Natural Beauty with Baby
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August 2017

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Jonah tucking in to cheese and lentil wedges
Food

Jonah’s cheese and lentil wedges for baby led weaning

This recipe for cheese and lentil wedges is adapted from the fantastic Baby Led Weaning Cookbook. The book is invaluable for tasty, simple recipes that your baby or toddler will love! These lentil and cheese wedges are just the right size for little hands, and are great with a side serving of Greek yogurt and fresh salad vegetables like tomato and cucumber (or umb-umber as Jonah calls it). The first time we made these yummy wedges from The Baby Led Weaning Cookbook, they didn’t turn out so good – although I think Jonah would disagree with me, since he ate up all his serving! I used Wensleydale cheese (a crumbly lower salt cheese), and I probably overcooked them slightly. Nonetheless, Jonah loved them, so I had another go. This time I used Cheddar cheese and reduced the cooking time by 5 minutes. They came out great and held it together…

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Review of Weleda Nursing Oil
Breastfeeding

Weleda Nursing Oil review

In this post, I review Weleda Nursing Oil. I’ve been breastfeeding Jonah for 14 months now. It’s so cosy and convenient and we love it, but it hasn’t always been easy. We struggled to get him latched on in the first few days and we were advised in hospital to use nipple shields. The shields worked really well and we were able to feed. Yet Jonah lost over 10% of his body weight within the first week. He was very fussy right after feeds, and he cried a lot in the night. Worried and doubting, we supplemented with two 4oz bottles of formula a day to help him gain weight quickly, and satisfy his hunger. And gain weight he did! This allowed us to be discharged from hospital as his weight gain was ample. Did he seem any more satisfied? Not really. In hindsight, I believe Jonah’s fussiness was normal…

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Enjoy the flowers – Jonah and Mummy
Parenting

Photography post – Jonah enjoys the wild flowers

Stockton-on-Tees is our home town – we live just outside of the centre of Stockton in a village called Norton. Along with Billingham, it’s one of the most northerly places in Stockton borough. This year, local people have been getting really excited because the council seeded beautiful wild flowers instead of planting rigid rows of traditional bedding flowers. And they look so beautiful! And the pollinators love them! Well done council! We thought we’d take Jonah down to one of the sites on Bypass Road in Billingham to have a look since he’s very much into flowers, trees, and running around like a small boy who’s just found his legs. Weeeeeee! We’re really happy with the photos we took. You can never have too many photos of your toddler, since they grow so quickly and change fast. We’re both camera nwerds and Jonah is the perfect subject! We’ve used a…

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Together after Jonah's birth - Jonah's birth story
Parenting

Jonah’s birth story – a day of love, tears, and pushing

It’s long overdue, but I’d like to share Jonah’s birth story here on my blog. It seems such a long time ago as Jonah is now 14 months old. Sitting here to write it makes me feel so happy and gooey, as it was such a beautiful day full of love, tears, music, and pushing! I’d hit 40 weeks and Jonah’s due date knowing that only 5% of babies actually arrive “on time”. I knew he’d arrive a bit later than his due date. North Tees hospital kept moving our dates forward at scans, and since I knew the exact day I fell pregnant, Jonah was actually just measuring big for his dates. We’d followed a HypnoBirthing course with the excellent Vicki Lund, so we had birth preferences in our hospital folder. Jonah’s birth didn’t go exactly as I’d hoped, but it was a completely positive experience! I’m so glad…

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Why I'll never sleep train our baby
Parenting

Why I’ll never sleep train my baby

In this post, I share why I’ll never sleep train my baby. We were gifted an old-fashioned crib by family, but went out and bought a Snuzpod sidecar crib so we could co-sleep safely. When expecting, we said we’d never bed share because we’d read all the advice about how bed sharing could lead to SIDS and was dangerous. We’d never put Jonah’s health at risk! We stayed two nights in hospital to get breastfeeding support, and were surprised that Jonah didn’t sleep well in his crib. He’d cry when we put him down, and found it very hard to settle in that little plastic box. In my ignorant new mother haze, I genuinely believed there was something wrong with him. I even asked the midwives why he wouldn’t settle anywhere but in my arms. The belief that babies sleep in cribs was so strong with me. After Jonah’s birth,…

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Prevent and treat nappy rash with natural nappy creams
Children's Skin Care

How to prevent and treat nappy rash with natural nappy creams

This post focuses on how to prevent and treat nappy rash. Does your little one suffer with nappy rash? So many babies and toddlers do. Whether it’s teething, colds, food intolerances or eczema. Sometimes it takes some sleuthing to get to the “bottom” of it. This post will help you figure out how to prevent and treat nappy rash with natural remedies, lifestyle changes, and natural nappy creams. Towards the end of my pregnancy, I started to give nappy cream some thought – maybe I would need nappy cream in my hospital bag, and at my baby’s changing area? I pondered if mainstream nappy creams would be full of junk ingredients, like a lot of mainstream baby products. Like a lot of parents to be, a Bounty newborn baby pack was thrust into my hands, with its free mini tube of Sudocrem Nappy Cream. Scanning over the ingredients (including sodium…

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Helen, about me
Pregnancy

Four beauty products to rethink in pregnancy

Pregnant and still using mainstream beauty and skincare products? If you haven’t already, here are four beauty products to rethink before baby arrives, and some great alternatives that are kinder to baby, you, and the environment. How much of what we put on our skin is absorbed? In researching this blog post, I wondered how much of what we apply to our skin actually gets absorbed. Figures fly around the internet at something like 60 – 70%. Well, this isn’t true, because there is no one magic percentage. This article explains why we don’t know how much of an ingredient will be absorbed when applied topically. To step back a little, penetration and absorption are actually separate things – penetration is where a chemical makes it down into the deeper tissues of the body. Absorption is where a chemical actually enters the bloodstream (source). Both depend on several factors: When pregnant or breastfeeding, and…

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Families gathering before the Big Latch On
Breastfeeding

The Global Big Latch On 2017

We’ve just got back from the Global Big Latch On 2017, where families around the world gather at their local event to simultaneously breastfeed and offer peer support. The children are all latched on at exactly 10:30am so it truly is a participatory event. It’s great to be involved in something so big! The Global Big Latch On takes place during World Breastfeeding Week (1st – 7th August). It aims to create a lasting support network for women, their families, and the wider community, and quite importantly sets out to normalise breastfeeding as a part of daily life. We attended the Middlesbrough Big Latch On. We met our breastfeeding friends at Stewart Park, a gorgeous old Victorian park with sweeping views over the beautiful ancient trees. In total, 34 women and their nurslings took part in the event. History of the Global Big Latch On The Global Big Latch On was…

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A breast milk bath - learn about the benefits of breast milk bathing
Breastfeeding

Breast milk bath – how to and benefits

In this post, I’ll be looking at how to make a breast milk bath, and the benefits to baby and mama a breast milk bath can bring. A little backstory: it’s been a long time since I expressed breast milk on a daily basis for Jonah. It used to be a regular thing for me to have the Haakaa breast pump swinging from one breast whenever Jonah was breastfeeding on the other. I could leave some milk for him while my husband had him for an hour, and I’d take some much needed self-care time in the form of pilates classes. Fast forward a few months, and I’m done with classes now, feeling fully recovered from pregnancy and birth, and feeling like running around after my steam train toddler is just about as much physical exertion as I can handle. This week, Jonah’s had a few stubborn spots across his…

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