all4kidsuk

Holidays over, back to the grind!

All those lovely days off work and children off school equals no hassle mornings, no real bedtime for the kids and taking things a bit easy. To cheer myself up my thoughts have turned to the next holiday 🙂 Continue reading →

We’ve just moved house, the excitement and total chaos are at full swing and that’s just the dog! We’ve sort of moved sideways size wise but the new house needs total re-decorating so furnishing the children’s bedrooms has become a bit of an obsession. There is so much to choose from and our little darlings are very definite about what they would like and keeping within budget is proving to be a problem.

Our eldest boy is 7, very into Ben 10, would like themed co-ordinated bedding and furnishings throughout, bearing in mind that only 6 months ago his obsession was Spiderman, you can see my reluctance to dive in and be-deck the room in Ben 10, we are battling towards a compromise at the moment, but it’s not looking good. My middle girl is 5, all pink and fluffy, we’re not quite into Barbie everything but we are heading towards pepto bismol pink, you’ll need glasses to enter the room. She’s chosen an adorable princess bed with matching wardrobe and chest of drawers, I love them, my husband baulked at the price but once he’d had a lie down and his little girl had worked on him they’re on the list. My youngest, she’s 8 months old, is obviously the simplest. We have been looking at a whole range of gorgeous nursery furniture, but the cot is proving to be the thing, do we opt for a cot bed so she can grow into it or use her old hand-me-down cot for the moment until she’s old enough for a proper bed? There is so much choice for nursery furnishings, furniture and bedding, I’m exhausted, I don’t care about our bedroom, we’ll sleep in a big box, with the lid on.

Have finally managed to get my head into a New Year and back to work mode, boy it was hard! Being dragged back to reality and back to frantic mornings getting the kids up, breakfast down them and into school uniforms and out of the house in time without having a nervous breakdown. In fact the tension has been brewing, just trying to get them to bed earlier than the holiday timetable, which seemed to have crept later and later and almost ended up them putting me to bed, but I did find a great incentive, buy new bedding and save it for tempting them to bed early!!!

The one good thing about the end of Christmas holidays is taking down all the decorations, which was lovely, as now my house seems much large and for a short while tidier! Now that I’m back to near normality it’s a case of trying to sort out the next school holidays, actually I think once you have children your calendar changes and your world is consumed by school holidays including the ever-growing inset days! Found a fantastic range of holiday clubs as well as workshops that are perfect for school holidays. Helps enormously if you have to rely on loving family members as childcare back up, gives them a break and the kids love it.

I’m a great believer in quality family time, it seems to me that kids these days are spending far too much time doing their own thing and missing out on good old fashioned quality family time. Ideally having a family meal together every day would be great but that’s almost a fantasy or living hell and if your kids are like mine then dragging them away from in front of the computer, playstation/xbox or the TV can be quite a struggle, I decided a while back that a few meals a week together would be great, saying that occasionally having a peaceful meal on your own after having fed the brood was good for my digestive system. What I do love doing is persuading them to have a family day out, having children of different sexes doesn’t make it any easier but we take it in turns to decide what we’re going to do, so everybody gets their day and surprisingly enough we all end up having great kids days out.

It was my sons turn last weekend to chose our kids day out, he opted for an outing to a zoo, we went to Regents Park Zoo and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. There was something for everyone and for all ages, My daughter is hoping for a day shopping for clothes, that may be pushing it for my son, but we’ve agreed on shopping in Greenwich in the morning and visiting the observatory in the afternoon with a run around the park before we go home to exhaust the little darlings, that should make bed time painless! Unfortunately I feel we may be running out of ideas, if anyone wants to share their great day out I’d love to hear about it.