Product of the Week: Burts Bees Baby Bee Shampoo and Wash

I absolutely LOVE Burts Bees Luxury Baby Bee products. They’re on the expensive side, but are natural, smell divine and are perfect for babies and young children.

Burts Bees products are created from time-tested, proven recipes using ingredients that are the best nature has to offer: beeswax, botanical and essential oils, herbs, flowers and minerals. These safe, effective ingredients have withstood the test of time.

My favourite is:

Baby Bee Tear Free Shampoo & Wash  £7.75 from John Lewis

 

This all-in-one, tear-free luxury baby wash combines a natural plant-based cleansing complex with sweet orange and lemon oils to create a nourishing formula that leaves baby’s hair and skin silky soft. It’s 96.8% natural.

How to use: Create a lather to wash baby’s skin and hair, avoiding the eye area. You don’t need much.

It’s always important to look at the ingredients (avoid products containing Parabens), so here they are:

Ingredients: aqua (water, eau), decyl glucoside, coco-betaine, lauryl glucoside, sucrose laurate, glycerin, betaine, coco-glucoside, sodium cocoyl hydrolyzed soy protein, parfum (fragrance), glyceryl oleate, sodium chloride, xanthan gum, glucose, citric acid, glucose oxidase, lactoperoxidase, benzyl benzoate, geraniol, linalool

I also love the luxury Baby Bee Bubble Bath £9.50 from John Lewis. Makes lots of bubbles too with just a small amount.

 

For their full range, click here

Girls, even at two, can wrap boys around their little fingers

One of my toddler’s friends today showed how cunning girls can really be, especially when it comes to boys, even at this early age. A little boy took a toy from her that she was playing with. She looked at him and proceeded to rub her eyes with her hands, pretending to cry. (We were watching from a distance.) The boy kindly gave it back. She then looked up at him, smiling, not a tear in site. Funny!

Anonymous Blogging

Sometimes I wish I’d started an anonymous blog, keeping my true identity a secret, as many bloggers have done. There’s a lot to be said for having a blog which enables you to talk about what you want without worrying who might read it. It’s easier to talk about things that are personal in much more detail, knowing that friends, family or anyone who knows you, won’t realise it’s you. And you can be as honest and as controversial as you like, without facing a potential backlash.

The Potty Diaries and Nappy Valley Girl are just two of the many Mummy bloggers who keep their identity a secret. They have freedom to write what they want, often giving us an indepth picture of their lives.

It can be hard to stay anonymous. Just look at what happened to anonymous blogger Belle Du Jour, whose accounts of life as a call girl were even turned into books and a TV series. She recently had to come out of the closet, so to speak, after several years of blogging in secret as she was afraid an ex-boyfriend was going to out her. Her real name was Brook Magnati, her day job – a researcher at the University of The West of England. Read more about her on Huffington Post.

I chose not to hide my identity in my blog, and it does make a difference as I bear in mind who might read it. Maybe I’ll create an anonymous one too.

In the news: Mother who left her four young children home alone to go on a 24-hour drink and drugs binge given a suspended sentence

Source: Dailymail.co.uk 16 Nov 2009

A young mother who abandoned her four young children to go on a 24-hour drink and drug binge avoided jail today. Rebecca Stevenson, 22, left her two sons and two daughters, aged between three months and four years, home alone. Her sentence: a 20-week jail term, suspended for two years.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1228240/Mother-abandoned-children-home-24-hour-drink-drugs-binge-walks-free.html?ITO=1490&referrer=yahoo#ixzz0X417YCPk

How could this person be so irresponsible, leaving four children under four alone at home. It apparently happened in a ‘moment of madness’ - it must have been a pretty mad moment!  She has been charged with four counts of child cruelty and this is all she gets. Perhaps the judge will say he was acting in the children’s best interest, but what kind of message does this send out?

My 2 year old’s painting of the fireworks she saw

Chocolate Advent Calendars – one for the grown-ups

I love the brand Hotel Chocolat. They sell all sorts of divine chocolate, that would potentially look better on your mantel piece than being eaten. They even have their own cocoa plantation, Rabot Estate, in St. Lucia. There’s a store on the King’s Road in Chelsea that’s hard to pass without popping in for a browse.

I was particularly taken by their fabulous range of Hotel Chocolat chocolate advent calendars.

From the luxury Truffles-to-Share £20.00, which features two truffles behind each window, to my favourite, The Ultimate Milk Chocolate £12.00 (both pictured).

Definitely a treat for grown-ups. They also have a great selection of Christmas gifts, including Chilli Penguins, Christmas Crackers and Cinnamon Crunch,

p.s. Top advent calendars for kids coming soon on this blog

Petition: To ask the Prime Minister to rethink plans to scrap the childcare voucher scheme

Please sign the petition to ask Gordon Brown to rethink plans to scrap the childcare voucher scheme. It will affect many working parents with young children.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/keepvouchers/

So far 77,745 people have signed it.

For more information, please see my previous post and this Q&A about the Childcare Voucher scheme on the BBC News website (11 Nov 2009)

 

Working parents penalised again, as Brown defends childcare changes

Source: BBC News Online 11 Nov 09

BBC NEWS | Politics | Brown defends childcare changes

Gordon Brown is planning to phase out tax relief on childcare vouchers (known as the Employer Supported Childcare Scheme) for parents over the next five year. Nursery fees in our area, Fulham, are extortionate – we pay £85 a day for our 2 year old to go to one locally, so you need to earn a considerable amount of money to just break even. The childcare vouchers are a good initiative because they basically mean you get tax relief when you buy the vouchers. Both parents can claim them if they work (and if their company participates in the scheme), so you can end up saving up to £900 per person per year. It’s not amazing, but every little helps.

Yet again, it seems to be the people that work hard to earn money that are made to suffer, in order to help poor people people from less advantaged backgrounds. I thought the government was trying to get mums back to work, but this latest plan will result in the exact opposite happening. There really don’t seem to be any incentives for mums to go back to work, so why should we bother.

Please sign the petition for the Prime Minister to rethink plans to scrap the childcare voucher scheme.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/keepvouchers/

Maclaren will probe buggy claims – and so they should

Source BBC News, 11 Nov 2009

BBC NEWS | UK | Maclaren will probe buggy claims.

Since MacLaren recalled 1,000,000 of their buggies in the US a few days ago, because a few children had their fingers amputated after trapping them in buggy hinges, they have received a number of complaints in the UK about similar occurences over here and they are now investigating. The models that have the suspect folding mechanism are the Volo, Triumph, Quest Sport, Quest Mod, Techno XT, TechnoXLR, Twin Triumph, Twin Techno and Easy Traveller).

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has stated they were ‘a very serious hazard’ and around a million of the safety kits were sent out in what Americans describe as a product ‘recall’. Yet, Maclaren weren’t going to do anything over here, because trading standards were different. That to me shouldn’t be a reason to take action in one country yet do nothing in another.

People are saying children shouldn’t go near buggies when they are being collapsed, but it happens and the safety of children is paramount, so I think everything should be done to prevent any future injuries.

Children’s modelling competitions are a joke

Nearly all children’s modelling competitions require people to vote for their favourite child, instead of choosing the winner based on looks/personality. The people that vote are parents, friends and relatives and many of them vote over and over again. Just look at the latest Next Generation Children’s wear competition as an example. People are even begging complete strangers to get additional votes. It’s ridiculous.

I understand the organisers of these modelling competitions want to boost traffic to their sites, and I understand how much some mums want their child to win. However these competitions are a complete farce.  Can you imagine if they did the same thing for competitions for adult models? They just wouldn’t.

Here’s any idea: There should be a panel of judges who decide. They could choose a shortlist of 5 or 10 children and then get the public to vote on these. A much fairer solution.

I would like to add I haven’t entered my daughter into this competition (she’s too young anyway).