Natural Beauty with Baby
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2017

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Blogger Recognition Award
Blogging

Accepting the Blogger Recognition Award

Woke up this morning with a lovely comment in my inbox – I was thrilled to discover I’ve been nominated for the Blogger Recognition Award. Massive thanks to Marie at My So Called Crunchy Life for nominating me! Marie’s blog is close to my heart, as it talks about subjects like breastfeeding, and living a healthy lifestyle with your littles. You can read her acceptance post there. It’s so nice when a fellow member of the blogging community recognises your efforts in producing blog content – so big virtual hugs to you, Marie! Accepting the award requires answering some questions that will help support fellow bloggers at the start of their blogging careers: Why did I start blogging? Natural skincare is my passion. I want to help parents find healthy alternatives to the products they find in chemists and supermarkets. I love to diary my life with photos and writing, and my…

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Can a scented candle ever be healthy?
Wellness

Is there such a thing as a healthy scented candle?

As the nights start to draw in, I’m starting to think about a healthy scented candle. Home fragrancing is possible in a myriad of ways, but nothing beats a candle for both ambience and fragrance. I absolutely adore candles. I unashamedly love browsing candle displays in shops. Who can resist having a sniff of candles with such enticing names, like “fluffy towels”, “bourbon wood barrels”, and “aloe water”, just to see if they smell as good as they sound? Me and candles, we have a long history together. I enjoyed my first visit to a candle factory aged 7 years old, where I dipped my first candle at Cheshire Workshops. Dabbling in candle making at home for the last decade or so, I started by buying all the kit – paraffin wax pellets, stearic acid, artificial fragrance, and colouring. The dangers of paraffin wax candles When the health risks of…

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Review of Green People Gentle Cleanse and Makeup Remover
Skin Care

Green People Gentle Cleanse and Makeup Remover review

Want to know one of my desert island natural beauty products? Green People Gentle Cleanse and Makeup Remover! I’ve never found a better product at removing eye liner and mineral makeup than this. Using it is a self-care ritual that makes daily cleansing a pleasure. I have used it for many years and wouldn’t change it for another cleanser. It’s creamy, it’s comforting, and it’s expensive. But it’s totally worth it! If I’ve been wearing makeup, then I’ll double cleanse with this and the equally fantastic Green People Foaming Face Wash. If I’ve not been wearing makeup, then I’ll just use foaming face wash or water, since I only like to use the bare minimum amount of product possible. In the morning, I finish my cleansing routine with Green People Day Solution moisturiser. The cleanser removes eye makeup without irritation. It comes in a handy pump dispenser which I love, as…

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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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