Tag Archives: family

8 Things You Can Do While Your Kiddos Are In The Bath

So, it’s January. And while you may have been listening to me giving out shite about that dreaded first month of the year, I do like that it forces us into a little clean-out.

I’m not talking about detoxing our livers here, I’m talking the house – the presses, the overstuffed wardrobes, the space in the attic where the Xmas decorations are going to be stuffed for the next 11 months.

Ass Monkey and I bagged up seven bags of stuff from our bedroom yesterday evening. It had been used as a dumping ground for months while we had been running around planning the wedding.

We’re talking rubbish, clothes, shoes, weird belts that he’d been hanging onto since possibly the 80’s, socks and jocks that we have no business hanging onto because they are tatty/grey when they should be white/say ‘SuperDad!’ on them – chucked, chucked, chuck.

It only took 20 minutes and felt great to get on top of it. And to make things all the nicer, the kids were in the bath the entire time. Look at that for multi-tasking!

It made me think about what you can achieve when your kids are occupied and quiet for a few minutes (although we did have to referee a few rows over rubber duckies), and I was reminded of this article I wrote for fab parenting site HerFamily.

NO, you cannot leave your children unattended while they are having a bath.

YES, you must supervise them at all times as they play with bubbles, brush their ears with toothbrushes and attempt to deliver all of the bathwater to the sitting room below.

BUT! While your kids are happily splashing around, they mostly don’t need you to interfere with their playtime in any meaningful way.

So why not let them at it, and rather than sitting on the toilet or the bathroom floor, counting down the minutes to when their little fingers officially turn prune-like, get on board with multi-tasking like a pro instead:

Here are 8 things you can totally do while your kids are blowing (or eating) bubbles:

1. Get your nails ‘did

Twenty minutes is plenty of time for a quick manicure. I can get my old chipped polish off, give my nails a quick file and rub some oil into the cuticles while the kids are doing their thing. Actual nail polish is impossible because you will literally be called upon to towel dry a little one as soon as you have one coat on. Not worth it!

2. Give your hair a boost

Whether you need to brighten up your blonde or give your brunette tresses a boost, these home treatments can be applied while you’re waiting for the little ones to clean behind their ears. Just apply, and relax.

3. De-fuzz

If you’re like me, you’ll know that the best-planned bath times for yourself don’t always come to fruition. Given that this is where I normally shave my legs, I end up having to find other convenient times to get them done if my own bath time is missed. So, lather up while you’re in there now and break out the lady shave.

4. Try a new product

Face masks, hair masks, exfoliators, eye creams, overnight recovery creams – pop them on now while you have a bit of time. Once the kid’s bath time is over and you actually get them into bed, it’s probably nearly your own bedtime too, right?

5. Tame those brow monsters

I am yet another woman who is bereft when she looks in the mirror each morning and sees the gaps where her eyebrows used to live. Why, fashionable-to-pluck-them-to-shit era, WHY?? Get them back in order, stat!

6. Massage your bags away

Not enjoying the sight of those under-eye bags every morning? Me neither. Take a few minutes and massage them away. Easy peasy.

7. Sort your socks

There is a laundry basket in my house that I try to ignore for as long as is humanly possible each week. It contains all the socks that have come out of the washing machine and have yet to be paired. No one else in our house gives a shit about this laundry basket so here and there, I drag it into the bathroom when the kids are having their bath, sit on the floor and deal with it. Painful but essential.

8. Clean as you go

I sometimes take the opportunity to give the bathroom a going over while we’re all already in there. I’m obviously conscious that you can’t use bleach and other toxic sprays while the kids are in the room, so try these natural cleaning ideas for the sinks, mirrors and surfaces. End result? Your kids AND your bathroom will be spotless. Boom.

It’s #BlueMonday today so we hope you’re doing ok and we’ve given you a bit of a laugh. Be kind to yourselves!

We are family – I got all my sistas with me!

I am sitting in the living room, ploughing chocolate bourbons into my face while my 2.5-year-old has an apocalyptic, unbridled shit fit on the other side of the door, all because she wants me to re-enact, word for word, an episode of Charlie and Lola that I haven’t even bloody SEEN. Meanwhile, my napping four-month-old wakes prematurely, starts to scream and I’m thinking – God, wouldn’t it be great to drop the kids off at Mum’s place tomorrow while I sit in a dark, quiet room for a few hours.
Except I can’t, because in 2001 I left Dublin and moved to the UK. I only came over for a New Year’s Eve piss-up, for God’s sake, but twelve years later find myself still here, married to a Londoner – who I have twice allowed to get me knocked up – and I’m now a stay-at-home mother living in Brighton. And it’s at times like this, when the racket from the hallway hits such a crescendo I’m waiting for social services to turn up, that I look mournfully at my snot/puke/milk-covered trackie bottoms and really miss my family.
Yet I’m definitely not alone – certainly not in the ‘when-did-my-cute-toddler-turn-into-Satan’ thing – but in that my husband and I are effectively raising our children alone, without the blessed presence of family around the corner. As with many, many young families these days, there’s no parent, sibling or cousin to swoop in unconditionally and help out when the situation gets desperate, and the irony of it all isn’t lost on me – I couldn’t wait to get out of Dublin and put space between us, and now I’d probably sell a kidney to have Mum live here too.
Out of the ante-natal group we attended before the birth of our first daughter, only one of the six women had family also living in Brighton. The rest of us had gravitated here from all over the UK – in my case a different island entirely. We were all about to embark on the single hardest thing we had ever done and, I believe, because we all knew that none of us could crawl, weeping and milky, to our Mums’ houses in those hideous post-partum weeks, we all turned to one another and became the firmest of friends.
After the initial shyness of those classes, which no matter how cosy they try to make them ALWAYS feel like an AA meeting, all the mums-to-be met up for brunch. We waddled into a café like a line of geese and, before the coffee even arrived, had covered such mouth-watering topics as perineal massage, varicose veins in unspeakable places (guys, you don’t want to know) and tits with more lines than a Tube map. ‘So apparently you poo yourself when you start pushing, the midwife just wipes it away! Here, try the black pudding – it’s delish.’ That kind of thing. How could you not love them?
And after we all gave birth – the six babies arrived within nine days of each other – we would email and text each other all night during our interminable nocturnal feeding sessions. No correspondence, before or since, has ever made me feel more supported or made me cry laughing so much. ‘My fanny is in RIBBONS, my nipples are BLEEDING, and the PRICK is just lying there snoring again.’ Or ‘I finally felt brave enough to leave the house today. I got stuck in traffic, ran out of petrol, the dog shat all over the back seat and then I couldn’t work out how to get the FUCKING car seat into the buggy frame.’
Over the next 2.5 years, we have seen each other through teething, weaning, behavioural problems, marital strife, toilet training, financial woes, miscarriages, illness and broken bones. We have watched each other’s babies turn into toddlers, sharing in all the brilliant, magical stuff that comes with it. We’ve supported each other when some of us had to endure putting our kids into crèche to return to work. We have provided cake, tea (wine) and a sympathetic ear for each other more times than I care to imagine. Yes, we all have our other halves to talk to, but only a fellow mother can really understand what we’ve been through. The physical gorgeousness aside of pushing something the size of a grapefruit through your most intimate area, there are the hormones, the body image, the career sacrifices (for some of us anyway), the broodiness when you want a second one, despite the fact your fanny looks like a chewed orange from last time. Only your mum friends will get all that. And so, even though I miss my family like mad, I’m kind of glad I didn’t have them around. I know I would have gotten too comfortable sitting in Mum’s kitchen. I wouldn’t have been forced to get out there and meet these brilliant new people, who I’m sharing the adventure of my life with.
Suzanne with her away-from-home family. (L-R) Laura, Emily, Peigh, Suzanne, Clair and Harriet

Suzanne with her away-from-home family. (L-R) Laura, Emily, Peigh, Suzanne, Clair and Harriet