The vikings have landed!

We made it to Kelburn and we weren't disappointed!  The Vikings were battling and the weather was kind.  We spent a long time wandering through the Walled Garden, playing in the play fort and walking beside the waterfalls before we spent some time with the Vikings.  If you're interested in the gardens, I'll be posting on that on my other blog when I find a chance tomorrow.

Why the Vikings, you ask?  Well the Largs Viking Festival has just kicked off this weekend... Didn't you know?

They were really rather good, and nearly  succeeded in frightening TT.  Nearly.  She's made of sterner stuff however.

My favourite shots are these though - modern day Viking checking his Tweets on his mobile?  (Shame I ruin the shot in my haste by appearing in the background!)

Anyways, we had a ball as ever at Kelburn.  TT loved her special treat of lunch out and told everyone in the cafe just how good her sausage, beans & ships were.  Definitely deserved on a Viking battle ground on the first days on Autumn.

Well done yet again Kelburn folk, and well done to the Vikings for their spirit and entertainment!  See you next weekend at The Pencil!

What are you doing this weekend?

There's so much to choose from this weekend.  Daddy Native has a Saturday off for once, so we shall be sticking close to home & working on projects in the garden then.  Mostly I shall probably be avoiding the heavy lifting by playing with my new D90 so look out for some stunning photography to follow! No pressure here then!
Then we are torn on Sunday between Largs & Glasgow.  Kelburn Castle is awash with Vikings this weekend so we'll be paying them a visit at some stage.  I can't work out whether it'll just be TT & I, or whether we'll borrow some cousins to join us too for the added exhaustion. 
Sunday is also my chance to see if any of the items on my wish list at The Forgotten Island are leftover and available to the public.  I am desperately seeking tyres and some of the wooden items for my new garden plans, so fingers crossed!

Other options this weekend...

• If you're in need of new baby bits and bobs, the Glasgow Baby Booty Sale is on this weekend at Kelvin Hall International Sports Arena from 10.30am.
• If I were in Glasgow's West End I would like to go to Byres Road Makers Market and sample some beautiful crafts.
• If TT were a tiny bit older I'd be galloping to the free Saturday Art Club on Saturday morning in GOMA, perfect way to spend a wet morning!

Of course I shall also come back with daring adventure stories to tell you all, as I try to never let the boring truth get in the way of a good story - read this for similar. Happy weekend! x

Shopping!

Used to be such a joyful experience.  Now I get a thrill out of walking around Tesco's on my own, like I used to once upon a time when I bought clothes. Those days are gone my friends.  As many of you can vouch for, shopping now means undertaking military precision planning with decoys planted in every pocket and snacks stashed for each till visited.

My pitiful attempt last weekend, which ran foul of nap time and thus was ear piercingly cut short denying the most major items on my list, got me thinking of where I'd recommend to any of my new-parent friends.  So here's my summary of the major shopping malls/shops in West of Scotland....

For me, the best option now is Braehead Shopping Centre, between Paisley and Glasgow off the M8.  It's nothing exciting, but then I would say that about most malls!  I spent many fun filled spontaneous child free years avoiding the repetition of shopping malls.  They are however a god send to parents & babysitting grandparents alike.  Apart from the obvious fact that the weather is one less thing to have to plan for, they do house most of the places that we need to visit every now and then for new kids clothes / yet more stuff from Boots / a nosy at all the clothes I can no longer fit into.  Braehead is the most child friendly round these parts, by an Irish mile.  I spent many happy afternoons of my mat-leave happily quaffing lattes (what calories?) and smiling at the new gurgling person glued to my boobs.  It's got fantastic baby changing and best of all adult toilets that you can fit a pram into for when you're alone with bubba.  Why don't more places have this?!!

To my mind Silverburn is the posher version of Braehead.  It's got way more restaurants to cafes and fancier shops to swoon over such as Kurt Keiger.  The aisles are also wider, making it easier to navigate if you have more than one child.  But the baby changing facilities are shite in comparison to Braehead, tiny, poky wee rooms and no adult + baby loos together for when you're out alone (with the baby that is).  Like Braehead they do also have a great Child Safe scheme, but I'm not quite at that age with TT yet, so am only speaking from my own experience here.

Seeing as we are heading towards Glasgow, lets go into the city centre.  Glasgow city centre is NOT baby friendly.  We have actually been kicked out of places for the audacity of taking a pram anywhere near the premises once whilst looking to meet family for lunch (avoid the extraordinarily rude Lab Bar at all costs if you have a child with you).  I don't want to go to Macky D's or Burger King or KFC thank you very bloody much. I want real food and some easy finger food we can share with the tiny terrorist please!  Moreover I want wine!  Alas, it's just easier to leave the scramblers at home if you fancy imbibing any alcohol at all.  There are a tiny few wonderful places you can take kids (mainly West Brewery, but shhhhhhhhhhh it's a secret) but mostly just accept that you shall never wonder far from Debenhams or John Lewis.  John Lewis preferably, for it's extremely child friendly cafes on 2 floors and excellent breastfeeding and baby changing facilities.

Besides this is the realisation that shopping locally for local seasonal foods is a temporarily lost treat under the toddler years.  It's major chain stores all the way for the time being.  Let's face it, time is tight now, budgets even tighter (UNDERSTATEMENT) and I now need to be armed with babywipes and cheap foods to bribe TT with for each aisle.  My top tip - bags of carrots are super cheap and make great teething toys and crunchies for getting a noisy toddler out of Tesco/Asda/Sainsburies/wherever with any degree of sanity, patience and dignity intact.  Looks saintlier than crisps, costs less than a bag of grapes!

GROAN. How boring parenthood can be!  Never mind the carrots, thank god for the wine aisle.....

Aging disgracefully?

"Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine." -  Mary Schmich as published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997 (not, as urban legend would have it by Kurt Vonnegut for the 1997 MIT graduation ceremony)

How I wish I had listened better to those words when I first heard them in Baz Luhrmann's 'Sunscreen' song in 1998!  But I didn't, and true to those words I do now look back at photos and think "holy shit but you wasted that body girl!". Because lets face it, I'm never going to look like that again following the leap I made into motherhood.  It's not so much the childbirth, or the pregnancy, with time and/or money these can be easily overcome through diet and exercise. 

But without time and money..... well I'm done for!  There is just no way I can work full time, be an adequate mother to a demanding and noisy toddler, almost wife to my man, runner of house, shopper of food, blogger of nonsense, wannabe Master Chef and painter of nails and still find time to do enough exercise to shrink the thighs and mummy tummy.  And I love good food far too much to stop eating - oh how I wish it were that simple!  But I'm afraid I agree with John Mortimer when he said "There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward."  Sigh.

So my make do answer for now is to hurl myself around the living room to various DVD workouts.  I seem to rotate between Davina and some floozy I've do this idea no idea of called Vicky Binns (possibly in Coronation St or something similar?).  Davina does great when I'm short of time, which is lets face it most evenings.  Vicky is the luxury of having an hour and the energy to go through with it.  Davina makes me feel virtuous and I can choose which work out I'm going to do - boxercise if feeling aggressive or pump if worried about the bingo wings. Vicky is tougher, so much tougher that I definitely warrant coffee and cake the following day.

I only manage to do either about 3 times a week, which I realise is only ever going to slow down the getting fatter process, and little to reverse it!  Try as I might the weekends go too fast and I'm too hungover.  Thursday, if I'm lucky enough not to be travelling I'm far too tired.  So I am trying to eat less carbs, and trying to avoid them after 6pm on most days.

My favourite thing of all though is drinking too much white wine on a Friday night and then going mental to this song in the kitchen.  I challenge you not to feel amazing after just looking at this video, never mind inspired to move that butt of yours.

What works for you?  Tell me please how you do it!

In case you're remotely interested, these are the Davina & Vicky Binns DVDs I'm talking about and bought following the best reviews I trawled through.  Not cheap these things so if anyone is interested in swapping and trying out new routines I'm all up for it!

Please stay Forgotten Island!

If you haven't been to the Forgotten Island yet, I must insist that you go this weekend. Because for some god awful reason it's disappearing much earlier than planned on Monday.  Boo hiss!  We actually went ages ago, but I've been so busy the past while I didn't get round to post this before now. 

The Forgotten Island is the latest project by Glasgow art organisation, Giant. Giant is an amazing company, whose company vision is rather wonderfully "to create inspiring, curious and unexpected arts experiences for children under 12 and their families" and what's not to love about that!

Not content with turning a piece of wasteland beside the new Transport Museum at Riverside into an inspirational place for children to play and explore, Giant also designed the space to evolve and grow with visiting children's interactions.  Everywhere you look there are delightful creations on display from previous explorers, like hundreds of mini-installations.

Visiting explorers can take part in activities teaching them to grow plants, create plastercine sculptures, draw posters, design their own postcards to leave messages for the Secret Gardener... the list goes on impressively.

The island has been designed by artists working in collaboration with local children who requested that their dream island could have tropical beaches and rainbows. 

The Rainbow maker - I'm not going to ruin the fun, I'll leave you to discover this yourself!

There are so many things to do and play with here, it made me even more depressed that I am supposed to be a grown up!  I thought the sound forest, where you have to peddle like crazy to generate the sounds of children playing, was a stroke of genius; and spent ages trying to see the image in the camera obscura.

TT was a little young to totally take everything in and get as excited as her loopy mother did, but man did she love discovering plastercine!  I'm not sure whether she spent so long in the Museum of Curiosities because of the little plastercine sculptures donated by previous explorers or because of the rain that was trying failing to ruin our visit.  I tell you what though, she was terrified of the monkeys!

My absolutely favourite bit, and it was a difficult choice, was seeing the fantastic things kids had chosen to grow vegetables and sweet peas in. 

The idea is that visiting explorers can make their own 'pots' by recycling anything and everything, decorate it, adopt a plant to carefully add to your 'pot', put it on display with a little stick with your name and then come back before the 15th August to proudly take it home.

What a wonderful, and simple idea!

I spoke to the lovely man who sells snacks and coffee from his Smoothie Van on the island and he said that the land is rumoured to be redeveloped into a cinema complex after this summer.  I'd rather have The Forgotten Island as a permanent feature please!

I got tons of ideas for my own garden, as well as activites to do with TT when she's a little older.  I'll be blogging about that on my other blog later.

I hear the weather's to be better and drier tomorrow so I'm borrowing TT's youngest cousins and taking them along before the island disappears- see you there?

Do you believe in fairies?

How do you play? 
We have very distinct playing roles in this house. Mama's good for cuddles and kisses and going on adventures.  Daddy's best for playing though - indoors or outside he'll happily roll around, tickle, play catch, hid in the den, allow himself to be thumped over the head with various toy tractors.  I guess he's the patient one!  I can't help but feel a little jealous of all the shrieks of laughter coming from TT's room after bathtime, but the truth is I'm just not as good at messing around for anything more than 10 minutes or so.  I could argue that I'm too busy however - after all I'm cooking dinner and sorting out the house while Daddy Native does bathtime & tries to find clean PJs.

So I'm drawing plans to make the garden more TT friendly.  Sure there's loads of space to run around, but I'm forever working in the garden, tending lovingly to the veggies and flowers and taking photos for my other blog.  So far, we've cut back a bush in the garden and carved out space for a den and put her play wig-wam in there to show her it's her space.  We've been lucky to receive lots of toys and a slide/climbing frame from neighbours & family who's kids no longer need them.

I'm designing a little obstacle course which I plan to build..... sometime!  I want there to be space for her to grow her own flowers and take pride in planting them herself, whilst also being able to climb and wriggle and hide and do rolly-pollys there.  We're lucky to have such a good sized garden  & I was greatly inspired by The Forgotten Island and hoping to source some tyres for free, build some grass ledges and add texture and colour to the garden with ribbons and crafts that we can make together.

Mostly however I'm super excited by the fact that she's started believing in and understanding what fairies are!  I had a funny conversation with a friend this week about how his fairies are very different from mine!  It had never occurred to me that everyone has their own idea of what a fairy might look like!  I'm going to wallow in reliving my own child hood here and put up some fairy doors on the tree trunk, and create plenty of evidence for TT to nourish her fairy imagination! 

What do you think makes the best play space in gardens for toddlers to grow & explore in?



TWINTASTIC news!

I am so excited!!  My friend has just given birth to twin baby boys!  They came a little over 5 weeks early, and so are tiny little things at just over 3lbs each, and are spending their first few days being well looked after and developing in intensive care.  Mum & Dad are both well and very proud of themselves - particularly Mum who managed to give birth without a C-Section, despite one of the twins being breach!! Yikes!

It's going to be a few days before I manage to visit, and I'm wondering - what gifts should I take?  So as this blog is all about making the first few months of parenting a bit easier I'm hoping you can help me with your ideas here. I've added a few more comments to an earlier post that might help also.

What did you most appreciate during your first week and month with your first born?  So far all that's been requested is nail varnish remover!

Oooooo - edible finger paint recipe

I have just found this recipe for edible finger paint which should be ba-da-bing perfect for TT this afternoon and had to share it with you right away.  Trust me to only discover safe painting stuff on the very last day of my holidays! Boo hiss.

If you look closely it does indeed clearly state opening hours....

We also spent this morning in the rain at The Forgotten Island - at last! Hurrah this was our third attempt to get there. First time we discovered it didn't open on Wednesdays & Thursdays and were pretty gutted.  So details to come on how fab it was later in the week!

I'm off to iron my work wardrobe and cry while TT repaints her bedroom in whatever colour of food colouring I manage to use for the finger paints.....