June 2023

What to drink at BritMums Live? “Gin, gin and thrice gin!” I hear you cry. It’s a no-brainer, right? It’s part of the mummy code, it’s the oil of mummy discourse, it’s in the mummy contract! But today, I am going do it. I’m going to come right out and admit it: I am a gin-refuser. Is this the end of my short blogging life? Is this BritMums Live suicide? Alas, poor Hendrick’s, I knew thee well Don’t get me wrong, I love gin. But gin doesn’t love me. It turns me from a happy Haribo into a belligerent beast. Normally, I am so anti-confrontation that I wouldn’t mention it if you’d been standing on my foot for half an hour. But pop a gin down my gullet and the world becomes my enemy. I have an angry five minutes where I assume everyone is against me and lurch around glaring at people from under glowering eyebrows. Then I suddenly flip into Insta-Depression. The adrenalin of “fight phase” leaves me deep down in the doldrums, or gindrums, as I call them. Nothing can raise me from my black mood – no, not even more booze. I just have to go to bed and steel myself for the ginover in the morning. There’s no way round it – I am gin-intolerant. Or, if I may: g-intolerant. Many of my favourite bloggers live by the gin. I fear forever losing the esteem of the lovely Katie at Hurrah for Gin. Aimee at Pass the Gin won’t give me the time of day. Just a Normal Mummy will cut me dead. I will be ostracized. As I pass by, they will throw glasses of gin and tonic at me, jeering and booing. Raising awareness of g-intolerance But I’ve noticed there’s a silent uprising of fellow gin-refusers. Kerrie at Wife, Mum, Student Bum is one such compatriot. Perhaps there are others that my campaign for g-intolerance awareness will bring out of the shadows into the light. Perhaps I won’t have to drink sparkling water and pretend it’s gin. Perhaps I can be prosecco and proud! Doth drink define a dame? Perhaps I am worrying unduly? Perhaps I needn’t drink at all? Pah ha ha! I’ve had three kids; I’ve done my time with sober social occasions (notably dancing at countless weddings with a massive bump) – that is it for life now. But perhaps I, and others like me, can be granted a Gin Pass, which allows me to not drink gin, yet still partake in the mummy blogosphere. It’s what’s inside the blogger that’s important, right, not what’s inside their glass? I’m looking forward to clinking glasses, whatever their contents, with all the bloggers I meet – and a virtual clink to those who can’t come. Cheers! Be a tonic – look beyond my gintolerance and pop me in for a BIB award?   

Why, I don’t look a day over 99!

Woohoo, Wry Mummy is 100 today! I am ridiculously excited to announce that this is my 100^th post!  Thank you so much to my lovely readers for showing a sniff of interest when I press Publish! To celebrate my centenary, I have picked out some of my favourites from my Happy Hundred.  Don’t worry, you don’t have to read them – it just makes me smile to see some of my little babies there. Stuck for a gift? Simply Like me on Facebook! 

When my son opened his birthday present, his face looked like we’d just shot our dog. We don’t even have a dog. 

The Shouting Bra, and Other Mummy Essentials

You can’t command respect naked. Not even from your kids. Hence, I propose a Mumswear diffusion line, starting with The Shouting Bra and the Pants of Power. 

If You Prick Us Mums, Do We Not Bleed? 

If you prick us mums, do we not bleed? 

If you tickle us, do we not wee a little bit?
If you’re sick in our hair, do we not blench?

As I sat there on the sofa, lip wobbling, with a boy either side of me engrossed in (by now) Mike the Knight, and a baby happily emptying out a bag of nappy sacks by my feet, I had an epiphany. They weren’t dwelling in the past or dreading the future: they were enjoying the present. And I realised that when I am next wobbling on the Mummy Tightrope, I should just remember this: “Do look down”.

I hope I’ll smile at children in the supermarket aisle,
Not look at them as if I’d never seen something so vile.
I hope I will remember when my own children were young
That all I wanted was someone to say to me, “Well done.” 

As I root out the chunks, I think grim thoughts about my husband, by now probably gently snoozing with our child nestled adorably in his arms. My only consolation is that with each breath he is inhaling the sick bug while germs seep into his pores from our poor infant’s soft skin.

#100HappyPosts
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Five hours in, I was feeling pretty chuffed. We’d broken the back of this flight. Only a paltry two hours to go, and the big two were still engrossed in Angry Birds while the baby and I were happily romping in the back. It was dark, it was quiet, and the meanies in the seats in front of us couldn’t glare, tut or throw themselves back in their seats in protest at the honestly minuscule rumpus behind them. The baby was crawling this way and that and having a great time, when someone came back to use the loo so I scooped him up out of harm’s way.  Joining The Bile-High Club Or so I thought. Suddenly, he gave a great heave and was vastly sick into my fingers. This is the third time in two months that I’ve had a really noteworthy puking episode on my hands. Which brings me to believe there must actually be a God of Vom, who sees my posts as acts of hubris, when his elvish minions, eternally  clutching their stomachs, hand them to him on his Apple Yak as he sits in his den of insickquity. “Right”, he must think, “you thought that was bad. Here, try it at 39,000 feet! Not a bottle of Dettol nor shower in sight!” I have to say, it felt strangely pleasant, like a sort of hot fudge sundae oozing through my fingers. But I couldn’t pause to enjoy the sensation, more tummy turbulence was on its way. I burst into the loo – difficult with my slippy paws and dangling baby – to allow the poor tot to get it all out. He did so, and was then immediately chipper, in the amazing way they always are when little. I began to survey the fallout.  Never has an aeroplane toilet seemed so tiny as when trying to cleanse all its surfaces while attempting to stop a baby from touching any of them. The delightful mixture of Ella’s organic pouch, the purple pruney one, and airline bread roll was all over the seat and inside of the loo, the floor, the wall, the sink, both my beloved Converse, my jeans and my arms. And, of course, my darling source was absolutely covered. I hate waste – I take holey socks to textile recycling rather than chuck them – but I just had to throw away his top. I would have been there for hours de-chunking it with the aeroplane tap, which is both weak and super-spray-y. Ironically enough, I had joked to my husband only a few minutes before about my bold preparation: “I didn’t even pack spare clothes for the baby”. The Vom God must have heard that and rubbed his hands together with glee. How I wanted to summon my husband to help, but you don’t really want to alert a whole flight to the fact that there’s a tummy time-bomb on board, do you? It was my guilty secret, and I covered my tracks pretty well. The contamination zone was pretty refined by the time I told the steward. Under cover of darkness, I’d wiped it off the life raft bit by the window and all that was left was a pool on the carpet in the corner. The air steward  was a true angel of the skies. “I’ve seen a lot worse in 20 years of flying,” he told me as he snapped on his rubber gloves and unpacked his special “sick kit” (something that, even in my distress, I noted as something I need to replicate in my own home). As is so often the way, it was him being so nice that finally brought me to shed the tears I’d been holding back for the past half hour. Luckily, our baby was not sick again, and as we finally touched down, I felt like I’d earned my holiday. Now I’m just trying not to think about the flight back.

Related post
Cleaning Up Chunks – A Mother’s Glory

Sports Day season is upon us, and it’s your chance to shine. Not only do you get to see your child’s cutely poor lane discipline and heroic recovery after a trip in the sack race, but you get to join in the main event: the Parents’ Race. Here’s some tips on how to take your share of Sports Day glory.  No gym membership required. The distance you’ll be covering will be similar to sprints you already perform, such as the “Oh! That’s my child falling off the slide!” streak, and the “That’s a road!” dash. The school likes to throw in obstacles and impediments – but again this is true to life. At my race yesterday we had to run balancing a beanbag on a bat – for which I was perfectly prepared by my long experience of running with a baby to stop the other two from harming themselves or each other. Upper body still, legs a blur, people. Wearing your gym kit is way too keen and will make it all the more embarrassing if you don’t win. But do – and I can’t emphasise this enough – wear a bra. Also a full pant. If you a) have to go through a tunnel or b) fall over, you’ll thank me. Best to look as though entering the race hadn’t crossed your mind. A long, floaty silk dress should do it. 3. Choose your heat carefully Take advantage of the start-line hubbub where slightly uncomfortable adults throng, torn between the joy of joining in, fear of failure and just plain bashfulness. Check out your competition. Usually the competitive dads jostle to be in the first race, while mums step from foot to foot behind, smiling weakly, and the dads who are in their suits and just doing it out of loyalty to their child loiter at the back. Aim to be in a single-sex race (although it’s always nice to beat a man, of course) and go in the first mums’ race: get it over with before the nerves get to you. 4. Disarm the competition Smile self-deprecatingly and distract your opponents by asking how their kid did. Murmur about your (undefined) “injury”. 5. Make sure your child is looking After all, you’re only running this race to make them proud / laugh. Right? Don’t get so distracted by your gameplay and waving wildly to get your child’s attention (now you know how they feel), that you miss the whistle. Work out who is starting the race and fix them like a gimlet. 7. Run like you’ve just spotted George Clooney When that whistle goes, look neither to right not left, and run your little socks off. For 30 metres, be Mo Farah. Whatever you do, don’t do a little skip over the finish line and wave both fists in the air. Who would do that?  So there you have it. As you might have picked up, I did actually, er, WIN! But you don’t have to win to be a winner. You joined in, you made your kid (and probably the crowd) giggle and best of all – you got a sticker! Of course, my own glory was as naught compared to my children’s. I was so proud of them just for standing still on the start-line in their cute shorts and not picking their nose very much. The fact that my oldest won three races, including the sprint – by a mile – is the icing on the cake.  Never taking this sticker off. Until it goes in the washing machine like all the others. You might also like this: The Meerkat Mum: like a Tiger Mother, only more cuddly.

“Inbox zero” is the bane of the digital world, but in the domestic sphere it is “laundry basket zero”. Are you, too, chasing the impossible dream?

I have a dream. A dream where the washing machine is silent. The tumble dryer is still. The airers are folded. The radiators are clear. The doorframe is hanger-free. All the clothes in the house lie peacefully in their correct drawers.

To have a day when I can have a break from the laundry without it beating a hole in my psyche. A day when I can go to bed without that sinking feeling that I haven’t hung the wash out and it’s going to pong in the morning. A day when I can laugh at the children’s bath splashanigans instead of rueing all the towels I have to use to mop up. A day when I no longer deter overnight visitors at all costs because if I have to wash another lot of bedlinen it will break me.

A day when I can wear whatever I like from my wardrobe. As it is, while my family waltz around in spanking clean clothes, I am in my last pair of pants and jeans that could walk to school by themselves.

A few weeks ago, I thought I’d done it. The laundry baskets (I have five – yes, five! – one for each family member), were stacked neatly in a pile. I’d been putting clothes away for 48 hours straight and there wasn’t a pair of school trousers being “ironed” on the radiator to be seen.

And you know what? I didn’t feel a thing. I didn’t feel triumphant. I didn’t feel exultant. I just felt a bit…loose-endy. The day that I have no more washing to do is the day my children no longer live at home.

But before I got too maudlin, I saw it.

My husband’s gym kit stealthily stinking in the washing machine.

And I knew that it was going to be OK. The impossible dream was still just that.

“Inbox zero” is the bane of the digital world, but in the domestic sphere it is “laundry basket zero”. Are you, too, chasing the impossible dream?

I have a dream. A dream where the washing machine is silent. The tumble dryer is still. The airers are folded. The radiators are clear. The doorframe is hanger-free. All the clothes in the house lie peacefully in their correct drawers.

To have a day when I can have a break from the laundry without it beating a hole in my psyche. A day when I can go to bed without that sinking feeling that I haven’t hung the wash out and it’s going to pong in the morning. A day when I can laugh at the children’s bath splashanigans instead of rueing all the towels I have to use to mop up. A day when I no longer deter overnight visitors at all costs because if I have to wash another lot of bedlinen it will break me.

A day when I can wear whatever I like from my wardrobe. As it is, while my family waltz around in spanking clean clothes, I am in my last pair of pants and jeans that could walk to school by themselves.

A few weeks ago, I thought I’d done it. The laundry baskets (I have five – yes, five! – one for each family member), were stacked neatly in a pile. I’d been putting clothes away for 48 hours straight and there wasn’t a pair of school trousers being “ironed” on the radiator to be seen.

And you know what? I didn’t feel a thing. I didn’t feel triumphant. I didn’t feel exultant. I just felt a bit…loose-endy. The day that I have no more washing to do is the day my children no longer live at home.

But before I got too maudlin, I saw it.

My husband’s gym kit stealthily stinking in the washing machine.

And I knew that it was going to be OK. The impossible dream was still just that.

Wry Mummy is two!

And still a complete mystery to most of my family and friends.

“A blog?”

“It’s my own website, grandma. You know, on the computer.”

“Your own website?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh,” baffled nodding and unsure smiling from the dear nonagenarian.

“Is that for your blog, mummy?”

“Yes, darling.”

“What IS a blog, mummy?”

Well, indeed. Explaining a blog to a small child or a 90-year old lady is understandably hard, but it’s almost as hard to most people I know and meet.

“What do you do?”

“Nothing at the moment. I mean, apart from being a mum.”

“Oh!”

“And I have a blog.”

“Uh-huh?”

“It’s like a funny mummy blog. Tries to be funny anyway.”

“Oh, ok. Is that like, your job?”

“Um, kinda.”

But does it matter that most people don’t get what I do? I don’t understand what my husband does, and we’ve been together 14 years. If you ask me, he works “in IT”. *eye roll from Mr Wry*

The best way of describing it is that basically, my blog is my baby. Er, except now it’s my toddler.

Eek!

My first ever post was Kids’ Bedtime – The Last Straw. Two years on, the 7pm-8pm vortex still kills me.

I will always love you

I’m about to turn 40. So why won’t I dress like it?

I assumed there would come a day when I would always look effortlessly stylish, smart – mature. In well-cut clothes and tasteful jewellery with a ladylike bag to match. I assumed it would be when I was about 40 – but that is 32 days away and I am currently coveting logo sweatshirts and white trainers. What is going to happen in the next four and a bit weeks to turn me from dressing like a teen to looking like a grown-up woman?

I blame the kids – of course. Because of them I no longer wear heels, necklaces, non-machine-washable clothes or white.

Apart from the immediate threat my children pose to delicate items and dangly earrings, there is the change of lifestyle. The only time I need to look smart is when I go to parents’ evening. I don’t watch rugby in the pub, I watch it on the boggy sidelines of my son’s junior club. The only Tube I enter now is the tunnel at the park.

But it’s not just for practical reasons that I want to dress down – I feel like I will look even older than I am if I am too “done”. I know there are thousands of fab and 40 women for whom this is just not true, but I have not yet found my place among them. Every time I find a grey hair I buy (or crave) another grey logo Tee – which I then only wear round the house because I feel silly wearing it in public.

That’s not to say you can’t wear a whimsical or tongue in cheek item past your 30s. There are no rules, indeed. It’s all so dependent on personality, figure, confidence levels and everything else bound up in our sweaty paw before we type the credit card details in. When I was in my 20s, I wore clothes that felt much older than my years – on purpose. To be taken seriously in the office (where the suits-only rule necessarily brought me into check), and to look chic. When you’re that age, you can wear pretty much anything and look good, provided it suits you (and even if it doesn’t, mostly), I realise now.

But with the onset of haggardness, I fear that if I wore a blouse and a trouser, I would look dowdy or frumpy, however fashionable the individual items were. I wouldn’t look ironic, or cool, just…old. So I stick to my uniform of jeans, shirt and (almost always) grey jumper.

Heidi Klum, 41 in this photo from the Mail in 2014, wearing my standard uniform…a bit better.

It’s not the fault of my years but my shopping habits, perhaps. With very little time or inclination to shop in real life or online, I end up buying different versions of the same things I always buy. This is definitely a change that has come with age – with the years bringing, in my case, a busy young family. As an office worker in my 20s, I had plenty of time to browse in my lunch break and spend whole Saturdays shopping. If I had a Saturday free now, shopping would be the last thing I would choose to do. I would spend it lying down alone in a quiet room eating champagne truffles (my ideal Valentine’s Day, incidentally).

But what all those years of fashion frolics has taught me is – what suits me. Which necklines, skirt lengths, jeans styles, colours, fabrics…Of course, there’s still plenty of scope left for me to make dreadful purchases, but at least I’ve narrowed the field a little.

Perhaps all this change is what makes me want to keep my clothes constant – the only reminder of who I “am”? As I approach 40, I may not know who I will decide to be in my 40s, but I will know what she looks like.

Me.

Do you feel like your wardrobe should grow up with you, or are you hanging on to your hotpants for dear life?

There has to be a middle way between Taylor Swift and Elizabeth Taylor?

Nothing shouts “I’m a mum!” like pulling a breast pad out of your bag when you’re looking for a pen. You can hide a mum tum under a well-chosen top, but if your baby tips your handbag out in public, your half-squeezed mouldy pouches and health-hazard dummies are there for all to see.

I love a good nose into other people’s handbags – via blogposts, you understand: I don’t rifle through real bags. So when M&S Baby asked me to share my handbag story, I was happy to join in.

Handbags: Before and After Children

The bag: Before: Small, smart, sexy, leather. After: An ancient, grubby sports rucksack. Because it’s hands-free and it’s there.

The stationery: What girl doesn’t love her stationery? Before, I had a smart diary, a notebook and a pink pen (always). Now, I still have a diary but the appointments are more “doc re worms (query?)” than “cocktails at 5pm”. And it has squished fruit bar on the cover. Crumpled receipts are my notepaper, and my writing tool is a broken crayon.

The cosmetics: Before, an Estee Lauder compact, full make-up bag. Now: Vaseline. No job is more parching than that of mother. And it’s also good for baby’s bottom.

The clothes: Before, a fine knit for the cooler air on the way home. Now, a balled-up babygrow in a nappy bag that I forgot to put in the wash. And a single glove.

The toys: Before, A BlackBerry. Now, random bits of Lego, like the Penguin-Dalek pictured above. And a Hex Bug, that frightens the bejesus out of me every time I see or touch it.

Snacks: Before, health bars from the juice cafe. Now, half-eaten biscuits and – sometimes – apple cores. But no raisins. After years of giving my three children raisins, I’ve noticed that the rate of one going in the actual mouth is 1:1000. I have stopped buying them.

Comforter: Before: a gin tin. Now, a gritty dummy.

I don’t think I’ll ever have a crumb-free handbag again, but I can still dream of a changing bag upgrade. The new dedicated baby section on marksandspencer.com – M&S Baby has a huge range of gorgeous baby goods, from the practical (bottles, weaning spoons and so on, which you may not have realised they stock) to the downright beautiful. I love this gorgeous changing bag (below), full of practical features and in the colour of the season. I have all boys but I think they would rock the flamingo fairground babygrow pictured below, and I love the pack of bodysuits in five fab colours, which wash brilliantly and would last to hand down if I were to have another baby. Now, that would be an excuse for a new changing bag…

My Dream Changing Bag

Clockwise, from top left: SKIP HOP M&S Exclusive Deluxe Blue Pinpoint £65.00,  5 Pack Pure Cotton Striped Bodysuits £13.00 – £14.00, Three Pack Girls Fairground Toucan Sleepsuits £15.00 – £16.00, Cotton Rich Teddy Face Bib £4.00, 2 Fish Buggy Toy £10.00, VITAL Baby Weaning Set £4.00, Contemporary Vibrant Yellow Stripe A6 Notebook £4.00, Elegant Gentle Pink Ballpoint Pen £3.00, SKIP HOP Zoo Straw Bottle – Monkey £6.50, MAM Perfect Night Soother.

Families need food. Fact. Yet can families buy food? No. Not without public censure, anyway. If the tuts, hisses and glares of supermarket shopping with kids is getting to you, take a look at my handy guide.

Over half term, we ran low on milk. This is an emergency in our 20-pint a week plus household. My husband wasn’t going to be back till after bedtime – not that there would be a bedtime without milk. My near neighbours are older couples – unlikely to be housing spare dairy goodness. There was nothing for it – I had to go to the shops with the children.

I started off with great optimism. ‘Why ever did I say I’d never go to a supermarket with them again?’ I thought. Then my toddler hit a pensioner with the QuickScan zapper.

Aha, you may be thinking, she went to Waitrose – no wonder. But I have found the name above the door is irrelevant: from Aldi to M&S Food, my family foraging has ended in public shaming. Even independent convenience stores have seen me heckled for blocking the aisle with my buggy.

Perhaps I have savages for children? But they’re really not that bad – honest. I am around other people’s children all the time and mine really aren’t more than average-ly wild. There’s just something about food shops that ignites their fire.

As if I would choose to go to a supermarket as a leisure activity with my boys! It was an essential visit. I was there for milk. It’s not like we’d run out of artichoke hearts and simply couldn’t last another day.

I can’t relive the horrors of that trip again, but suffice to say that when we got home, the older boys were sent to their rooms and the toddler was put down for an unceremonious nap.

As I sat jibbering on the sofa, I compiled this guide for future reference.

Supermarket Weep To Supermarket Win

Follow the 3-item rule
You may buy ONLY the one thing you went in for, plus one other urgent item that you remember as you go round, plus the obligatory snack bribe for the children. Then get out while you still can. Do not go in for loo roll and come out with half the shop, plus some random bud vases.

Do a pep talk
I’ve found this effective in many situations of late. By outlining what is going to happen in the next half an hour, what is expected of them – and WHY – what will happen after if it all goes OK, you are managing expectation and hopefully planting a seed of restraint.

Go to the snack aisle first
Delayed gratification does not work for children. Offering them a reward for being good in the supermarket may work for an older child, but for a toddler? Certainly not. And it’s just easier to get the snack over with first. Whatever’s their poison – Pom Bears, raisins, Haribo, Baby Bels – eating it as they walk round keeps them occupied. Just remember you’re in a race against the blood sugar rush. You need to be out of there before they hit manic.

Dress right
This is a hard one to get right. If you look a bit frazzled – no make-up, slightly Weetabix-stained jeans, parka, (i.e. normal, for me), you’d think you might garner some sympathy from the general public. “Oh, how tired, she looks, poor dear. Maybe we should help her re-stack the Easter egg shelf her toddler just trashed?” However, it seems to work the other way round. Instead of a helping hand, I get scorn: “No wonder her kids behave like that, she’s obviously a slovenly parent as well as dresser.” Whereas if I look well-turned out, I feel like people are thinking, “She had time to blow-dry her hair, but not to teach her son some manners.”

Choose your checkout carefully
Self-scan is the quickest, you could say. Depends how much your children argue about whose turn it is to zap the barcode, which inevitably ends up with me fumbling it out of their hands and doing it myself while the toddler climbs in the precarious basket pile. I advise going for the youngest checkout assistant there is. They may be stroppy, but it’s better than the raised eyebrows when a more senior one puts through yet another packet of stuff you’ve already opened to assuage the children. If any assistant shows a spark of friendliness, adopt him or her and never go to anyone else again.

Leave your mummy paranoia at the door
‘Spotlight theory’ (roughly, the idea that everyone is looking at you) is rarely more applicable than in a public place with children. Don’t we all feel that everyone within a 5-mile radius can hear when it’s our toddler kicking off in the toy aisle (which should be BANNED)? Yes, that man whose ankles just got nicked by a flailing basket is probably glaring at you and your preschooler, but the majority of people in there are just getting on with their shopping. (Right?)

Smile
I follow my children round the supermarket with a face like thunder, pained looks flashing across my face with each new calamity: the oldest has jostled his brother into someone’s trolley, the toddler has taken a bite out of a potato, the middle boy has managed to cut his hand on a price ticket. But rage breeds rage. If you look angry with your children, other people seem to think it’s OK for them to give you and them mean looks too. So now I make a concerted effort to smile. ‘Look at my dear, high-spirited little angels,’ my fixed grin says. “Laugh with me at the cute way they touch all the bread rolls.” I might look slightly odd, but it gets me round the supermarket without going round the bend.

See also: I Hope I Smile At Children In The Supermarket Aisle