Beccy Mundy

Book Review – This Woven Kingdom

This is my spoiler free review of This Woven Kingdom by Tahereh Mafi.  ‘Alizeh stitched in the kitchen by the light of star and fire, sitting, as she often did, curled up inside the hearth.‘ Alizeh, the lost princess of a Jinn Kingdom – is hiding in plain sight, working as a house maid and seamstress to keep off the streets in a kingdom where her people are feared and unwanted. Kamran, the…

I’m a Planner

This is what the side of our fridge looks like now. I also have a number of notebooks on the go…

With my husband able to work from home this has already been very useful for us.  He has an idea of how I see mine and Aidan’s day going and he can plan little breaks into his working day to come and play with us. For example I’m not really able to run around the garden with Aidan at the moment ( I’m…

I’ve also done a few Amazon orders and so I’ll do a post about those items soon.

I was pretty pleased with what I found, I’ll be keeping these things hidden away until they are needed so that they are new and interesting to Aidan when they come out. I’ll break it down into themes.

I got a farmer and tractor, these will probably end up nice and muddy. A book of various stories and rhymes about Old McDonald and Farmyard bingo.  I’m not expecting Aidan to be able to play this, but we can use the tiles as flash cards so he can learn the animals names and sounds.  I’m also just noticing that there’s a storybook included in that, I’ve not actually opened it yet so we’ll have to see if it’s in there.

The zoo was a topic I was planning to do very soon, in the hope that we might still be able to get out to the zoo, with the ever changing guidelines and recommendations for high risk groups (I have asthma and am pregnant so currently fall into two of the three groups) I thought it best to put it off until later in the year, even if I can’t get out maybe Daddy can take Aidan out to see the animals.

This one was a little more for me than Aidan really, I wanted something with some dino facts and nice pictures to inspire me.  It does have flaps though so Aidan will be happy to sit down with me and have a look through. I also managed to grab a few plastic dinosaurs on a more recent trip out. I’ll be doing some messy play with those.

A few of these things will be usable over multiple topics, these will all get used for our Animal theme.  The puppies at the back will be covered in sticky back plastic and made into puzzles.

These three are just a few extras that caught my eye.  I thought they could be extra visual aids to support themes.  Nice pictures and even though I’m not, for example, expecting Aidan to lean the alphabet from the large flashcards, they can be out and we can still talk about the letters and pictures.

A lot of these things will probably act as more of a prompt for me and help me think about what things fall into certain themes and topics.  In the end I want Aidan to have fun and enjoy playing and I can tell that he enjoys playing more when there’s not hundreds of toys all over the floor and mummy is say on the sofa watching.  Having the themes helps me focus what tops and activities I provide for him and the displacement activity of planning and organising our week around the themes is giving me the mental peace to continue to enjoy playing with him.  I feel like I’ve been productive and have helped make the world a little better for Aidan by planning thing for him to do and so I can allow myself the time to play with him, instead of worrying about things I cannot effect.

Follow me over on Instagram to see what we’re doing day to day and check back here for more of my planning posts soon!

I will try and get into the habit of loosely planning out the whole weeks worth of activities, so I have plenty of time to prepare, but organising each activity the evening before or during the day.

Our theme for this week is ‘On the Road’, Aidan loves vehicles and so this was a fairly easy theme to get started with.  I started by writing down a few activity ideas that I can use throughout the week. I wrote down anything that came to mind, from messy ‘Tractors in the mud’ to really simple ‘Pointing out cars on the way to the shop’.  This helped me to see that even the simplest, most every day activities could be a source of entertainment.

Today was off to a bit of a funny start because Aidan woke up early and so he needed a nap by 9am… So we got the day started properly at 10am with some outdoor play.

I put his ball pool out with some cars in and his bike. Mostly he just wanted to be chased but we did spend a little bit of time using the cars to push balls around and rolling cars as far as we could with one push.  He also had his snack outside which isn’t usual so i think he enjoyed that.

Then we went for a walk to the charity shops in the village, I wanted to try and pick up a few things that would help me with future activities and on the way we talked about what cars we could see.  I’d asked Aidan before we left what he thought we might see and he wanted to see a tractor, I told him I didn’t think we’d see a tractor but I was wrong! He spotted it way out on the main road and was very excited to point it out to me.

When we got back it was time for lunch, while daddy and I put a few bits together Aidan played by himself. After lunch we put him down for his nap.   The morning nap was 100% required but totally screwed us up for his afternoon nap.  He ended up chatting and singing to himself in his cot for 30 mins or so, long enough for me to clear away all the mornings toys and set out a few new things for him to play with (and put my feet up for 10 minutes with a cuppa).

We spent the afternoon building towers and running cars down tracks, two toys he rarely gets out on his own.  We read a couple of books and talked about what we could see in them.  At about 3 we went back out into the garden to play with a ball and some larger push along toys.  I had hoped he would entertain himself a little so I could wash the dishes but he wanted to play together so we kicked the ball around and he had his afternoon snack.  Getting him back inside was challenging, he wanted to play on his bike and be chased some more but it was getting cold and I was starting to get a bit stiff so I tempted him back inside telling him he could race his bike around while I started tea. Daddy to the rescue at this point, we have a running stroller and Aidan loves going out for a run with daddy so they went out while I made tea.

We played quietly with bricks once we were done and then it was time for his bedtime routine. The day flowed quite naturally, I had quick and simple activities up my sleeve in case we ran out of steam on something so it’s nice to have those in the bag for another day!

Tuesdays and Wednesdays he goes to a childminder and all being well he will be able to do that as normal this week. I will plan another couple of days of activities on our theme and hopefully that will see us through the week. I guess we’re going to be taking each day as it comes for now, trying to keep as much normality as we can until things change. It’s nice to feel prepared though and getting into good habits early will help us later.

Our Day – Roughly…

Chances are at some point in the next few weeks we’re going to be told we have to stay inside. One of my big anxieties is around keeping Aidan, who’s nearly 2, well entertained and myself sane. I took a look at Five Minute Mum’s website and Instagram for a few ideas and her latest blog post was a big help. I definitely find that I need structure and routine to help keep me calm. Not rigid hour by…

A couple of weeks ago I signed up for the Extinction Rebellion fashion boycott.  The below text is taken from the XR Fashion Boycott pledge page, I don’t think I can write it any better than this…

‘We are in a climate and ecological emergency. If we don’t act now, we will face mass food shortages, the collapse of our civilisation and extinction. We can no longer afford to use land to grow crops…

This is our changing area, it’s in Aidan’s room so we’ve made it quite a nice spot.

We have a changing mat, a storage box and the wipes on top.  The bin is on the floor to the left and the drawer on the right is our nappy drawer, this has our folded nappies, spare liners, covers and boosters.

The white bin is for rubbish the grey is for dirty reusables.

On the left we have our reusable wipes and the clean water. In the storage box we keep disposable nappies for night time, we have some biodegradable single use wipes and below is a packet of biodegradable nappy bags.  We always keep a muslin and a towel on hand for snotty noses, sick, wet hands or wee! In the bottom corner are creams and hand sanitiser and a roll of bin bags.

That’s it! At the moment streamlining nappy changes is a must, Aidan’s quite the little wriggler!

Signing up for Plastic Free July was a bit of a no brainer for me. We’ve been wanting to do a waste free month since before Aidan was born, but as soon as he arrived the thought of trying to go waste free with a baby was a bit overwhelming. Plastic Free July was a great excuse to throw out all our excuses and get on with it!

If you go to their website and Take the Challengethere are a couple of…

Cloth Nappies – What you need?

I feel like there are two options for starting out with cloth nappies.  You can ease in, in which case you’ll probably do really well with just a couple of nappies and something to put dirty ones in. You can build up from there as and when you feel ready.  Or you can dive straight in and get everything you need in one go.

Here’s what we use, it works really well for us but of course this is not…

Out with the Old, In with Bamboo! – Bamboo Toothbrush Review.

During my recent trip to our new local zero waste shop I got myself and Aidan new toothbrushes.  His is a Environmental Toothbrush (ET) and mine is a Truthbrush.

I’ve used an ET before and was pleasantly surprised. I got one in a monthly subscription box and, honestly, at first it scared me – all I could think about was how unpleasant a splinter in my mouth would be.  Obviously they are designed…

Cloth Nappies – When, Why, How.

Before Aidan was born we were firmly in the camp of the cloth nappy. After speaking to a few friends who cloth bummed, we made the decision to wait until he was around a month old and then to cloth in the day and use disposables at night. Pretty much everyone I spoke to said they found using cloth a night to be inconvenient and disruptive.  We ordered a tester kit from Totsbotswhich had a couple…

Breastfeeding Journey – Part Two

This is part two of my breastfeeding story. Part one is here. Or for a quick recap…

Our baby was bottle fed a mixture of expressed breast milk and formula, for the first 11 days of his life, and then with the help of nipple shields we packed away the bottles! Fantastic, big step forward!  But then nipple shields are just like bottle teats that you put on your breast so again, I was reminded by…