In 2010, we made the decision to keep Isabel rear-facing for as long as possible, and bought a rear-facing “Volvo” (re-badged Britax) seat. It’s a fantastic car seat, but as with the majority of rear-facing seats, it has a bigger footprint than a forward facing seat:

As my completely unscientific diagram shows, FF seats fit with the shape of inner car seat whereas RF seats fit almost at opposites, requiring clearance in between the back seats and front passenger/driver. Also, in the event of an additional support leg (which the MultiTech we bought has), that’s another bucket load of space required too.

So anyway, faced with this quite specific requirement, I got a lot of questions on why I don’t just buy a new seat and turn Isabel around. *headdesk* I have no idea how to begin explaining why keeping my daughter 5 times safer is important to me.

Anyway, so after much trawling of second-hand cars on the ‘net, local dealerships etc we settled on a Skoda Fabia. It’s an older version but with a 4 star Euro NCAP rating for passengers satisfies my safety-conscious side. It’s in fantastic condition, full service history, low tax (compared to Karl’s), yadda yadda yadda. Most importantly? It fits all the major rear-facing car seats. Rock on!

Originally published on jemjabella.co.uk - Ultimately better than you.

Have more children (at least one), keep chickens, become more self-sufficient, work for myself, ride the world’s biggest rollercoasters, visit Egypt, finish one of my many(!) crochet blankets, climb a mountain, cook a perfect treacle sponge pudding, ride in a hot air balloon, visit the Ice Hotel, donate breastmilk for premature babies and complete my breastfeeding peer supporter training.

I will probably think of loads more as soon as I hit publish, but what do you want to do? :)

Originally published on jemjabella.co.uk - Ultimately better than you.

It’s no wonder there’s a global problem with debt if school-aged children can apply for credit.

Originally published on jemjabella.co.uk - Ultimately better than you.

I’ve talked about CIO and sleep training before, you know I don’t like it, so I won’t go over old ground. However, as Isabel gets older I am becoming more “live and let live” about parenting and so even if I personally wouldn’t do something, I try not to let other people’s choices bog me down. I don’t have the time or energy to be worrying about someone letting their toddler wail. I certainly don’t see the point in spewing hate-filled vitriol across someone’s facebook page about it.

All’s well that ends well, we all agree.

Except that obviously something has sparked me off ’cause you know I wouldn’t just be writing this post to agree that a) mommy wars are stupid and b) if some random blogger wants to let her 1 year old cry that’s her business.

Indeed… and here lies my problem: not the original post, but the responses. Responses like the one from the mother who let her 10 month old cry so much he hyperventilated and vomited all over himself. Again and again. Responses like the one from the parent who let all her kids cry it out from 12 weeks old because they clearly had no physical needs and were just trying to control her. Responses like the one from the mum who “let her boys cry it out” so they’d sleep through by 8 weeks old.

And do I then want to spam someone’s facebook page or start a ‘mommy war’? No, I want to shed a tear. I want to hug those poor little buggers tight and apologise to them because SOCIETY has such fucked up views on parenting and NORMAL baby behaviour that some parents feel the need to leave tiny, tiny babies to cry themselves to sleep and then brag about it — what a fucking awesome decision it was — on some random blog. On a blog that other mum’s are going to see, that other mum’s will then use to compare to their infants who are (quite normally and naturally) waking every couple of hours or more, and maybe even use as a starting point for a decision that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives.

Does that make me judgemental? Immature? Am I contributing to the “mommy wars”? Probably. But there has to be a line. A line drawn in the sand where we say to people: beyond this, it’s just not fucking acceptable. And if you’re still counting your kids age in weeks or mopping up their vomit because they’re so distraught? That to me crosses the god damn line.

Originally published on jemjabella.co.uk - Ultimately better than you.

Also, I’ve called this a ‘cheaty’ curry because I’ve not properly prepared any spices or anything; I couldn’t even be bothered to chop up garlic. This is because after a crap day at work, the last thing I want/need to be doing is arsing about in the kitchen for hours. Anyway, on with it…

Ingredients

• 1 large onion
• big handful of mushrooms
• 2 big handfuls leftover lamb roughly chopped into chunks
• 2 tsps curry powder (I use mild because I’m a wimp.. adjust to suit)
• glug of Linghams Garlic Chilli sauce
• 1/3 of a tube of garlic pureé
• small tin of Heinz curry ‘beanz’
• 1/2 cup lamb gravy (t’was a bit of experiment adding leftover ‘proper’ gravy, but it boosted the flavour wonderfully; if you don’t have any you might want to use a stock cube + extra water?)
• cup of water
• big glug of olive oil for frying + optional butter

Instructions
Put a big saucepan over a medium heat on the hob and and add your big glug of olive oil (I also add a small knob of butter when I’m using mushrooms as they fry better, but this is optional). Chop your onion and mushroom and add it to the pan, frying gently til lightly golden then add the meat chunks.

After a minute or so of gentle frying, turn the heat down low and add the curry powder, Garlic Chilli sauces and garlic pureé and mix well. Leave to fry for a little longer, stirring regularly so nothing sticks.

When everything looks all curry coloured and all the flavours are intermingled etc, add the leftover gravy and water (or just water if you’re minus gravy… in fact, a nice alternative to both would be a tin of chopped tomatoes, which would add another veg portion I reckon). Add the tin of ‘beanz’ (another portion of veg plus fills it out a bit) and then leave to simmer for as long as you can be bothered to wait. I left mine for 20 mins on a medium heat which got rid of some of the excess fluid, but I’d generally leave a curry for at least 30 mins.

Serve on a clean plate with some microwave rice (ha!). Should serve 3-4 but it depends how much of a fat piggy you are.

Originally published on jemjabella.co.uk - Ultimately better than you.

As per previous post, I had my Well Hung Meat meatbox on Friday, complete with a shoulder of lamb thingy. Lamb being my favourite meat of all time, t’was an event to celebrate. I slow roasted this with big roasties and a load of veg yesterday, most of which ended up burnt… but the lamb was FANTASTIC.

I am telling you this in the hope that, despite not remembering to take any pictures of the resulting lamb (or the failed burnt veg) you will consider me an aspiring domestic goddess. Or at least someone who knows how to whap the oven on to 170 degrees for 3 hours, whatever.

Originally published on jemjabella.co.uk - Ultimately better than you.

Within a couple of days of writing the post, Adam from The Well Hung Meat Company got in touch via the comments and passed on his apologies for the experience that I’d had and as a goodwill gesture, credited my account with points equivalent to the ‘missing’ roasting joint and the steaks that I’d not been happy with. He came across as both polite and genuine in his responses; a credit to the company. :)

Happy to give them a second chance, I placed a regular order with WHM and I received my second meat box in December. I must admit that my memory fails me in the exact contents (what can I say, December is a busy month) but the roasting joint, roughly 0.8kg of beef topside, was fab. It was the first time I’d done a roast beef (normally stick to chicken) and I spent a lot of time on all the trimmings (roast potatoes, proper gravy, yorkshire puds – from scratch! etc) but it was definitely worth it.

I wish I could say the same about the steaks, but again they were cut so uneven I found it hard to get them cooked ‘just right’. I can’t help but think I’m being COMPLETELY anal about this but as a steak (cooking) newbie I need a helping hand with these things.

My next Well Hung Meat box is due tomorrow, so you can probably extract from that I’m happy to continue with a regular order for now … I am planning on trying the Riverford boxes at some point (if nothing else but out of customer loyalty; I do love my Riverford veg) but I’m glad this little meaty experiment has proved positive after all :)

Originally published on jemjabella.co.uk - Ultimately better than you.

Today, for example, we were driving back from seeing my niece & nephew (and their very pregnant mum) and Isabel started laughing…

Me: “What are you laughing at darling?”
Isabel: “The trees!”
Me: “Are they funny?”
Isabel: “Yes [giggling]”
Me: “Are you crazy, Izzy?”
Isabel: “YES! [more giggling]”

And then this evening, completely randomly and unrelated to nothing that was happening at the time she pokes Karl and says “Daddy’s got his willy on!”

I just … yeah. There isn’t a day goes by where I don’t laugh at something she’s said, or something she’s done. She’s insane. No idea who she gets it from, Karl and I are completely normal. Ish.

Originally published on jemjabella.co.uk - Ultimately better than you.

So anyway, follow-up. How do I feel about it now? Great decision, looking back. Don’t get me wrong, I miss Habari. It was quirky, fast and simple; a well-coded system. The path which WordPress is taking though is fascinating. It would be no exaggeration to say that WordPress stuff has formed the bulk of my work for clients this year, and I have had the opportunity to learn/try out so many awesome things.

One project I’m currently bringing to completion is the migration of an existing e-commerce store to a WordPress backend, using custom post types to power the product section and custom taxonomies to tag/categorise products. This tagging, and the power of WordPress’ built-in queries/functions, has allowed me to create a massive bespoke faceted navigation (think Amazon where you drill down the options on the side … Shoes > Size 7 > Brown > etc) in just a few hundred lines of code.

How is this related to my blog? Well, I’m excited by it, and I don’t get excited by code that often any more. :P I can’t wait until the project is live and I have the time to share some of the neat stuff I’ve written / what WP can do & improve THIS site too. Watch this space…

Originally published on jemjabella.co.uk - Ultimately better than you.

I wasn’t a “popular kid” at school (I know you’re not surprised by this). I was different before it was cool to be different. Short boyish haircut, knackered old Doc Martins, purple tights and mismatched socks. I didn’t listen to the “in” music, or watch the “in” TV shows. Nerdy and smart but with a big gob and the ability (and willingness?) to stand up for myself. Didn’t let any fucker push me around, but you know, I think that just made things worse.

Anyway, I had a bit of a weird dream last night in which me, and many from my year at school, were doing a weird quiz thing in a huge gym/assembly room (stand on this side of the room if you think X, move over here if you think Y … I don’t know). Someone got in my face so I put her up the wall and suggested she back off before I did something we might both regret. (Incidentally, this actually happened, but with a different girl in a different place and for a different reason. It worked, though.)

Yeah. I’m not sure why I’m writing this down … I guess I just thought that at the grand old age of not-quite-26, that I wouldn’t give school a second thought now. Pregnancy makes you dream strange things.

Originally published on jemjabella.co.uk - Ultimately better than you.