Plum Baby Give Away

If you read my blog regularly you will know that I received and reviewed some Plum-Baby biscuits just the other week, the folks over at Plum Baby have given me one months supply of baby food, nibbles and treats to give to one lucky reader, so that someone else can give their organic range a try.

Plum Baby is all about real food for babies and not just baby food and all the products are made with the highest quality organic ingredients. They offer babies a taste of what's to come and are full of nutrients and nothing artificial.

The prize includes: breakfast cereals and muesli's, savoury pots, sweet pouches, yummy spelt biscuits and sauces worth £75.00 and the winner will receive the pack most appropriate for their babies age.

To enter, simply go to the Plum Baby newsletter (http://www.plum-baby.co.uk/plum-mums/plum-mums-sign-up) and sign up using the code "Ramblings of a mum on the run" - a winner will be picked at random in 7 days time.

Check out www.Plum-Baby.co.uk and discover more yummy products from the Plum Kitchen.

The Gallery - A Self Portrait

Tara Cain over at the Gallery really threw us a curve ball this week, with her prompt, but here I will let her explain because she does it better than I would.

"The theme is actually inspired by Laura at Are We Nearly There Yet Mummy who wrote something that really touched me a few weeks ago and I want to 'celebrate' it through The Gallery.


On tenterhooks yet?


She wrote about photographs of her mum, who died when Laura was just 9.
For someone who has been voted in the Funnest Blog category of The MADS, she sure made me catch my breath with that post!
She wrote: "Luckily I have photos, quite a few in fact. I don’t just look at the photos, I pore over them I wonder what she was thinking, doing, wearing … just any glimpse of anything that makes me feel a bit closer to her.
Now that I am a mother they mean even more to me . . . "


Well, I'm going someway to help redress that balance today.
Imagine in years to come, your children looking back over photographs of their childhood. Are you in it? Are you always behind the camera?
Our photographs are the story of our lives, and even if you aren't a parent you need to be in it.
I know many many people hate pictures of themselves - myself included - so if you don't want to post one to your blog just think about what I've said and start making that change.
And if you do want to put one on your blog, then GREAT.
Get creative, and show us all who you are.


So, this week's theme is: Self portrait."

OK so there you go there is the explanation for our prompt, it really got me thinking, mainly because I never have my picture taken, I just don't, its against the rules, strictly forbidden.  And this is because I hate looking at myself, for all different sorts of reasons, mainly I just am not happy with what I see and for this reason I assume that no one else will want to see it either, so I am always, always the one behind the camera.

But the prompt and the post that inspired it had me thinking about what smurf sees when he looks at me,    I know he just sees his mummy, I think he either does not see the flaws I do or maybe they are just not relevant to him.  So for that reason I took some self portraits today,  I am not ready to put them on the photo shelf we have yet, but I fully intend to be in front of the camera a lot more, for no other reason than I want my son to have the memories to look back on of all the fun and love that we shared, when time has stolen the event those photos will mean it can never steal the memory.

So thanks to Tara and Laura for showing me how selfish I was being and for giving me the opportunity to change it.

I cant wait to see the face behind the blog, go on over and have a look for yourself.

And I will post mine before I have a chance to change my mind.

Moody Mummy

Do you ever have days when you feel like a negative, moody mummy?  I have been having a whole weekend of that, I feel like I have spent the whole of the weekend telling smurf 'No" or "don't do that' or 'come here'.  I can hear myself but cant stop the words coming out of my mouth, and then end up feeling really bad that I am being so negative about everything he wants to do.

I know that some of the things I seemed to be telling him off for were for his own good, either because he was going to hurt himself or be in danger, but I dislike being that way and I don't want him to think I am always on his case.

One of the things that I have found myself telling him off for this weekend is for not holding my hand when we are out somewhere and wanting to wander off, this drives me to distraction, I know he is trying to excerpt his Independence, but it terrifies me that he may get lost or wander away too far from me, and he is so sincere when he promises that he is going to hold my hand, and gullible fool that I am I always give him the benefit of the doubt and believe him, and every time he ends up saying "mummy I can walk by myself".  Is it just a thing that toddlers go through or something that needs to be nipped in the bud, I really don't know.

Smurf is not a naughty child , he is generally really good, so it must just be that mummy had much less patience this weekend, hopefully the rest of the week will be better and we will have a much more moan free week.

Plum Baby Review

The lovely people over at Plum-Baby asked me if Smurf and I would like to try out some of the snack foods they had developed recently.

I had used some Plum products when Smurf was really little, as they were organic which we liked and they were handy if we were on the move.

Like many of you I thought that Plum only made foods for babies, so I was really surprised when they told me that they also made snacks and biscuits that would be suitable for Smurf.

We received a lovely box filled with a range of the biscuits that Plum make and Smurf wanted to try them right away.
The first snack we tried were the "Milky Moons" which are flavoured with Chamomile and Vanilla, I felt that these were a little hard and to be honest Smurf was not really taken with them, however it did not put him off trying the other snacks.

We tried also the "Spelt Fingers" with Apple and also with Pomegranate, these come in handy little packs of two, which make them great for popping in your bag when on the go.  These went down much better with Smurf, especially the apple ones which were a firm favorite.

The final cookies we tried were "Oat Rounds" with orange oil and ginger, these were a firm favorite, and I will have to go out and buy some of these as smurf really took a shine to them.

All of the smacks are of course made with organic ingredients, contain no preservatives and are 100% natural, they are all sweetened with spelt syrup and are certified by Organic Farmers & Growers.

All in all I think these make a great slip in your bag smack for babies and toddlers, and if you would like to find out more about the range of products that Plum-Baby produce then there web site www.plum-baby.co.uk , has lots of information about their range and the heritage grains that they use in these super snacks.

The Gallery - Men!!

OK The Gallery this week is all about the men in your life, quite an easy task for me since I am going to go down the obvious route and just go with pictures of my hubby, my smurf and my dad..and I might just throw in a little curve ball for good measure.

This is my gorgeous hubby( I may be slightly biased) taken on holiday in possibly the most boring place on earth.  Lanzarote, its all just a little too dull for me.











Smurf and his daddy enjoying an afternoons painting,

I was left to tidy up the mess...typical.

My dad and smurf, they are the best of friends, and have a liking for matching hats.  My dads as great a grandad as he was a dad, Smurf is a lucky boy, he has a fab daddy too.










Smurf, my little treasure, having fun on the beach.

And finally just a little bit of indulgence on my part, the men I spend most of my Saturday afternoons with.   Liverpool FC.
This was taken one day last season.











Can't wait to see everyone elses' men, hop on over to Tara at Sticky Fingers and check it out

Is It The Same Child?

Today Mr. and myself went to a parent teacher conference at smurfs nursery, which he attends for 5 afternoon sessions a week, each one 2.5 hours long.

The teacher who is apparently smurfs "core" worker (whatever that means) proceeded to tell Mr and I about a child, and after 10 minutes I honestly thought she had got us mixed up with some other parents, the child she was describing bore absolutely no resemblance to the happy, confident little boy that I know, she actually went as far as describe my child as "verging on timid".  It was very difficult to get a ward in edge ways with 'core worker' as she was talking twenty to the dozen about this alien child, when we did finally manage to contribute to the conversation by telling her that it was very strange for us to hear this as the child that we know, is full of fun, imagination and a very individual independent personality, who does have a gentle temperament.  'Core workers' explanation for this was not the fact that she has only been at the nursery in question for 3 months or the fact that my child is only 3 years old, her explanation is that smurf is an only child, and apparently according to her beliefs only children always have issues.

I could see the steam practically start pouring from Mr's ears by this time and thought it best to draw the conversation to an end after telling her that we had no concerns about smurf or his development and that maybe we could review it again in a couple of months.

I left the nursery feeling like we had well and truly been castigated for dooming smurf to a life as an only child and that it was impacting on his emotional development, that and the fact that 'core worker' kept telling us that as mother of 3 boys she was well aware of how they could behave.

My confidence in the nursery has been knocked a little, which is a real shame because it is attached to a lovely village school and the other 2 teachers are lovely, and it seems to be full of well behaved polite children who always look like that are having fun when we drop smurf off and pick him up.

Both myself and my husband have siblings, and indeed smurf has a stepbrother who admittedly is a lot older and has not lived with us since smurf was born, so it would be interesting to get some other opinions on being an only child