A few weeks ago we decided to spend the morning at Grasshoppers at Tong Garden Centre near Bradford. Tong Garden Centre has gone through a bit of a renaissance over the past couple of years, with its cafe undergoing massive refurbishment and the addition of a fantastic outdoors children’s play area. Grasshoppers has everything to keep kids of all ages entertained. There’s a giant sandpit with a water table, two bouncing pillows, zip wires and two adventure playgrounds. Younger children can enjoy the playhouse section or perhaps older children can enjoy driving the coin-operated cars. I had taken Jack on a number of occasions while I was pregnant with George.…
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4 Ways to Keep On Top of Your Home Business Books
As a self-employed freelancer and work from home mum, I’ve had to quickly learn how to keep on top of my home business books. It is one of those important tasks that I used to dread, especially when it came to meeting the tax deadline. Coming off maternity leave and with two kids keeping me busy, I was determined to be more organised and put better systems in place to make the whole process more efficient and less stressful. I quickly came to realise that keeping on top of my accounts isn’t all that scary, that I didn’t need to be a maths wiz and that a little bit of…
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Motivational Quotes To Inspire Determination
Love them or hate them, motivational quotes can help get you off the ground when you are struggling to make a start. During the evenings, once the kids are in bed, I sometimes find it difficult to rouse enough momentum to crack on with a client assignment or work on my blog. I’d much rather be dressed in my pyjamas, lounging on the sofa and binging on the latest Netflix series. However, if you have serious goals you need to put in some serious work. Then there are the setbacks. It’s easy to think about giving it all up if it feels like your business venture or blog is going…
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Things No One Tells You About Postpartum Recovery
I was completely unprepared when it came to my postpartum recovery. My husband and I sat in various NHS-run parenting classes where labour was discussed in depth. Natural birth was rammed down your throat, one midwife proudly declared how she had eight children and that not once did she request an epidural. (No pressure then) I remember being taught how to put on a nappy and was reminded to practice getting the baby seat in and out of the car a few times. Then there were the breastfeeding videos, showing babies latching onto the breast with ease. The postpartum recovery period wasn’t really talked about. I was told I might…
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Family Car and Tyre Care Checklist
This is a sponsored post in collaboration with DAT Tyres Our family is scattered across the UK so we often do long journeys. This means we need to keep our car and its tyres in good health so that it stays safe on the roads. We travel from Yorkshire to the Midlands at least once a month, and in the last year we holidayed in Devon twice and spent time with family in Suffolk. Thanks to the ever-unpredictable British weather, it has become imperative that our car remains healthy and fit for racking up the road miles. Over the years we’ve had our share of car issues; from lose clutch…
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5 Reasons To Start A Blog
Before launching CubKit, I wondered whether starting a blog would be a pointless endeavour. There are over 3 million blog posts published each day. A blog is born somewhere in the world every half a second. That’s a lot of blogs created by a lot of people who have a lot to say. I thought perhaps I had missed the blogging boat and if I had anything to say that my intended audience hadn’t heard before. Then there were the success stories. I couldn’t get enough of them. I spent a lot of time reading about people who within three months of starting a blog were earning a six-figure income,…
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Family Day Out At Trentham Gardens
During a visit down to my parents in Staffordshire, we lucked out to have one day of sunshine during a week that had been otherwise blighted by rain. So instead of staying in, we decided to pack up and head across to Trentham Gardens which sits on the outskirts of Stoke on Trent. It’s a place I visited as a child, not that I can remember it in all truth. We tend to go and wander around the chalet-style gift shops or mooch in the huge garden centre, but since they started charging to visit the estate it was something we never bothered with. I was put off by the…
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The Health Benefits of Keeping a Journal
Writing is part of who I am. I have kept diaries for as long as I can remember. It all started under a duvet, with a pen, a piece of paper and a torch. I must have been about 7 years old – although I think my mum said at the age of two, I’d sit and scribble, and when she asked me what I was doing I’d reply saying: ‘I write’. I am fuelled by a need to put pen to paper. Throughout my childhood, I spent hours in my room, scribbling away mundane thoughts in my diary, writing stories, poems, plays or designing my own little magazines. It is…
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Easy Guide to Going Self Hosted with SiteGround
If you’ve noticed that things have been a bit quiet over on the blog, it’s because I finally took a big leap with my blog and gone self-hosted. It signals a shift in mindset on how I view my blog and the potential for it to become a serious career. I have been blogging for around six months now, but in January I started to take it seriously.
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Why Children Need to Grow Up Around Nature
My sister and I were very lucky to have grandparents who lived in a small cottage on a countryside estate. As children, we would spend occasional weekends there without our parents. We would explore the fields, build bridges and splash in the brook or go on woodland adventures. I’m sure my grandma never let us out of her sight but she gave us enough autonomy to discover how we can use the great outdoors as our playground. I recently went to visit them with my two boys. As soon as I stepped out of the car, into the soft and gentle countryside, I could feel my mind wander back to…
