A Reiner Knizia game called Mmm! caught my eye. Published by Pegasus Spiele, this game is for 2-4 players, takes 15-20 minutes to complete, and is suitable for age 5+. A quick scan of the back of the box indicated that it’s a cooperative game. Perfect. Although we regularly play competitive games with our six year old, I’m the first to admit that cooperative games are a much better choice at this age, so that you all win or you all lose together. Your child still gets to learn about winning and losing, but doing so as part of a team softens the sting of losing, and is easier to deal with for young kids. 

  
Back to the game. The premise is simple. You play the part of a family of mice who want nothing more than to throw a nice dinner party. You can’t have a party without food, however, so you need to raid the pantry for cheese, bread, carrots, fish, and cucumber. All sounds easy until you learn that the pet cat is on the prowl, trying to spoil your fun. 

To play, each person takes their turn to roll three dice. Each die has a symbol for cheese, bread, cucumber, carrot, and fish, as well as a big red X. When you roll a food symbol, you can choose to place the die on the corresponding foodstuff on the board, or take another chance and re-roll. You need to complete a whole food each turn to prevent the cat from moving. Fail to do this – or worse, roll a big red X – and the pesky cat will move one space closer to the pantry door. If the cat makes it all ten spaces to the pantry door before you collect all the food, you lose! 

  
So far, we have beaten that cat once, and lost more times than I care to mention. It’s such good fun though. There’s a small element of strategy to it, easily understood by a five or six year old. And even the two year old can take part. She’s happy rolling the dice, but much prefers to play the part of the cat and move one space closer to the pantry door each time we roll a red X. 

  
This game is out new this year, and so far the only place I’ve seen it for sale is Black Kat Games in Kilkenny. But if you can get your hands on a copy, I think you’ll find it’s the perfect winter afternoon game for any family with young kids. 

Disclosure

I purchased the Mmm! board game myself and did not receive any compensation for writing this review. I have done so simply because I think this is a great little game that deserves to be shouted about. 

The post Mmm! This year’s perfect kids’ board game appeared first on Mama.ie.

Of course I didn’t expect it would take almost 2.5 years before my little girl was sleeping well. There was a point around November last year when I thought the broken sleep would finish me off. But somehow it passed, and when the summer rolled around I had to admit that it was time to come good on my promise to myself to start exercising. 

In my entire life, I don’t think I was ever as  unfit as I was at the start of this summer. And in the back of my mind I worried about injuring my leg again, the pain of that calf muscle tear last winter not quite forgotten. 

But I started slowly. First a few walks. I dusted off the My Fitness Pal app and started watching what I was eating. I made one attempt at the 30 Day Shred – which worked so well for me previously – and realized I wasn’t there yet. When I felt my energy levels improving, I started following a Couch to 5k podcast called 5K101. 

The idea is that you run when the podcaster tells you to run, walk when he tells you to walk, and after a few weeks of following his instructions you’ll be up to 5km. You’re supposed to do each weekly podcast three times and then move on. I found I needed four or five attempts at each weekly session before I could do it comfortably. Like I said, I was starting from a very poor fitness level. 

Six or seven weeks in, I was at Week 4. Then the evenings got dark and it became obvious that if I wanted to keep running, I’d have to get up the nerve to run with someone else. So a couple of weeks back that’s what I did. And since then everything has changed. 

My first night running with a friend, we completed a 5km circuit. It took 40 or so minutes and I had to stop to walk 2-3 times. I didn’t know it then but that was a turning point for me. Three days later, I went out by myself for a run. As I ran I kept reminding myself to just put one foot in front of the other, and keep going. (See how I’m still managing to apply what I learned about the power of positive affirmations from my Gentlebirth class all those years ago!) And I did keep going. I ran 5km without stopping for the first time that night, and I’ve clocked up another 18km in the week or so since then. It feels amazing, and I find myself half way through a run wondering at the fact that I am actually doing this, I’m managing it. And something more – I needed it. 

The post One foot after the other appeared first on Mama.ie.

But we did get through the first two categories – clothes and books. I would write at length about it, but I’m exhausted! So I’ll tell the story with pictures instead. 

Step 1 – gather all your clothes in one place. I piled them all on my bed and had instant regret. Where was I going to sleep?   
But a couple of hours later, my wardrobe was decluttered for the first time in years. My bedside locker was empty. I had an entire empty wardrobe, and one empty drawer in the main wardrobe. I was converted. 

As soon as I woke up, and got breakfast out of the way…

   …it was on to the kids’ room. I started with my son’s clothes and within an hour, his clothes boxes looked like this:  

My daughter’s clothes were next. I gathered them on the bed, took one look and decided I needed more coffee. 

  
After a break, I got stuck in and soon her clothes boxes were a thing of beauty too. 

  
Off to the clothes bank then to drop off 5-6 bags of clothes, and then a pitstop at McDonalds for lunch. I figured I had the calories to spare. 

Books were next on the list. We only had five boxes because we did a huge cull a few years back and got rid of 12 boxes of books. 

  
Still though, there were plenty to get rid of, and soon we were down to half that number.   

 
Did I mention that in the kids’ room, I started with 16 of those deep IKEA boxes full to the brim, and when I was done with the clothes, I had 7 empty boxes? By the time I was done with the books, we were mulling over a reorganization of the kids’ room. 

An hour later regret set in. 

  
But it passed and by tonight, we had a whole new room – at least that’s what it felt like. 

   
   
 I really should have taken a before picture, but the transformation wasn’t planned. Suffice it to say, it looked nothing like that this morning. 

So now, I must sleep. Work tomorrow!

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I try to tell myself it’s because our house is too small. And it is small – two bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchen, a tiny bathroom upstairs, and an oversized downstairs toilet (which even after 8 years in the house leaves me wondering how anyone could possibly have thought it was more important to give that additional space to the spare loo rather than to the kitchen). Anyway, into a small house, add two kids and their toys, a husband who is a self-described collector, and me who can’t seem to let go of anything, and what you end up with is stuff everywhere. 

We seem to be constantly battling to keep it under control. During my first maternity leave, I tried Fly Lady with her routines and her incessant emails, but there’s no way you’re going to keep all this stuff under control in 15 minutes a day. So that didn’t work. 

We struggle on instead. Every so often we do a big clear out and it seems like we’re making headway, but then the clutter starts to reappear again. 

And then last night, I spot a challenge from The Clothesline: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Challenge. She had me at Magic.  I was intrigued. Imagining some Disney style magic with little cleaning animals to come to our aid, I clicked through to read about this supposedly “life-changing” book: The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. 

I wasn’t convinced. I laughed at the challenger and all the tidying she had ahead of her. But curiosity got the better of me, and I bought the book anyway. I’m currently 47% of the way through the book and it’s starting to sink in that this is going to involve a serious amount of work. And the skeptic in me feels like running a mile from any life plan that involves making sure my socks have an opportunity to rest. (Seriously. It’s all there in the chapter about organizing your clothes.)

But I’ve already accepted the challenge and there’s no turning back now. Step 1: Read the book. Half way there already. This is easy. 

There’s still time to get on board. Head over to The Clothesline to read all about it and then let us know how you’re getting on. 

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Heading into the winter last year, when we were 18 months in with our second child, the setup in our house would have had Supernanny and Gina Ford and all the rest of the self-appointed experts in a tizzy. Co-sleeping (bed-sharing in fact, so “worse” again), breastfeeding on demand at night, no set nap time during the day. Disaster, right? Except it wasn’t. It worked for us for a long time. And since I’m feeling liberal with the clichés today, my parenting approach consists of a lot of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude.

But somewhere between the summertime and November last year, it stopped working for us. A combination of things I guess. I day-weaned the toddler thinking I was so smart and she promptly reverse-cycled on me and got her extra feeds at night instead when I was half asleep and not paying attention. She also hit that infamous “Leap 10” that fans of the Wonder Weeks book or app will be familiar with. It’s a developmental leap that occurs around the 18 month mark, and is characterized by “crying, clinginess, and crankiness.” Fun times.

And last but not least (and I think this was really what signaled the end of her co-sleeping days), our little toddler sprouted. Suddenly we were being woken by a little foot kicking out or an arm flailing. Then I hurt my leg in late November and ended up on crutches for the best part of a month. 

So something had to change. But instead of trying to change everything at once, we went for one small change at a time. First we night weaned by introducing a bottle, which she wasn’t that keen on. By Christmas, the night time feeds were completely gone. 

Then we set up a toddler bed for her in the kids’ room, with a mattress on the floor for whichever of us had to get up to her during the night. 

That toddler bed lasted a couple of months until she started referring to the mattress on the floor as “my bed” and we conceded that she was actually spending her nights on the mattress and not in her toddler bed at all. So we dismantled it and put it away in the attic. 

In the beginning, one of us was on that mattress with her all night, but we’ve gradually reduced that and now at least a night or two each week, she sleeps through on her own in her own bed. 

Lately with the bright evenings, going down to sleep has been an issue, often taking an hour of lying beside her helping her drift off to sleep. So this week we’ve started to make changes there, and over the next month or two I am hoping we’ll get to the point of a story, a kiss goodnight, and then leaving her to drift off herself. It happened one night this week! It’ll surely happen again at some stage! 

Whenever I begin to doubt this lazy child-led approach to changing sleep routines, I remind myself that I’ll miss those cuddles to sleep when they’re gone. I look at my five year old now – a child who was once in the running for world’s worst sleeper, and I can’t remember the last time I had to lie beside him till he drifted off. Sometimes in the midst of these early sleep deprived years, it feels like the sleep struggles have been going on forever, but once we’re through them and looking back, it all seems to be over in the blink of an eye. And I find I’m glad for travelling this slow and steady path to get where we’re going. 

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What is Bressure, you might ask? 

You might think that it’s a clever buzzword designed to provoke maximum media exposure for a new enterprise at the expense of a group of mothers who are already in a minority. But that would be very cynical of you. 

In fact, it seems it’s pressure to breastfeed. This pressure may take many forms. It can be factual advice provided by midwives at antenatal classes. It might be an offer of help from a friend who has breastfed previously. It could be your doctor asking you how baby is fed at your six week checkup. It’s there when you read a newspaper article that explains that breastfed children are less likely to develop leukaemia. And most bressurising of all – those photos of women breastfeeding their babies. Who do they think they are, smugly feeding their babies?

Luckily as a breastfeeding mother I didn’t have to experience Bressure. When large corporations spend millions sponsoring parenting websites, branding baby fairs, and ensuring that not a day goes by without me hearing a suggestion that their product is “Simply More Advanced” on the radio, or watching giggling babies whose mothers are “ready to move on” on TV, that’s not something that we ascribe a dirty word like Bressure to. Oh no.

That’s just advertising.

The post Bressure – another stick to beat us with appeared first on Mama.ie.

In many ways, I had it easy. I fell in love at 18.  After ten years together, he asked, and I said Yes. We married amid great celebrations with friends and family. Our wedding day was more than just a great big party. That ceremony of marriage conferred rights on us that we wouldn’t have otherwise. We had a church wedding, but the rights we gained were civil rights. There were the obvious financial rights like the right to inherit from each other and the right to share tax credits. 

But more important to us was the right to be considered family. The right to be consulted as next of kin for each other should the need arise. And the right to automatic guardianship of our children. 

When my children grow up, I want them to have this right to build a family with the person they love regardless of their sexuality. This Friday we have an opportunity to ensure they have that right. We have the chance to say Yes to marriage again. And I hope that when they are older, my kids won’t ever remember a time when they or some of their peers were unequal purely by accident of their sexuality. 

We have a chance for positive change here, to bring joy and happiness and the legal right to family to others. 

Say Yes. 

The post Three simple letters – Y E S appeared first on Mama.ie.

But as the kids get bigger, it gets easier to leave for a few hours. So, I left the two of them and my husband planning a fun morning for themselves, while I headed off to the shops. 

First stop Starbucks. I treated myself to a Cinnamon Dolce Latté and settled back into a comfy armchair. Then a sense of déjà vu crept over me. I’d sat in that exact spot once before. She was a tiny baby, maybe 6 weeks old. And she needed to be fed. As much as possible, I had avoided breastfeeding in public with my son. I was so afraid of it. But this was my second baby, and I knew that if breastfeeding was going to be workable, it would have to be convenient. So there was nothing else for it. I would have to grit my teeth, pretend that I was totally comfortable with public nursing and just do it. Nothing wrong with easing myself into it by picking a known breastfeeding-friendly establishment like Starbucks though. 

I quickly latched her on and then looked up, checking I guess if anyone noticed. And who did I see across the way from me but a woman I had met the previous week at the local breastfeeding group, and she was sitting there feeding her own baby. And she smiled. 

I smiled at the memory as I sat there thinking back on that day. How far we’ve come since then. I breastfed my daughter for far longer than I ever expected to and it was such an overwhelmingly positive experience. That day in Starbucks, when I sat reminiscing, we had already started weaning. We were down to a short bedtime feed, and some nights she wanted the milk and some nights she wasn’t pushed. The week after her second birthday, we gently stopped. And then that was it, another phase over. Two years sounds so long when you say it, but in many ways it was the blink of an eye. 

It’s been a few weeks now since our last feed, and just this week, I overheard a discussion between her and her brother. He asked her if she wanted mammy milk or Bob-bob (bottle) milk. “Mammy no have milk,” she exclaimed. “Only bob-bob have milk.” She couldn’t understand what he was suggesting. That was it. It’s already forgotten.

In some ways that makes it really final. Now it’s over. I look back on the days and nights, and the feeds and cuddles, with a lot of fondness and no regrets. As it should be. 

The post And then it’s over appeared first on Mama.ie.

That’s how it began. A simple suggestion and discussion that happened to coincide with the announcement that Blog Awards Ireland wouldn’t be taking place this year. That suggestion for dinner and drinks quickly snowballed into a full blown awards event, complete with ten categories, some nifty trophies, fantastic sponsors, and the best goodie bags going.

I am the first to admit, I had my doubts we could pull it off. But Sylda from Mind the Baby reassured me that we could do this in our sleep. And when Sylda says something, you believe her. So that was that – we were staging our own awards night.

We quickly pulled together a committee with all the talent needed. Mind the Baby explained the plan to us and then set about arranging a venue – the Rooftop Terrace in Odessa Club & Restaurant no less. The Airing Cupboard designed our logo and colour scheme. At the Clothesline, The Busy Mama’s, and Raising Elves started organising sponsors, while Dolly Dowsie started planning the goodie bags. And meanwhile I took a crash course in Advanced WordPress and figured out how to facilitate nominations, voting, and ticket sales on the site.  That was February.

I look back now and the weeks seem to have passed in a whirlwind of emails, phone calls, vote tallying, and goodie bag packing. Before we knew it, it was 2.30pm on April 25th and we had three hours to go.

It was around that point that it struck me that choosing the roof top terrace in a building with no lift may not have been the best idea. But somehow we managed to get everything upstairs and set up. At 5.22, Deborah reminded me that I might want to get changed out of my jeans and tshirt. And by 5.30, I was downstairs greeting our guests as they arrived. All 56 of them for dinner.

Three delicious courses, a glass or two of wine, and some party games later, it was time to scoot everyone upstairs for the awards. The atmosphere was wonderful. It felt like a get-together with old friends. All those media outlets who like to rant about the mommy wars could have learned some lessons from our group. We’ve got it all – babies fed from boobs and bottles, born in hospitals and at home, pushed in buggies, carried in slings, hovered over and left to range free. But I didn’t sense competition in that room. I sensed friendship, fun, and real support for all the bloggers – not just the winners. I’m not sure how to write this without just sounding like I’m blowing my own trumpet – that’s not how it’s intended – but I felt a real sense of pride looking around. I described it to someone there as feeling like that post-birth high. You know when you and your partner look and each other and look at your baby and say “Wow. Look at what we made.”

I started the Irish Parenting Bloggers group on a whim – a small bunch of us who’d gotten to know each other through Twitter were trying to set up a lunch or dinner. The idea fizzled out, but the group remained. And then over the years it grew. Mind the Baby and At the Clothesline joined me as administrators. I added the directory and web site, with the idea of building something that would promote the group and its members. And while all this was going on, friendships formed. There are lots of blogging communities out there, but I like to think we built something different. A blogging village if you like, with a focus on the people, not the blogs. We try to build each other up, rather than compete. That was the real achievement that I felt the night of the awards – and it wasn’t my achievement. It was the entire group’s. People hadn’t come together for a competition – they had come together for a celebration. 

Old friends greeting new friends. People who’d never met before in real life launching straight into conversation as though they saw each other every day. At times, I wondered what the sponsors and the bloggers’ guests who were attending the awards with us must have thought, because it was a night for in-jokes and group hugs.

Sylda MC’ed, Suzy tweeted, Laura took photos, Deborah loaded up the music (and the occasional Gentlebirth track), and I handed over envelopes and teapots. And we smiled and laughed and chatted our way through the evening. I caught up with Office Mum (winner of Best Parenting Blog on the night!) and Another Drop of Ink over dinner. I admired Bumbles of Rice‘s new shoes before we went upstairs. Swapped sling recommendations with Stuff and Nothing, searched for her lost phone with Glitter Mama Wishes, chatted to “old friends” like My Thoughts on a Page (who came away with both Best Personal Blog and Best Writer), Kate Takes 5, Proper Fud, FatDebSlim, and Where Wishes Come From (who won Most Beautiful Blog), and hopefully made some new friends in Lady Nicci and Raising Ireland, and so many more. I’d better stop now, because I’m in danger of trying to list everyone, and I will inevitably forget one blog if I do that and hurt someone’s feelings!

Suffice it to say that I was smiling heading to bed that night – not least because I had booked into The Gibson and had a wonderful hotel room all to myself – and still smiling when I headed down for breakfast the next morning. What fun! I can’t wait to see what we do next.

And if me going on about it, isn’t enough for you, check this out just to see what we achieved: #IPBAwards 2015: How did we do?

The post Let’s go for dinner #IPBAwards 2015 appeared first on Mama.ie.

 This week I’m delighted to bring you a guest post from my friend and fellow blogger Kate, of KateTakes5. Kate writes lots more pearls of wisdom about parenting, fitness and lifestyle at Kate Takes 5. Or you can follow her on Twitter or Facebook. Or you could just read a book instead. 

I was in a shop at the weekend with my sister and our daughters buying provisions for the Sunday roast.

‘And can we just get these biscuits too?’ asked her 12 year old.

‘Um..no’

‘Please, they’re really yum. Ginger. Lovely. Honestly.’

‘No’

‘Oh come on, please, just one packet?’

‘I said no’

‘Pleeeeaaase. I won’t ask for anything else..’

‘Oh ok then’

Of course I knew from the very start of this that she was going to fold eventually. It’s not that she is particularly weak, or that her daughter is particularly persuasive. It was that innocent little ‘um..’ at the start of the conversation that I knew the girl would pounce on like a tramp on chips. It was a school boy error on my sisters part. Didn’t she know these things?

Perhaps not. So I decided to note down my Top 6 red flags in the art of saying no.

– Never pause before your no. Any millisecond of hesitation will bring with it hours of pester power.

– Like ‘um..’, any language fillers used as a pause for thought will be seen as a sign of weakness and they will go in for the kill.

– Do not reply back with a question. Queries such as ‘When did you have them before?’ ‘Are you going to buy them with your own money?’ will not help. Whatever the question is it will be seen as an opening to continue the harassment and you will lose.

– ‘I don’t think so’. Not good enough. A firm and forceful ‘NO!’, preferably shouted whilst invading the personal space of their face is required.

–         ‘We’ll see’. A favourite of mine for some time until I said it to the six year old one day when he persistently asked for ice cream just before dinner. A moment later I heard him whisper to his sister ‘she’s going to give it to us’. Hmmm.

–         Puppy dog eyes – don’t be fooled.

I’m sure I’ve missed tonnes of other lapses in concentration that see our wallets invaded and our pockets picked. Do let me know. Together we can share the knowledge and stamp out this atrocity.

The post Guest Post: The Art of Saying No appeared first on Mama.ie.