The One Where I Have a Fabulous Idea

Between sickness bugs and teething and colds and more sickness, S has been fairly poorly and clingy lately. She's wanted to spend a lot of time either watching TV with me, or playing with me, or reading with me - or doing anything really, so long as it involved sitting on my lap, usually holding one or both of my hands.

Sometimes climbing on my lap is also required

Today, as I sat on the play mats demonstrating the noise benefits of a toy drum for the umpteenth time, I thought to myself, "wow, I have a million things to be doing... there must be something I can get done while I sit here on the mats..." 

And then, in a stroke of genius, I thought, "Yes! That's it!! I'll sit here and think of all the things you can do while your child is playing on your lap, and then I'll write a fabulous blog post about how to be super productive."

So I set myself to thinking. You could... or... well... uh...

And that's when the real stroke of genius hit me. My gorgeous daughter is 13 months old. Those 13 months have already gone far too quickly; in the blink of an eye she will be 13 years old, and the times of her wanting to sit on my lap and hold my hands will be long gone. Perhaps the most productive use of my time is just to sit here and play with her, while I can. Perhaps I should just be a bit more... zen about the whole thing, and sit and enjoy the moment.

And so I abandoned all thought of housework and blog posts, and gave in to banging the toy drum and blowing raspberries. Which is why this blog post is rather short.

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Buddhism for Mothers

Ten Ways to Save Money

1. Do you use liquid soap? I don’t know about you, but every time I wash my hands with liquid soap, half of what I’ve pumped out of the bottle goes down the drain. Next time you buy a new bottle, pour half of it into the old (empty) bottle, and top both up with water. It still works as soap, it still smells nice, it’s exactly the same – but there’s twice as much soap. You can do the same with washing up liquid, and probably shower gel, bubble bath too.
2. Dilute your fabric softener with white (distilled) vinegar. It works just as well, and the vinegar is apparently very good for your machine. Never use fabric softener for washing nappies, towels, or basically anything that needs to be absorbent; just use vinegar on its own. And no, your clothes won’t come out stinking of a fish and chip shop.
3. Don’t throw away flat cola; put it down the loo instead. Left overnight, it can clean your toilet bowl up nicely.
4. This one has a bit of an initial outlay, but I’ve found it pretty handy in the long term. Stock up on non-perishables when they are on 3 for 2 or BOGOF offers in the supermarkets, and only re-stock when they are on offer again. Most of the supermarkets rotate their offers between brands, so you can get 5 cans of Heinz soups for a reduced price one week, 5 of Campbell’s the following week, and so on. If you have the space, you can do this with washing powder, nappies, toilet roll… basically anything. When I find something that I use regularly is on offer, I buy as many as I can afford and stash them in the cupboard. When you first start doing this, you can just add a couple of extra things to your shopping basket each week/month. Longer term, because you don’t need to buy toilet roll or nappies or whatever this week (because they’re stockpiled at home) you can afford to take advantage of another offer!
5. Sign up for every single reward card you can get your hands on! It can be a pain to carry them all around with you and fumble for them at the till, but if you use them religiously every time you shop, and make use of the coupons etc they send you, you can save a lot of money. My favourite ones to use are Boots (best value, and tons of double points events), Tesco (they’ve started doing promotions where you can cash in your vouchers for double the usual amount), Nectar (you can collect them bloody anywhere) and Holland & Barrett (because I use a lot of supplements, and shop in there any way, and once a quarter they send me a code to use at the till for money off my purchases – no need to worry about losing coupons!) Also, sign up for baby clubs, family clubs, wine clubs etc with these shops. Boots give 10 points per pound spent on baby products, and if you join their contact lens scheme you get money off all Boots products. N.B. sign up for reward cards, but not store cards; these are the work of the devil, with horribly high interest rates.
6. If there’s a brand you particularly like, “like” them on Facebook, and visit their website whenever you think of it. In the last couple of months I’ve had coupons for free baby fromage frais, free baby food pouches, money off Tropicana and Soreen, a free tooth brush, free tea bags, free coffee…
7. Whenever you have a product that breaks, doesn’t taste right, leaks or generally doesn’t perform as you expected, email the company and complain! British people are terribly polite and don’t like to cause a fuss, but at the end of the day, you spent your money on that, and it turned out to be a bit pants. The companies want to keep you happy, and will usually send you vouchers or something to compensate for your inconvenience. When I bought a certain brand of nappies for S and they leaked badly I emailed them and they sent me vouchers that could be used across their whole range of brands – so I used them to buy some toilet roll for the stock pile cupboard!
8. Become a great big geek! Anyone who knows me well, will know I love a good spreadsheet. I keep a weekly track of how much gas and electricity I use, and then compete with myself to see if I can get the amount I’ve spent down a little each week. I have a prepay meter for both, so each time I top up I make a note of how much credit is left on the meter from last week. I also keep a “cash flow” spreadsheet to keep a track on my bank account and make sure I don’t go overdrawn. I love it. And I feel like I’ve just admitted something terribly embarrassing!
9. Sign up for everything! Most companies want to send you weekly/monthly/quarterly emails with random gumpf about their brand; they’re mostly rubbish, but sometimes they will also send you vouchers, coupons, discount codes and even chances to test new products (free samples!). Avoid having your email account filled with spam by setting up a new account especially for this sort of thing, and just check it every now and then to see what’s come in.
10. This one is really boring. Open your bills and statements, and read them. Check whether you are going over your minutes or texts on your mobile, or perhaps you’re not even using close to your allowance and could stand to cut your contract. Check there’s not random amounts of money disappearing from your bank or credit card account each month. If you’ve made calls from the landline, would it have been cheaper to call from your mobile, and vice versa? 0845 numbers are expensive to call from your mobile, and usually cheaper from the landline, and some companies have a system where you can pay a small fee for a month and get calls to these sorts of numbers significantly cheaper – worth knowing about if you get that sinking feeling you’re going to be on the phone sorting out something complicated and time-consuming!

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10 Ideas for Entertaining Your Baby

1. Old CDs stuck to the side of a cupboard or box next to where baby spends time will reflect light and be endlessly entertaining. In fact, anything shiny is sure to be a winner. Just make sure it’s safe.
2. If you are able to sit and supervise baby, they seem to be quite enthralled with the noise made by the plastic windows in envelopes. This one kept S entertained for over an hour.

3. I read about treasure boxes on The Imagination Tree and made one for S; she loves to rummage through it and pick out random items to explore. The idea is that you use them for heuristic play, so fill them with household items made from materials other than plastic - stuff that reflects or bangs or rattles or feels different in their hands. At the moment it contains:
• a paper plate
• a CD
• a loo roll holder
• a tin lid
• some brightly coloured material
• some metal spoons
• a wooden spoon
• a scrunched up piece of silver foil
• some random rock samples I was sent as part of an OU course

4. Music! I used to think S loved to watch the children’s TV station, until I realised she just liked the music. Now she listens to Radio 3 (more melodious music, usually less talking) and loves it. Sometimes we will put local radio on instead and dance around the living room to some cheesy tunes.
5. Go on a tour of the house. This is a good one to do if you’ve been sitting in the living room for a while and baby is getting a bit grumpy. I take S into the kitchen and we say hello, then to the front door, the stairs, the bedroom, take a look out the window and say hello to the people out there, stop and say hi to her cot mobile, maybe play with a toy on the bed for a little while, say hello to the baby in the mirror, and then head back to the living room, saying hi or bye to the rooms and objects again as we pass.
6. When S was very small, she used to cry whenever I changed her nappy. I read somewhere that babies like high-contrast images, especially simple pictures of faces, and so one evening I got out my pens and some postcards and made up some pictures to stick on the wall next to her changing mat. To be honest, I didn't expect it to work, but until she was about 5 months old, she would happily stare at the pictures on the wall whenever her nappy was changed - though I did change them every month or so to avoid her getting bored.

7. Explore different textures. I went through my old scraps of material, and bought some remnants from a fabric shop, to find different styles and textures of material. I’m sure you’ve already noticed babies love the feel of label tags on everything they touch, but as they get older they will be interested in other textures too, especially if they have different colours or patterns as well.
8.  Plastic bottles! I got this idea from my 2-year-old nephew, who's always had a thing for plastic drinks bottles. I finished a drink the other day and handed S the empty bottle, to see what happened... turns out she's just as enthralled as her cousin. I'd seen a few different variations of things to put into plastic bottles, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Seriously, this one is so easy: you fill the bottle with liquid, and then you put some stuff in it.

§   I used water in mine, but you could pop to Poundland and get some bubble bath instead. If you use water, you can put some glycerine in it - this makes the water more gloopy, so that whatever stuff you put in it moves around more slowly. 

§   I put red food colouring into one of my bottles. I used gel colouring, because it was all I had, and it left a few lumps in there so I guess if you didn't want lumps you could use liquid colour.

§   The other day whilst rummaging through a cupboard I found some of those little silver balls you use to decorate cakes... They were a good six months out of date, so I couldn't really put them on a cake so I used them in this project instead, and put half into each bottle. The silver colour came off of them and floated in the water, and the sugar balls dissolved into the water.

§   I also had some out of date glitter writing icing tubes, so I squeezed them into the bottles too, which made them all glittery and pretty.

§   In an act of selflessness rarely seen before or since, I ate a bunch of chocolate coins, and put the scrunched up wrappers into the red bottle.

§   In the white bottle, I put the beads from two old bracelets.

§   With this sort of project, the world is your oyster. You can use whatever you have lying around - pieces of foam, plastic, glitter, pasta shapes... And it's dirt cheap, so you can make as many different ones as you want and change them over as often as you like. Winner!

9. Peep-o. The old ones really are the best. You can play this game with a baby for as long as you have the patience, either hiding behind something or draping a light cloth or blanket over baby and exclaiming "Where's baby gone?!"
10. One of S's favourite things at the moment is to watch me wave my arms around and pull a face, or simply shaking my head. I get a good workout every afternoon jumping up and down and waving my arms whilst pulling faces at her whilst she giggles away at what an idiot she has for a mother.

I'm sure there are a million other things you can do with a baby that don't involve TV or expensive toys; please feel free to add yours in the comments. 

I may well collect up some more as I go along to make another post on the subject some time in the future.

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