Will Dig Life

A friend with a nearly 4-month old baby visited me today. We don't see each other much these days since I've moved away, but before she gave birth I offered her a few thoughts on baby parenting (mainly to trust her instincts rather than parenting books / other people's opinions, and follow the baby's lead) and she told me today how much she took those things to heart and how well it's served her. Both she and her baby are thriving and loving the bonding early months. But, she also told me that there's already pressure on her - friends with babies the same age are sleep training them (leaving them to cry alone), raising their eyebrows at her feeding her baby to sleep... at not even 4 months old?? I was gobsmacked. She asked me, why is it bad to feed your baby to sleep? My answer: I'm not sure, I still feed my 3yo to sleep and it's the one thing that makes her  want  to go to bed - without it I don't know how much fight she'd be putting up! ...

I was never 'into' Christmas as an adult. Along with most reasonable people, I rolled my eyes at the waste of electricity for fairy lights, the earlier-every-year creep of its attending commercialism, the nonsense of a fat bearded man in red and white coming down chimneys. (I didn't grow up with Santa so from an outsider's perspective it just is weird to celebrate Christ's birth that way). Now I have children, however, I have to engage with the culture around us, interpret it for them in a way... I want them to experience that deep and meaningful anchoring to the past that traditions give us. But not with Santa. I'm uneasy about that man. Traditions and family I think that traditions serve several important purposes for kids: identity (this is what we as a family do);  anchoring (this is what we as a community do), and sign posting (this is why we do this) These are probably why I rejected the traditions I grew up with as a young adult: I did n...

We need money. The cold hard truth - we are just about managing on one salary, but it's tight and the house is still a project with much more to do than we have money for! So, we need some more income.  Mr. and I sat down for a long chat about that. He can't change jobs; in his industry there is great uncertainty due to Brexit right now, and he sees lots of colleagues being made redundant. He's got a good pension scheme where he is, and has been due a pay rise for several years (!) now - hopefully that will come to fruition at some point. So changing jobs isn't workable for him, and changing careers (which he would quite like to do) would mean taking a huge pay cut for several years as he gets stuck in to his new career, which also isn't workable right now. As for me, I'm qualified as a marketer (postgrad). But I don't have the mental capacity at the moment to really apply myself in that field; if I wanted to be employed, it would be difficult to fin...