag them up into 'who goes w...

A friend of mine gave me a delicious recipe for gravy and it completed this meal for my family. Bear with me as I do this, I haven't written down a recipe before but I'm 'trying something new' today. Hope you enjoy this take on a mash-up of a couple of traditional British meals as much as we do! (pretty cheap to make too!) For your weaning infant, just remove the sausages from the mini toad. Only use unsalted stock for babys gravy. Mini Toads, mashed potato and red onion gravy Preheat the oven to 200'c. You'll need: for the mini toads... 12 space muffin tin 9 sausages Olive oil 4 oz plain flour 2 eggs 200ml milk for the mashed potato... potatoes as desired, I usually allow 2 per person plus one! butter for the red onion gravy... 1 red onion chopped into half rings 200 mls vegetable stock (depending on how organised I am, this is either from a cube or frozen stock from a previous meal!) Juices from cooked sausages 2 heaped ts...

Can we say excited? Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.9

Yesterday we went to a Christmas party and I took with me a small tub of chopped veggies and rice crackers. At least I thought I did because when the time came, turns out I'd left it on the counter at home. Bad mummy. I was naturally dubious about feeding my 6.5 month old daughter party food but in the end she munched her way through some boiled egg, cucumber sticks, bread sticks and some cheese & tomato pizza cut into small finger slices. The thing that got me this time was the way she was picking up one thing and chewing on that for a while, then catching sight of something else presumably more interesting, then discarding what was in her hand and picking the other thing up. She was picking and choosing her food and having a great time. One challenge is convincing my boys not to put food on her tray. They see her eating normal food and obviously don't know the thought that goes on behind the choices so think its ok to give her food. Not all of which is appropriat...

I saw a question in Twitterland somewhere today - "What are you most looking forward to this Christmas?" and I immediately thought of one thing... then another... then another. Then I started to think that I must surely have a highlight but actually, with a family the size of the one I'm in, that's a very difficult 'one thing' to pin down. So here is a 'super positive happy Christmas bloggetty blog' of all my favourite (in no particular order) things about Christmas... Sound of Music style! * Making mutant mince pies with my children on Christmas Eve. I say mutant because baking mince pies is my baking nemesis. They always (and I'm not being dramatic) end up sticky, overflowing, misshapen messes. The kids love them and I tell people that the kids made them so I get away with it. * Decorating the tree at my Mums house with my 3 siblings and now my own family. This helps ground me again as a daughter, though now I squabble with my 5 year old...

This afternoon I went to an appointment with Daisy at the children's hospital. It was a follow up for the storm in a teacup rustled up by my health professionals. They initially decided she had early closure of the anterior fontanelle so we were referred straight to the hospital as the implications of this are quite serious often resulting in cranial surgery. Thankfully the consultant said that wasn't the case, that he wasn't worried at all. Turns out its highly likely my health visitor measured her head incorrectly. Either way I was intensely relieved ad you can imagine. So imagine my disbelief when they decided that she was too small for her age!!! I held my tongue, after all, this country is renowned for coming down hard on people who DON'T have a problem, and leaving those WITH a problem to get on with it. Anyhow, I digress. So blood tests ensued along with weight monitoring. All along I maintained that she was perfectly healthy, just not massive, afterall...

When we started this babyled weaning onto solids journey, my only clear aim was that I wanted to follow Daisys instincts and to go at her pace and I have been surprised daily with her progress and at how well she has done. She is really eating as part of the family now, joining in our roast dinner on Sunday and showing us how much she enjoys it with her beautiful smiles and giggles. Watching my lovely bonny breastfed baby, I've become convinced that if she is left to her own devices as with how she controls her breastfeeding habits, then she will find her own way so I have been following her lead. If she looks interested in something I have then I've been letting her give it a go (salt and sugary foods excepted) and that's how she came to try the corn on the cob and loved every gummed morsel. It has been with some debate then that I considered using a spoon at all. Inevitably though I figured that cutlery will ultimately form part of her eating habits so I gave her...

The surprise was that she tried it! I had it in my hand, she took it off me and started chewing it like she'd been eating forever. I've noticed that when I try to give her something directly into her mouth, like I gave her a bit of mashed banana once and some yoghurt and it came back out pushed by her tongue. When she puts something to her mouth himself, it generally goes in and stays in. She instinctively works her mouth in harmony with her hands and its working! I'm amazed! I still attribute it to breastfeeding, it rocks! Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.9

My new latest phrase that I save specially for me and my husband is that we're in this parenting lark for the long haul. Every day we have decisions to make about how we bring up our children. Some are small and seemingly inconsequential, others are bigger and the value of them is apparent. I do strongly believe that I need to carefully pick my battles. Endlessly picking at children will just result in them feeling got at, hassled, resentful and ultimately erode their natural in built confidence. It's ok to 'let it slide' every now and then on the small stuff; the decision does need to be made about what we consider to be the 'slidable' small stuff. I can't say what that might be for anyone else, but for us, the 'small stuff' includes things like shoes still on feet on the new sofa for example.... but for some people that might be a deal breaker. But for us, some small stuff is the important stuff. The pleases, thank-yous, sorrys, basic m...

Frankie Boyle thinks that making sexually explicit jokes about a disabled young child is not only appropriate, but hilariously funny. He thinks that freedom of speech enables him to express this filth and even worse, make money from it. He should be ashamed of himself, though I now doubt he has enough decency in him to feel such an emotion. And to the people who think that any child of a person in the public eye should be open to this sort of abuse from the media, then shame on you too. What is going on in this world that this has become acceptable? Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.9

The debate about children in poverty had raised its head again lately here after the report which said that more children from working families are living under the poverty line than those in non-working families. The sensationalist headline "work doesn't pay" being the title of choice for some tabloids. Whatever the particular statistics, the fact remains that in the UK today, 4 million children live in poverty. That's 1 in 3. That is shocking. Apparently the poverty line is where the household income is less than 60% of the median household income. Or in normal terms, for a family of 4, a total income of around £300 per week, inclusive of benefits etc.[www.cpag.org.UK] For the people who think...Oooh, £1200 per month sounds ok, let me break it down for you. (for a family of 4) Mortgage or rent £600 Council tax £140 Gas & electric £50 Water £25 Car costs £150 (inc petrol, tax, NOT inc repairs, servicing, MOT & tax) So we are at £965 costs but...

I have been caught by surprise with the way my daughter has taken to eating. It has been totally different to the way the boys started food. All those purres and mashes. And she just picks up a bit of food and eats it. She carefully picks up what she wants and thoughtfully puts it to her mouth, looking at it and turning it round before gumming it into a soggy mess, probably getting around half of it down to her little tummy. She's now tried cucumbers, mashed potato (now THAT was messy...) courgette (squash), cheese - in sticks and in a sandwich, steamed carrot sticks, toast, banana, Apple and Pear slices and rice cakes. She enthusiastically ate them all. No pressure from us, I haven't PUT a single thing in her mouth. I'm relying on her instincts to guide her in her eating journey. Babies have excellent gag reflexes, so when something a bit too big broke off, her gag reflex brought it straight back out again before I even had time to react. I must say at this po...

Got 'the letter' from hospital today. Im not entirely sure what it all means but basically as follows... He has an ejection systolic heart murmur which they're not overly worried about, but that prompted the 12 lead ECG and chest X-ray which they did not long ago. Findings of that are Q waves in lateral leads and possibly ventricular hypertrophy. Chest X-ray showed enlarged heart size with minimal perihilar shadowing that could be in keeping with pulmonary oedema. So that's why he's been referred for echocardiography. So there's a 'possibly' in there as well as a 'could', so that's good right? Now we are just waiting for an appointment to come through. We've been told March time so they're obviously not direly worried about it... they leave that to the mother who can't help it. Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.9

I was one of the first in my group of friends to get and email address. I was 17 years old and it was early 1998. I signed up for it, had no one to email so promptly forgot about it for a year or so. I discovered chat rooms when I was around 18. It was a whole new world and I could hardly believe that I was talking to people in different countries and time zones to me and it was around then that I fell in love with the internet. I used to listen to loads of music online, using Napster before it was shut down originally. I'd stay up all night chatting to people about nothing and everything, playing online games and keeping my Neopets alive. I made some pretty stupid decisions early on in my 'net life, ones that I wouldn't dream about now, like the time I went out at 3am and met someone I'd been chatting with for a few hours, got in a car with them and went for a drive. I was so stupid. Nothing happened, I was fine, delivered safely home but Blimey. Thankfully I...

I've been a parent now since August 2005. In some ways it feels like the time has slipped away in a blink of an eye... in another it feels like I've always been a parent because now I can't imagine my life without my children. What on earth did I used to do with my time? Why was there ever any mess in my home pre-offspring? Why were we always so broke? When I got pregnant, why did we spend even one evening in out of my whole pregnancy? The truth is we absolutely had no concept of how much our lives were going to change, and consequently had no concept of just how unrestricted we were back then. If I had known... I probably would have taken more foreign holidays. (you didn't think I was about to say we wouldn't have had the kids did you?!). Parenting has been the biggest challenge in my whole life. Every now and then the responsibility weighs so heavily on me that I feel like I'm going to break. It's up to me and Mr Tant to turn these blonde maniacs into well...

"I am far too lazy to bottlefeed"; just one of the phrases used by myself and my breastfeeding mummy friends when asked about our feeding choices. In fact we did a radio interview when my eldest was 7ish months old and someone said that. It raised a laugh but it is actually very close to the truth. The thought of having to prepare all the bottle feeding paraphernalia in order to leave the house really does leave me cold. I have enough trouble leaving the house as we are. We were being interviewed that time as a part of women's health week and National Breastfeeding Week was looming. There was around 5/6 of us, we all were still breastfeeding at 10 months and more, and that did make us an unusual sight. The (not so secret) secrets of successful breastfeeding Understand me when I say I am NOT bottle bashing here. Everyone has their own decision to make and I am simply saying one (slightly dramatised) reason why I didn't/don't bottlefeed my children. The ...

This evening we put up our Christmas decorations. My husband put the lights up in the window while I put the lights on the tree and the kids bounced around the room clutching handfuls of hanging decorations waiting for me to finish so they can weigh the branches down with them. We then turn the room lights off and Oooh and aaah over the twinkling lights in the dark. We then eat together and my children go to bed excitedly knowing that their Christmas boxes will have a treat waiting inside for them in the morning when they wake up. The Christmas boxes started 3 years ago when my eldest son was 2. Rather than a shop bought advent calendar, they each have a small cardboard box which they each decorated with Christmas stickers and sparkly bits n pieces. Then each morning, a small 'treat' miraculously appears in the box alongside a small figure to add to the nativity scene. It culminates in baby Jesus 'arriving' on Christmas day. Come Christmas Eve, we, that is, me,...

But just to say that I'm intending on Blogging throughout December, thanks NaBloPoMo! Exhausted right now though as I for caught in the snow and had to abandon my car. Happy days. Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.9