May 2011 | Mum In The Madhouse

May 2011

Tracks of my years

This week I thought I would tell you about my song for Mini, as I already told you about Maxi’s. I had a difficult pregnancy with my number two child as I suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum through out it (just like with Maxi) and MadDad had to give me thrice daily injections to try and reduce the sickness, however this was compounded with a relocation 350 miles back to our native North East whilst 6 months pregnant and looking after Maxi (who was only 15 months when Mini was born). So I spent a lot of time sleeping when Maxi was sleeping or being sick when I wasn’t asleep!

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For the love of Lego

We are a Lego House, I was a Lego girl and I still have the rooms for the Lego house in the loft. I am thinking about bringing them down for the boys to play with, but the truth is, they still bold too many precious memories for me to do that yet, I need to hold on to them a little longer.

But just because I haven’t shared by vintage set with the boys doesn’t mean that they don’t love Lego. There favorite type at the moment is Lego Nijago, which is an interactive Lego that you can battle with and boy do they battle. The whole street are hooked on the stuff and the boys rush in from school and grab their spinners, cards and figures and off they go. When they are not battling with them, they are using them in Garrmadon’s dark fortress. They really do seem to have got into the whole Ninjago thing. Yes my boys are younger and they don’t use the cards correctly and they make sure that they come home with the same weapons that they go out with, but they love it.

I am slowly learning about it, the forces of good and evil and the four elements of spinjitzu.

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This is Mini, he is my future …..

How many parents, can say that in the third world? Well if I tell you that 8 million children under five every year die from preventable illness, such as pneumonia and diarrhoea. No Child is born to Die.

Save The Children is focusing on the provision of vaccinations and health care workers. In June there is a meeting in London hosted by David Cameron and attended by other world leaders. Save The Children aims to make as much noise as possible to ensure the funding shortfall for vaccinations (4.7 billion) is met by all the donor countries.

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Is this really what men think about woman?

If you dress like a slut then you are asking to be raped. Is this really what men think about woman? I know that it is not something I want to even let my boys contenttemplate thinking and have to say I was shocked that in today’s society that any man, let alone a police officer would band things like this about.

If you go into a shop is it acceptable to steal as you are being tempted by all the things on offer? I didn’t think so, so why does the way a woman dress mean that she is asking to be raped? But fundamentally what worried me was that this is what the man obviously thought and felt strongly enough to say even though he was aware that it was something that he shouldn’t be saying in his capacity as a police officer.

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Encouraging reading in boys

I wrote a post about encouraging writing in my boys and wanted to followup with one about encouraging reading. I am an ferociously reader. I adore books and lap them up, no, that is not quite right I adore reading. I love words, their meanings, the way they make me feel, the places they take me too. SO for me it was key that I introduced my boys to books very early on in their lives.

Make books available

We have books everywhere and we make sure that they are within their reach, We have them in the loo, in bedrooms, in the sitting room, we have a bookcase on the landing and one in the conservatory too. When the boys were smaller I made sure that books were in a box at their level and we rotated them. We were offered a free trial of Reading Chest and I have to say Mini loves it. He gets three books delivered and we can post them back when he has read them and we get three more in the post. It is superb if you are looking for books which are pitched at their ability and you do not have a library or in our case there is no reading scheme in Reception, which means Mini doesn’t get any books he can read, just ones that we can read to him.

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