Being Mrs C

Nice things

This latter half of July has been a funny old time. It started with me becoming a year older, not something that I usually get all that fussed about, but despite a bad start to the day itself I also had a lovely spread out series of celebrations and treats. Things certainly started to look up with the postman appeared at the door with a large box of treats from Bettys - with strict instructions on the outside that it should be opened straight away as it contained edible delights the postman looked disappointed when I signed for it!

Both Mr C and Little Miss C must have been busy on notonthehighstreet.com as a series of packages arrived from there before my birthday and I was lucky enough to open some wonderful presents on the day itself. The kind of nice thing that you never buy for yourself as you can't justify doing so, but that you look at in catalogues and online and think "ooooh that would be nice".

It's years since I've had any sort of a birthday "party" but something inspired me this year to just invite round a couple of local blogger friends and their families and happily the date chosen for a BBQ coincided with the start of the recent spell of hot dry weather. After all the rain we'd had amazingly we were able to sit out in the garden without coats and wellies and five children were able to explore the outdoors and we even had to apply sun cream to some of them. Having the opportunity to sit back and relax with good friends for an afternoon was bliss and very rare. My lovely, wonderful, thoughtful friends brought gifts with them too - a bottle of champagne to chill until Baby C arrives and a package of beautifully chosen items all with a sewing theme. Both gifts just perfectly thought out - thank you ladies.

Since the birthday celebrations finished there have been family celebrations of a different kind as my sister got married on Saturday. I was a (rather large) bridesmaid and LMC made an adorable flower girl. The recent period of hot weather meant that I'd finally been able to convince LMC that wearing a pretty dress was a perfectly acceptable thing to do and rather than walk down the aisle in jeans and a Peppa Pig t-shirt she instead wore a beautiful vintage-style print dress and looked adorable and scarily grown up. Apart from a complaint that the wedding service didn't include enough singing - hence a quick rendition of "wind the bobbin up" during the prayers - she thoroughly enjoyed herself and all the attention that all the other wedding guests gave her. She completely loved the dancefloor and even at one point grabbed Mr C and I by the hand and insisted that we dance together! It was lovely also to see so many family friends and family members, some of whom haven't seen LMC at all before and others who saw her last when she was just 6 weeks old. Much has changed since then.

Someone pointed out to me this morning that August starts tomorrow - quite where July has vanished to I wasn't so sure, but then sitting down to write about all the nice things that have gone on in just half the month makes me realise just how busy we've been and how much has happened. In addition to all this our loft conversion work has continued and we're even looking at the possibility of the main work being completed this week. There will still be things to sort - like painting and carpets - but it's actually feeling like the end is near and as my due date approaches I'm feeling rather relieved about that. The idea of not having my house full of builders every day is a very attractive one!

So that was July then. Roll on August - and hopefully a month full of completing things. And fingers crossed that Baby C agrees not to put in an appearance until everything is complete!

Time for a puzzle

It's funny, but it was a while before I thought of trying to do jigsaw puzzles with Little Miss C. We had the typical baby/toddler puzzles where you get wooden shapes with little peg handles to fit into the appropriate cut out holes, but it was only when someone gave me a promotional jigsaw that she showed an interest in that I thought of looking for appropriate ones for her to do. Since then we've picked up several in charity shops as well as being bought a few as gifts and they have to be one of her favourite things to do.

They are great for encouraging the fine motor skills required for putting the pieces together and now that she's getting older there is the added challenge of her trying to work out which pieces fit together and match up the pictures on them. Quite often with larger puzzles I will choose the next piece and hand it to her, but smaller puzzles with only eight or nine pieces in total are now do-able on her own, especially if it's a picture that she knows well, such as a particular pig that seems to be famous and on everything right now! Puzzles are also great for helping to increase vocabulary and understanding too - telling her to find pieces that have particular things on them or just looking at a completed puzzle and asking her to name things in the picture.

I love finding traditional toys and games that hold LMC's attention whilst also being educational like this. As much as I also like the high-tech toys and games that she has, there's something slightly romantic about old-fashioned jigsaw puzzles and sitting down and doing one together that's magical. The fact that they can be done over and over again, and also picked up cheaply second hand, just makes me love them even more!

What old fashioned toys and games do your little ones enjoy?

Making the most of the sunshine

If you're in the UK then it won't have escaped your notice that this summer has been WET - very wet. Wet enough that going out to splash in puddles has been a common activity with Little Miss C. Wet enough that when I told her I was taking her to the local Splash Park one day her first response was to go and get her wellies and rain coat and put them on! The outdoor toys that we bought her for her birthday have been used, but we've not had the long lazy days in the garden making the most of them in the way that I imagined.

This last weekend though all that changed. The sun came out and even managed to do so on the day that I'd planned a birthday BBQ with some friends in the garden. We were able to sit in the sunshine and watch the children run around the garden whilst Mr C cooked for us all. No one required an extra jumper, shoes were kicked off and the sun cream even made a rare appearance!

As I sit here on the deck right now with my laptop, above is my view. There's some dappled shade to keep me cool, but a warm breeze, bright blue sky and lots of very green plants thanks to all the recent rain - if I could just ignore the noise of the builders on the roof attempting to sing along to the radio it would be perfect. Yes it is hot, very hot, but please let's not complain. We all moaned about the rain, but now the sun's here let's make the most of it.

There's no need to splash out on expensive things to keep the kids entertained in the school holidays when the weather's like this - just send them out into the garden and do whatever you might have normally done indoors outdoors. With toddlers painting activities are so much easier and less mess if you just do them outside. A bit of paint is much easier to get off the grass than off the sofa and curtains and at the end of it all you can legitimately just turn the hosepipe on them to help them cool off and clean up! For little ones a paddling pool full of water and loads of containers can provide hours of fun - as well as somewhere nice and cool to put tired, swollen pregnant feet.

As long as you can keep children's bedrooms cool in the daytime we also find that all the heat and running around outdoors leads to a better night's sleep too. Drawing blackout curtains during the daytime helps rooms not heat up from the sun as much and they can also block out the early morning sun too - to the extent that we even managed an 8am lie in on Saturday. Perfect.

We might not get much sun here in the UK in the summer but let's make the most of what we do have and please don't complain about it too much - after all we're not sure when we might see that yellow ball in the sky again!

Featured Post: Sorting out the household finances

I'm not sure what's prompted it, but my twitter stream has recently been full of people asking for advice on how to sort out their household finances. People looking for tips on how to reduce their car insurance, contents insurance and utility bills and also how to keep track of what they're actually spending each month.

I can't pretend to be a complete expert here, but several years of balancing our household books (and a previous paid job running project budgets) means that I have picked up some ways of doing things that others seem to find useful so I'm happy to share them here.

How much are you spending and what is it going on

It may sound like a lot of homework, but before you can reduce your outgoings it helps to actually understand how much you are spending and what you're spending it on.

Some outgoings will be monthly (utility bills, mortgage or rent payments, childcare costs) whilst others may only be annual costs (insurance policies for instance) and it therefore helps if you can look back over a 12 month period to see what you're really spending. Get together all your bank statements, credit card bills and other bills and try to note down what your outgoings are on a month by month basis. If you have access to Excel or another spreadsheet application then this will make the job simpler. As a checklist you should expect to have the following items in your list:

• Mortgage/rent
• Gas
• Electricity
• Water
• Landline/Broadband
• Mobile phone
• Council Tax
• TV licence
• Car insurance
• Car tax
• Buildings / Contents insurance
• Credit card bills
• Loan repayments
• Subscriptions / memberships

Also worth doing is working out how much you are spending each month in the supermarket. Break down your credit card bill or keep your receipts to see how much you are spending on food and on other things like toiletries, cleaning products and clothes. Keep track also of those small purchases that you make day to day - coffees and magazines can add up to a surprising amount over a month.

How to reduce what you're spending

Once you know what you're spending you can start to try to reduce things. Look at your last utility bills to see how much you are spending in terms of energy usage and shop around to see if you can get the same for less elsewhere. If you're not already paying by Direct Debit then it's worth seeing if you can as many utility companies give you a discount for doing so. Opting for online billing rather than paper bills also earns you a discount with some companies too.

The next time your annual insurance policies come up for renewal don't just automatically go back to the same company and accept your renewal quote. Phone them up and ask if that's the best price they can do. Also look at what other companies can offer you for identical cover. More money could be saved by looking into whether you actually need everything that your policy cover gives you. If possible increasing the excess on your policy is another way of reducing the cost of your policy. It does mean that you would have to pay more in the event of having to make a claim on your policy, but if you don't have to claim for five years you could make a saving even if you then have to make a claim and pay that higher excess.

Set yourself challenges for how much you want to save on your grocery shopping. Are there cheaper alternatives to things that you buy regularly. Do you end up putting food in the bin at the end of each week - if so stop buying it in the first place. Can you plan meals around what is on special offer in the supermarket that week? Try to buy toiletries in bulk whilst they are on special offer. Toothpaste, shower gel and nappies don't go off, so take advantage of three for two deals or similar when you see them rather than waiting until you run out.

Keep track of what you're spending

If you've set up a spreadsheet to track what you have been spending then just extend it going forwards to keep track of what you're spending now and this will help you to see where you're making savings. Look to balance the books at the end of each month as that will help ensure that you're keeping track of all your spending. Include your incomings in the same spreadsheet and you can see either how much extra you have left over each month, or how much more you need to cut your outgoings by to remain in the black.

Plan ahead

Once you've reduced your outgoings the job's not over - planning ahead will hopefully help you keep on top of things. Think about those additional costs that come up from time to time. The need to replace your washing machine or fridge, urgent car repairs if it fails its MOT, the cat needing a trip to the vet and some money to go towards a family holiday. Look at how much these events might cost you if they happened and think about how often they might happen. If you think that once a year you have to pay £500 on average for car repairs then try to plan so that you have enough left over every month so to meet this annual bill - in otherwords £42 a month. That means that if that bill comes in you'll hopefully have enough set aside to be able to pay it without taking too much of a hit elsewhere.

What else can you do?

After reducing your outgoings then next obvious thing is to try to increase your incomings too and there's enough to say on that subject for a whole separate blog post!

I'm no financial expert, but if you found these hints and tips useful then please share this post. If there's anything that you think I've got wrong or missed out then please leave a comment and let me know!

Sweet Potato and Butternut Squash Gratin

Pulling meals together from what's in the fridge isn't my speciality. It shouldn't be difficult, but somehow I always struggle and sadly end up throwing away far more food than we should. I'm making a real effort at the moment to change that and reduce what goes into the council compost bin and I'm delighted to say that this last week I've succeeded and come up with a great new simple meal as a result.

Based on the Waitrose Baked Pumpkin Gratin recipe that I picked up on one of their cards a while back I managed to concoct a delicious sweet potato and butternut squash gratin based on what I could find in the fridge. 

I love the bags that Waitrose do of butternut squash and sweet potato cubes. When Little Miss C was weaning they were ideal for making up a quick batch of puree for her without all the hassle of having to cut up butternut squash - which I strangely always find troublesome. They've been on special offer recently - hence a surplus in my fridge.

Ingredients

• Bag of butternut squash and sweet potato
• Some tomatoes
• Garlic cloves
• Vegetable stock (enough to cover the amount of veg you have)
• Single cream
• Breadcrumbs
• Gruyere cheese

Method

Place all the vegetables in a roasting dish. Pour over the vegetable stock and then place in the oven at 200 degrees for about 45 minutes. At this stage stir though and then add some single cream - enough to cover all the veg, but not to make it too liquid. Sprinkle the breadcrumbs over the top and then grate the cheese over the breadcrumbs. Return to the oven for approximately 15 minutes; until the top is crispy. 

You can serve this either as a vegetarian main course with salad on the side, as an accompaniment to meat, or with some nice bread to make it a comfort food supper. It's a great recipe for just using up what you find in the fridge or your vegetable rack and simple to do too.

In this case the sweet potato gave the dish some bulk, whilst the nutty nature of the Gruyere added an extra taste dimension. The whole thing has also made me much more confident of my abilities to cobble something together from what I can find in the kitchen and hopefully in the process has helped to reduce the amount of food we waste.

The dangers of shoes...

They don't exactly look dangerous do they? A pair of toddler shoes in a bright red and a size five and a half.

Yet yesterday they were the reason behind a dash to the emergency Doctors before closing. Little Miss C didn't fall over in them, nor did my inability to see my own feet cause me to trip over them when she left them lying around. Oh no - nothing that straight forward. Instead I managed to sprain my wrist whilst fastening the buckle on them. Yep, you read that right - a sprained wrist caused by fastening my daughter's shoes. You honestly couldn't make this up.

After three hours of throbbing pain and an inability to even eat cake or drink tea without pain I gave in and phoned my wonderful local Doctor who managed to squeeze me in to see someone quickly. I was pretty sure I hadn't broken any bones but the thought of looking after a toddler whilst not being able to use my right hand was rather frightening. I came away with a prescription for Ibuprofen gel and advice to rest it completely for 48 hours and apply ice. Maybe it's my own stupidity but I didn't realise just how difficult it is to do so many things with just one hand - tying my hair back, fastening my bra and brushing my teeth are all suddenly so much more complicated, and in the case of the teeth brushing messy too! 

So, if you're waiting for an email from me, or for me to do anything else then there's a pair of red shoes to blame!

Good enough to eat?

Sadly I can take no claim at all for this tin full of goodies. Instead it was one of my knitting group, the very talentend Mary, who passed these round at this week's meeting. They all look fantastic, but the details on the donuts deserves special attention - the beaded bits apparently took an age to sew on individually, but the end result is definitely worthwhile.

My knitting progress is at a crawling pace at the moment, but with people around me sharing completed items like this there's constantly more and more inspiration for things I want to knit just as soon as I have the time!

Too much?

It's all been a bit quiet here lately. Not due to an early arrival of Baby C I'm pleased to say, but instead due to the simple fact that there haven't quite been enough hours in the day to get done everything that needs doing.

In addition to looking after Little Miss C and being generally tired from being pregnant my body appeared to decide that a simple cold was too much like hard work this last week and seemed to stop working properly in protest. Two weeks of not being able to breathe properly due to a bunged up nose and sinus pain, coupled with a hacking cough became far too much and I finally had to give in to antibiotics from the Doctor and instructions of having a bit more rest. Quite how you rest with a toddler in the house I'm not sure. Apparently in "olden times" the Doctor might have recommended a week or so in the sea air to make me better, but my NHS maternity exemption certificate doesn't seem to stretch to that. I did ask the GP when I saw him and he promised me that had he been allowed he would have prescribed a week long holiday on a hot beach somewhere, but rules are rules...

Things at home aren't exactly relaxing at the moment. As soon as we learnt about number two being on their way we decided that now was the time to properly convert our loft space into something habitable. A previous owner had installed a carpeted ladder up there, but it wasn't at all safe for small children and the space up there wasn't properly insulated and not all that usable other than for storage. After a successful 12 week scan we bit the bullet and signed up for a full loft conversion to make a master bedroom suite. It will be wonderful when it's all done, and the builders themselves are lovely, keep themselves to themselves, hard working and are very polite and tidy, but it does still mean weeks of having strangers in the house, noise, dust, possessions in all the wrong places and a skip in the drive. Not exactly conducive to nesting, which my hormones seem to want me to do right now, or being able to snuggle up under a duvet in peace whist LMC naps.

Even just the writing of this blog post has amazingly taken over 12 hours. Interruptions included three toddler tantrums, a cup of milk emptied over the kitchen floor, delivery of three Velux windows, one parcel (hopefully for my birthday next week), a book from Amazon, a new shower cubicle and a man to empty the skip! And most of that was before 10.30 this morning. I did also manage to squeeze in time to cook meals, hoover the house, go to my knitting group, attend an aquanatal class and spent some time building towers and drawing pictures with LMC.

The time I set aside yesterday (when LMC was at nursery) to catch up on blog posts instead got eaten up with trying to discover whether our car actually had a valid MOT or whether we'd been driving round illegally for the last six months! (In case anyone from the police is reading I'm pleased to report that actually we're completely legal, but the paperwork at the local car dealership is atrocious and the receptionist there that I think left no long after out last visit got the blame for it all!) Phone calls with companies are always interesting once they pass you on to a manager without you having to even ask to speak to one.

There are plenty of things to look forward to though. We've had a tour round the new local maternity unit where we hope that Baby C will be born and that's made us realise just how soon we should hopefully become a family of four. With the building work progressing well there's also been the opportunity to put into practice what we've learnt from all those Channel 4 property shows that we've watched for years by trying to come up with decoration designs for our new bathroom and bedroom. I've spent more time looking at tiles, paint colours and carpets over the last fortnight than ever before. I'm still not sure we're completely agreed on a design yet, but progress is definitely being made - even if it does mean my kitchen table is currently buried under paint tester pots, sample tiles and swatches of carpets!

It's strange, whilst I like a busy life and love all the progress that is being made I'm still just wishing things would slow down just a little bit. At half past ten tonight we were stood there with a torch trying to decide where we want new plug sockets to go in the loft so that the electrician can start the first fix work first thing tomorrow morning. One of those little jobs that you can't really do with Little Miss C up, but that needs doing so as not to slow down the builder's progress and hence can't wait until the weekend. Ho, hum. 

Maybe it's just all too much to take on at once, especially when pregnant, but then again life would be dull if I was just sat around for the next two months waiting for baby to arrive. Sorry if this all sounds like one long moan as that wasn't my intention - just a realistic snapshot of life at the moment!

Button Caterpillar

As soon as I saw a tweet linking to the instructions to make this Button Caterpillar on the Baker Ross blog I just knew we had to make him.

Completely adorable and all you need to do so is a supply of buttons, a couple of pipe cleaners and a small circle of cardboard. The original design also includes some beads and some small googly eyes, but seeing as I didn't have either that were suitable I just made do without.

Little Miss C was just able to thread some of the bigger buttons on to the pipe cleaner, whilst I did the smaller fiddly ones and also finished it all off. Older children though should be able to do much of this by themselves without too many problems.

This is a lovely little activity for a wet afternoon and playing around with the buttons and pipe cleaners whilst we made this little guy also made me realise just how many other activities we could do with both. LMC's enjoyment in sorting out my buttons and lining them up either by size or by colour also made me think that it might be time to start playing with beads too. I'm not sure who's more excited, me or her!

Buns for new friends...

If a new friend has invited you round for tea then you can't turn up empty handed. Luckily I had a little assistant to help me in the kitchen.