reren

What is the name of the Facebook group?

Am about to buy a single bed (rather than a toddler bed) which toddler will soon move into - I'm thinking a cheap bed from ikea with a half decent mattress. But how much to spend? I'm thinking you want something reasonably good to support growing body? Looking at John Lewis site it seems you could spend an awful lot on a single mattress - but who knows how many times he'll wet the bed / jump on the bed - dont really want to splash out too much (not to mention can't afford it!). Does 150-200 seem about right (there isnt much on offer that is a lot cheaper than that)?

Very close friend had her twins at 25 weeks - they were 1 pound and just under a pound respectively when they arrived They are now 2 and a bit and perfectly healthy and developmentally exactly where they should be - they are a bit small still but apparently they will catch up by 5 - but there seem to be no health problems and they are talking walking etc it was obviously pretty tough for the parents - but it is amazing what can be done nowadays - so don't be too worried! I pregnant too - and her story has actually made me feel less worried about premature birth because it has been so positive!

It is the best thing you will ever do. We have had 2 lovely au pairs and it has been a fantastic solution for us. I think people get hung up about the idea of having a stranger in the house - but the pros so far outweigh the cons - and there are lots of things you can do to help with the cons. First the pros - it is amazing to have childcare on tap - my au pair starts taking care of my son at 7:30 - allowing me to hand him to her and go back upstairs, shower and get dressed - while she feeds him breakfast / plays with him / gets him ready for nursery. I literally dont understand how people mange to get themselves and a small child (or 2+) out the door on their own. My husband works long irregular hours - so the flexibility you can have with an au pair is amazing when you are in this situation. And having someone to babysit in the evening so you can pop out for dinner or a quick pint is amazing. So lovely for your relationship with your husband/wife - and allows you a degree of spontaneity that is unusual in parents. In terms of what to do to make the relationship work - I'd recommend going for an au pair who is a bit older and more experienced - 22+ We have found it is good when someone is grown up and independent - keen to go out and see friends a lot. Our first au pair ate dinner with us every night and that wasn't easy as we were parents of a small child - and having to cook for someone else and make conversation in the evenings was tiring. Our current au pair prefers to make herself something to eat earlier in the evening and tends to be up in her room or out when I get home from work (by which point my husband has taken our son off her hands). But it is really important to also fulfill your bit of the bargain - it is a cultural exchange - not cheap childcare. They usually want help with their English / a chance to take lessons and some exposure to life with a family in the uk. Most important thing is to treat them really fairly and choose someone you like spending time with. I've heard of families making the us pair work really long hours, do housework etc - you need to stick to roughly 25 hours and just a bit of light housework related to the child(ren) - I.e. tidying bedrooms not scrubbing kitchen floors. I think if you treat someone well and put an effort into making their stay enjoyable - you get a fantastic relationships with a lovely young energetic person for your child and a level of flexibility and support for you that is invaluable. And finally - yes I recommend an agency - though we are just about to try our first au pair found through gum tree - so will tell you how that goes! An agency however does a lot of the hard search work for you and so far we have been really pleased with the result (plus you get crb checks etc for peace of kind.)

Just found out that am expecting another boy and trying to get my head round it - wanting to hear all the great things about being a mum of 2 (or more) boys! I have a brother - and more than I realized I think I expected to have a girl and am slightly mourning all the books I won't be able to pass on (or are there boys who would love Rebecca at 12 as much as I did??), the relationship I would have with a daughter etc - so silly I know because all that should count is having a healthy baby and I should be counting my blessings (and i feel really guilty about the little chap inside who i should just be excited about) but I don't think a third is an option for me - so bit worried about being the odd one out in endless football conversations etc - tell me it is all ok and there are lots of great thing sa out being a mum in a family full of testosterone!

Brilliant thank you all for the advice!

Is it possible he is hungry? we had a similar problem w our son and started giving him a bowl of cereal before bed - suddenly he started sleeping through! It was quite miraculous! Our son was older - so could be that he was just shifting into a stage when he could sleep for longer - but there was definitely a connection with not being woken by hunger in the middle of the night.

Has anyone got a recommendation for a good hypnobirthing specialist? Thinking it might be worth a try 2nd time round?

Has she thought about a year out first to work and earn money to help reduce some of the debt? Probably at 17 it seems like its more fun to just get into debt - but I do think it can be invaluable to hold down a job before you head off to university. It can really help focus you on the kind of thing you want to do after university - or the sort of thing you want to avoid and by the time you get to university you appreciate the freedom and the chance to spend time just focusing on the things you find interesting - think it helps make you more serious about what you are studying?

Been some interesting threads on this already if you search - but will give you the potted history as i understand it. The vaccine has been routinely given to all children in the usa and elsewhere for over 30 years - and as such is considered very safe - has been tested on a huge amount of children. The reason it isn't on the NHs is complex - there is an argument that if you immunize a whole generation of children then the older generation (who caught the virus as children) have a greater chance of catching shingles and more severely. As I understand it if you had chickenpox the virus is in your system and shingles is your body having an immune response to the virus. If you are regularly exposed to chickenpox however - it boosts your immunity each time you are exposed - giving ou less of a chance of getting shingles. Therefore if no one has chickenpox - you will never get the boost effect. The other reason I've read about for not introducing the chicken pox vaccine - which to me seems even more plausible - is that the powers that be have decided to focus their attention on getting people to get the mmr vaccine as a priority over trying to convince people to immunize against chicken pox. Probably a major factor is also that since people aren't clamouring for it and see chicken pox as 'not too bad' there's no impetus to spend extra money on a programme of vaccination.

The naughty step is a comPlete waste of time as when we threaten that he shouts 'yippee' and runs to sit on it!!

I'm intrigued - so this one is for all you amateur child psychologists out there (and hopefully one or two professionals!) : what is it about toddlers and their need to control EVERYTHING?! My once sweet docile little boy is such a tyrant these days - 'you sit here', 'you play with me' etc. Is it that they have discovered they can have some control over their surroundings and it goes to their head and they become power crazed or is there something important happening developmentally? And therefore - how much is it good to follow their 'orders' (only word for it) and how much to push back / tell them to put a sock in it! :-). Currently i do a lot of sitting in uncomfortable positions on the floor, in small space between bath and corner(!), etc, but draw the line at allowing daddy to be told he isn't allowed into the kitchen etc. but what is it all about?

I think the older girl younger brother dynamic can be a lovely one(I am an older sister to my brother). I always felt very maternal and was rarely jealous. In our case I've always thought it was because of different sexes we didn't feel very competitive with each other - but maybe was due to parenting more than gender? Older girls are often great at creating brilliant games to play with their brothers and helping to soften / broaden some of the focus on cars and trucks that can dominate small boys lives! What my parents did was to make us into a little team - they rarely compared us to each other (or never over anything serious) and encouraged us when we defended each other against them. There was a subtle approval of us for example for sticking up for each other - and real disapproval of telling on each other. That behavior wasnt rewarded - and I think it helped us create a bond. We always jumped to the others defense against pur parents. We had terrible rows too of course - especially physical fights (until he got as big as me) - it wasn't the Walton's! But generally we loved (and still love) being together. I wonder if sometimes parents can use the older child to help them parent (tell me when your brother is being naughty) - and maybe that then can set up a funny dynamic? I'm always surprised when I see other friends and their sibling has told a parent something private / a confidence between the siblings. Even now as an adult I know I can tell my brother anything without it going back to my parents - I suppose I feel he has my back (if you know what I mean?). Seems to me that's quite powerful and probably largely created by the extent to which parents try and avoid comparing too much, criticizing one in front of the other, setting up one child as the good child / the other as the naughty? One final thing I've noticed in other close family/ friends - is that sometimes one of the parents can be very dominating forces in the family dynamic - they are the one everyone wants to stay on the right side of / be friends with - and they encourage that atmosphere because it makes them feel good / centre of attention - but it can have the effect of making the parent each child's bestfriend / confident - rather than the siblings turning to each other for that. Not sure if I'm explaining myself very well...but have seen this a number of times... I'm about to have my second (and hoping for mixed gender siblings)so we'll see whether I can practice what I preach!

Really nice guy - I would recommend too

Gillandjo - that sounds really hard - but you must try and see that this is developmental - nothing to do with you at all! My son is the opposite - wants to be w mummy and pushes away daddy - and I can very clearly see it isn't actually anything to do with me being better - but he just sees more of daddy (who is at home more) and its part of a toddler style power game. I think sometimes he just says something like 'I want my mummy' in order to be able to make a fuss about something! My husband finds it hard sometimes - and it is hard to have the person you adore most in the world being mean to you - but this will pass! They get much nicer around 4 I hear! make sure you get out and talk to other mums and dads who are going through the same thing - it is sooo common might make you take it less to heart too realise that.

We are looking to do a very simple loft conversion and trying to get a sense of cost. We will create one room only without building out a dormer / mansard roof or putting in an en-suite. All we will be doing is putting veluxes into existing roof and a staircase. I've done a loft before and am familiar with the various costs (fire doors, smoke alarms, steels, insulation,etc) so I know it isnt necessarily cheap or straightforward even though its so simple - but I wondered if anyone had done anything similar recently and how much you paid?

I think what I need to do is take my son to the dentist but I wonder if any mums have any advise / words of wisdom. We recently went through a phase w my 2 and a half year old when he wouldn't let me brush his teeth and wouldn't touch the tooth brush himself. It lasted quite a while (6 months?) and in that time he went many times without having teeth brushed - I did do some pinning him down and forcing the toothbrush into his mouth but I was worried it would give him a complex and so more times than not we just let it go. Finally we are in a new phase and he's loving brushing and doing it reasonably well - though I'm sure not getting the back teeth get that super clean... I just had a good look at his back teeth and gave myself a bit of a fright as they are a bit brown in the middle of the molars! Have I let his teeth rot already! Eek. He doesn't eat sweets but does have some fruit juice (v watered down) though we try and stick to water - and he loves fruit ... Any experience of similar and advice on a nice local dentist to take him to see?

I had a great experience with kings even though i was hoping for a homebirth that didnt happen- even the much discussed post-labour ward was ok! It probably helped that i wasnt there for very long - but the staff were lovely. When i was being taken down to the post-labour ward they did this lovely thing where every member of staff i encountered in the lift, hallway etc called out congratulations in this delighted, heartfelt way. It still makes me teary thinking how wonderful that was to hear from strangers after a pretty tough birth- and impressive considering they must see so many women who've just given birth. You need to be prepared that you are'nt going to get much help w the baby from midwives on post labour ward(though they are there for important things like making sure your baby is healthy and i had some fantastic help w breast feeding). Now that your partner can stay it must be great. I was on my own and was pretty hard to move around...but still i'd say kings is a great place to have a baby.

Went last night and thought the food was lovely - only small gripe is that when I asked the waiter which were the less spicey dishes - he sneered at me that it was thai food and all hot. I can see that he might feel it was unsophisticated to turn up to a Thai restaurant and not want hot food - but I don't think he should make the customer feel like that... And a really good restaurant would offer to customize something a little for the customer. As it was we ordered a range of dishes and only one of them was particularly hot - so in fact he didn't need to be so dismissive...as actually a number of things on the menu were quite mild and I'm not sure why he didn't tell us that... Also felt it was a bit wrong to suggest 5 dishes between 2 - was way too much food - we could have easily done with 3...will go back but perhaps won't rush because of the service. Prefer ganapati - they aren't at all up themselves in there.

I can sort of understand the angst - particularly wanting to protect little girls from living in a world of commercial Disney pink - but I have to say I think worrying too much about the Cinderella story misses the complexities of growing up. I loved Cinderella - and spent many happy hours with my grandmother sweeping the hearth with her pretending to be the ugly stepsisters - for some reason I liked dramatizing that bit rather than the finale of finding the shoe and getting the prince? As I grew up I became more and more of a feminist - and I find it quite easy to reconcile the career woman, main bread winner, feminist I have become with the little girl who loved Cinderella. Fairy stories have been part of our culture from time immemorial - every culture in the world has a version of the Cinderella story (granted our Disney version is a pretty drippy sanitized one compared to more ancient versions where death, mutilation and virginity were much more prominent elements of the tale!) but personally I think (some) little girls love pink and princesses for a while, but it doesn't automatically make them passive or weak - and they are just as likely to go onto having a phase of tomboyness. To me the far far more important role model is their mother and father - and how they share roles and responsibilities, childcare and work. Where parents share this equally - I think little girls and boys grow up to expect that from their own lives and relationships - whatever their interest in Disney/ Cinderella as a child.

Just to add to the mix - I was apprehensive about sharing the house - but it has been really easy with both au pairs. They tend to develop busy social lives and so aren't around on weekends much anyway - and the huge benefits of having an extra pair of hands around far far outweighs any negatives. But it is all about finding someone you like and treating them really fairly. It does sound like you want a bit more work from someone than would be fair to ask an au pair - so might need to go for nanny/ housekeeper - but don't let the sharing the house thing put you off - it really is fine.

I have a whole stack sitting in hall ready to go to recycling - pm me if you could come pick them up

Don't know much more than what I heard on news night - think currently the NHs will not pay for over 39 year olds to have treatment - and new guidelines are suggesting this increases to 42?

I assume you know that the brierly have a particular specialism with women who have mental health issues / depression? Definitely talk to your midwife - it isn't something I have personal experience of but i was with the brierly with my son and they were wonderful. I am very confident that you will be met with some real expertise in helping you cope with this. It's scary being pregnant and overwhelming - and your hormones are doing all sorts of strange things - not surprising that it might throw things out of kilter.

Guidelines have been released today recommending extending Ivf to women up to age of 42 on NHs. Now we can expect lots of tedious headlines about selfish career women choosing to leave it too late/ wasting NHs money. I love Mariella Frostrup she was great on newsnight - making the point that it isn't just women's choice to leave it til after 35 to have kids. So infuriating that men not wanting to settle down and have babies pre-35 is never discussed. Culturally it's as much of a 'problem'as women supposedly making that choice! (If its a choice at all...bet a huge number of women having Ivf after 40 have been trying other means to have babies for years before they turn to ivf anyway) Makes me so angry that we don't ever - as a society - say to young men 'if you want to have an easy time having kids with the woman you love - get her pregnant as young as you can!' In fact we constantly reinforce the idea that men can keep making babies into their 90s so fertility isn't something for them to worry about. So outdated to behave as though women have all the responsibility in decisions about making children when in fact it's generally v much a joint decision.