Today, August 20^th, has been crowned the most stressful of the school holidays. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Follow my tips and tricks for a stress-free day and defy the odds!

These declarations do make me laugh a little. How anyone can single out a date to be the most stressful with so many to choose from, I don’t know. And what’s the benefit of knowing it – it’s not like we don’t already wake up with a sense of weary dread. Apparently, the summer holiday in general has been cited as the most stressful time of year – which is a “fact” I can get behind. But just one day?

But let’s say it is true and today is the most stressful – never fear! We can beat the system! Several weeks of stressful incidents in, I’m ready to share my wisdom.

Don’t go out.

This may seem counterintuitive – most parents find taking the chaos outside much easier, and normally I agree. But take them out to any of your usual haunts? Crammed with all the other desperate families, who all seem to be back from their holidays. I took my troop to “our” “secret” spot in the local woods and guess what – turns out it’s the favourite hangout of every family in the area, leading to some big turf wars between the children.

Bored with our usual, I tried a different park – only to find myself getting murderous and the children hysterical in the ridiculously long queue for the swings.

By staying in, not only do you avoid the crowds but the mammoth stress of “put your shoes on!”, a clear win in my book.

Don’t get dressed.

This will instantly save you hours of stress. Dress yourself if you must, but don’t bother with the kids – if they’re like mine, they’ll have shed them all again in minutes anyway.

Don’t play Craft Roulette

By this point in the holidays I know to steer clear of:

• Felt pen roulette – turns out some in our assorted box are definitely NOT washable
• Finger painting – again, some indelible ones have sneaked into the mix, plus my kids don’t stop short of painting with fingers. Before I can say “let’s make a nice handprint for daddy”, they’ve painted their arms, legs, faces and little brother a brilliant orange which sticks to their eyebrows for days.
• Scissors – great for developing fine motor control. And for cutting your brother’s hair.
• Glue – mmm, yummy!
• Stickers – my washing machine filter is crying.

Play games their way

No, of course you’re not supposed to move your Battleship mid-play, but do you want to get through this day or not? After hours, feels like weeks, of trying to teach the boys how to play by the rules “because it’s right”, today I’m just going to let them choose their Top Trump card when they know what the category is, even though every fibre of my being is screaming against it.

Keep your distance from water play

Nothing makes me crosser than an unwelcome soaking. I’ve given up trying to playfully join in my boys’ water play. You can only spray your mother’s behind with a water pistol so many times before she begins to eye the paddling pool with a stiletto heel. To think I started the holiday with such joie de aqua, happy to run through the sprinklers to make the boys laugh, to spend an hour adding warm water to the paddling pool jug by jug. A few hundred rounds of towels, clothes and wet footprints strewn across the floor has turned me off this in again-out again staple of summer living. Until next year.

Don’t go shopping

Whatever you need, it can wait. The supermarket in summer is like a zoo, full of captive parents having stuff thrown at them by de mob happy children who scamper about every aisle seeking their kin. You’ve heard of borrowing a cup of sugar from the neighbours – what’s a packet of fishfingers, some waffles and a bottle of wine between friends?

Don’t expect to get anything done

One of the reasons that August 20^th is thought to be the most stressful day is that going back to school fever starts to bite, with minds turning to all that needs to be done before the beginning of term. Don’t succumb to the mass hysteria – don’t expect to, for example, get all their school shoes bought and haircuts done in the same morning (as I do, every time).

Sort out your copper jar

This is my No. 1 tip for keeping children occupied all day. Yes, it may expose them to all the evils of the great Mammon – greed, theft, bribery, extortion, blackmail – and a penny might end up in the baby’s nappy, but my tin of coppers and foreign coins has been my saviour. Do you know how long “heads or tails” can keep a child occupied for? It could just get you through the most stressful day of the holiday.

So are you with me? Let’s take the stress out of stressful and just enjoy a ‘full’ day today!

You’ve got another 10 days to panic.

You know how it is. You’ve been married a number of years, and you’re in – well, a rutis probably a bit strong, but, say, a state of pleasant and ever so slight boredom. It’s not that you don’t love your dear heart just as much as ever, but what with young children and jobs and life, your marriage is feeling a bit…stagnant. Well, I have two words for you, my friends: “Get rats!” There’s a number of easy ways: slovenly living, moving to London or a farm, having a nice warm airing cupboard… In our case, we have some neighbours who dug up their garden when we least expected it and thus dislodged a family of rats. Who could blame the refugees for scampering along the nearest branch available, straight into the cosy loft of the new family next door? I was lying in bed alone. My husband was away for work. I was woken by a scuffle on the roof. On the roof? Or in it? I lay frozen, hardly daring to breathe as I listened for more. Another scrabbling sound. Oh God. Then a loud kerfuffle followed by…silence. As the moments ticked by, I exhaled slowly and my mind began working its revisionist magic. Being very tired, I let it trick me into believing that it had in fact been a bird landing on the roof, losing its footing and then sliding down the tiles that made all that noise. This seemed to satisfy my leaden eyes and I fell asleep. As if a bird, whose very life depends on its ability to fly and land silently, would have made such a racket! It wasn’t till a week later and my husband was back that I heard the noise again. This time there was no mistaking it.  “That’s a rat,” said my genius spouse. “It sounds like it’s putting furniture together,” I replied in a strangled voice. “They, you mean,” he replied. We looked at each other in horror, our eyes gleaming with terror in the dark. How the Rats Spiced Things Up There are a number of ways marriage counsellors suggest you can improve your relationship. Who would have thought that they could all be put into practice with such unlikely consorts as the common rat? The next morning, my What’sApp was going nuts with messages from my husband updating me on where he’d got to with booking a pest control company. He even left me a voicemail message – with actual words, not a sigh and a click – for the first time since about 2009. I rang him to confirm that I too had spoken to said company, and the rat-catcher would be on his way at lunchtime. How appetising. The rest of the day was alive with report and counter-report, as my husband and I relayed Googled rat wisdom to each other.  By the time Frank the Rat turned up, we’d all but decided to build a second wooden rampart round our house, in the manner of a medieval fort, complete with mini boiling oil buckets for our rodent friends. Frank talked for 40 minutes about mice, hornets, roaches, wasps, squirrels, and, of course, rats – your basic pest spectrum. Then he popped upstairs. I waited with bated breath, half-expecting to hear a giant struggle as if he were wrestling colossal rats to the ground and throttling the life out of them. He came back down after a minute or two and said it was definitely rats, he’d lay some poison and come back and check on them next week. Meanwhile, he put us on RatWatch, which involved extensive inter-spouse communication.” “You’re imagining it, shut up and go back to – oh God, it’s the Rat Express!” 2. Touch more, not just for sex There’s nothing like creepy noises in the loft to make you cuddle up. We were clinging together like babes in a wood. 3. Talk about something other than the children I don’t know about you, but even their father doesn’t want to talk about the children as much as I do. How many date nights have you spent scrabbling for conversation that doesn’t involve the offspring? With rats, you’re never short of news! A fresh sprinkling of droppings spotted! Daytime activity in the Big Rodent house! Rumours that it might be killer squirrels from the mums at school! 4. Nurture your “in-jokes”

To evade the horror, we span our own little sitcom about the “friends upstairs”. When the tapping started again, I quipped: “Sounds like they’ve been to EEKEA again.” On the night they sounded like they were having a party: “They’ve just been down the Rat’s Arms and got a RatDonalds.”  “And now they’re going to watch ‘Mouse of Cards’ on Ratflix…” I tell you, it was a shaky, grossed-out laugh a minute. 5. Foster a common purpose There was one thought occupying our marital mind, and one thought only: Those rats must out! I don’t think we’ve ever worked with such equal fire towards the same goal. Yes, raising the children is a fairly key mutual goal, but there’s something about rats that has a certain immediacy about it, raises a certain fire in your belly. If the kids don’t learn to read this week, it’s not the end of the world; if the rats don’t leave by Sunday, I will. 6. Have a bit of healthy distance I couldn’t bear the noise – or, worse, the silence, waiting for them to come in from the watering hole and start assembling flatpacks again. So I moved into the spare room. All the perks of breastfeeding – bed to yourself, pile of books and magazines on the side, light on as long as and whenever you want – without the frequent wake-ups and nipple pain. My husband, meanwhile, toughed it out in our room, grimly determined to monitor the movements of our squatters, in order to report any death throes. It meant we were forced to catch up on the day before retiring for bed. Which is a definite plus for anyone whose husband tends to fall asleep on them when you’re trying to tell them something important. 7. Try something different in the old conjugal relations area Think Mr Darcy creeping along the corridor, all open blouse and dashing cheekbones. The hero and heroine have not seen each other get changed for days. The creak of the floorboard. Someone stirring. The heroine hardly able to contain her excitement… Before getting up to put the toddler back in bed. 8. Create shared memories The rats have gone. Either that or they’ve laid carpet and muted the TV. But we still have the memories. And we are that little bit further entwined, our marriage is that little bit stronger – all thanks to our nimble pals in the loft.

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Mary Berry would weep. I bake so seldom (once a year, per kid) that I have to buy all new ingredients each time in case of weevils. But I say to her – please make a programme for the poor souls among us who simply can’t do it: the half-baked, if you will. A Great British Bake-Off For Beginners, including things like how to fish the yukky bits out of egg yolks and what it means for a batter to “curdle”. All the books say, don’t allow your mixture to curdle – but I don’t know what this means, what it looks like or whether it really matters if it does. However, despite my lack of ability, I love making birthday cakes for my kids. There’s something about being up really late on Birthday Eve, like Christmas Eve, doing something creative and rationally unnecessary (I actually fingered a boxed cake in the supermarket but walked away from its slippery charms), that makes me feel like a Real Mum, in a way that sorting their dinky but annoyingly disparate socks doesn’t muster. I have actually had some limited success in the past, thanks to copious icing and lashings of Haribo. However, this was not such a time. I felt I had to share, just as a brief guide to: How Not To Bake a Birthday Cake Before making the cake, have an idea about who it’s for and what they’re into. Don’t, by poor planning, restrict your choice to a cake mould you used for their first birthday, as it’s the only one you’ve got (I have lost the other half to my round set so couldn’t even have made a normal sandwich cake except in two goes; which was impossible, given the next point.) If they now like Star Wars, is a babyish aeroplane really going to cut it? Don’t start baking till after 9pm or it won’t rise. Fact. Leave no time for an emergency re-bake. Unless you count the wee hours, which to voluntarily enter on a school night is clinically untenable. Pay No Attention To the Varying Depths of Your Mould The cake will all cook perfectly in the same time regardless of its depth, right? Well…I took this baby out after 18 minutes, the wing tips were burning while the passenger seats were an oozing bulge. After putting it back in two or three times, the wings were frowningly dark while the middle was still a pale lemon quagmire. I dug out the heart and put it back in the oven. I tell you, I felt like an expectant dad outside a delivery room hovering by that oven door. After five minutes, no joy, so I took even more out and re-inserted it, until the cake was practically hollow, but cooked in its extant parts. Do Other Things At the Same Time I was concurrently baking cupcakes for the birthday boy’s classmates, which was a bit of a distraction, what with the quantity of mixture knocking around, the fumbling with wretched cupcake cases and the reveries about how I would decorate them. But it was a lucky happenstance, as it turned out – one cupcake was a fair fit to replace the core of my gutted aeroplane. Yes, I was to perform open heart surgery on a cake. Leave Yourself 20 Minutes To Ice The Thing The next day, I had 20 minutes until school pick-up. Ample to ice the cake – all I had left to do having spent the day tidying the house for the imminent in laws, and general faffery. If only my icing had gone to plan. Rather than be too runny and too scarce, so it ended up looking like this: Leave Yourself One Minute to Re-Ice It, and Make Sure You Mix in Crumbs If you’ve ever tried to rectify an icing mistake over a baking debacle, you’ll know that scraping new rather-too-stiff icing over wet, runny icing covering an unstable cake, will result in crumby drag-marks that are impossible to conceal, unless you apply chocolate buttons all over and turn it into a hedge-plane, or aero-hog cake. But who, with a functioning mouth, has that many chocolate buttons lying around? Add the “Finishing Touches” While Your Child is Having Tea With the kids engaged in their savoury course and under cover of the fridge door, I attempted to disguise the mess with some well-judged detailing, using my newly-acquired squeezy icing writing tubes. Yes – all the gear, no idea. After a while, I realised that my birthday boy was at my elbow, but by this time just being able to give it to him at all, even if not as a surprise, seemed a handsome goal. Invite Mary Berry, or Equivalent As I mentioned, my mother-in-law arrived for tea. She is very lovely. She is also an absolute master cake-maker, nay, cake-artist. She once made a cake that was an exact replica of a friend’s garden, complete with working fish pond – with a real fish in it. I kid you not. I warned her to look away, but she kindly smiled at my effort and suggested touching up a bit where a clod of cake had fallen off. I did so. It fell off again… Present It To Your Child Like Nothing’s Happened Even though its passenger cabin was held up by nothing more than a fortuitous naked cupcake, its fuselages were dripping glace icing and its badging was wobbly and inaccurate, my aeroplane cake flew right into my son’s heart. He blew his candles out (three times, and once for his little brother) and got stuck right in. After all, all he wanted was to have his cake and eat it – the very premise and right of childhood. If you’ve ever made a really bad birthday cake, please do share.

So you made it through the first week with a wing and a prayer, but what do you need to get through the rest of the school year?

1. Your “gate face”.
   Now the first week’s weeps / whoops are over, it’s time to work on your schoolgate face. To arrange your features into an acceptable expression to greet friends, strangers, teachers and children alike. In short, to look “normal.” If that is how you want to appear, of course.  The key is to look receptive (open to meeting parents you haven’t come across yet), unsurprised (when you realise you had a lengthy chat with them last week which they, unlike you, recall perfectly, damn them), calm but not serene (that just annoys everyone); and like you’re looking back at your child till the very last second before they disappear in the door (not chatting about the weekend or checking out Fit Dad).
   Excesses of emotion should (I’ve found), be kept off your features to avoid looking deranged (even if you feel like it). The tears of rage induced by lost keys / book bags / single shoes / teeth-cleaning battles / undoing of seatbelts while moving / refusals to walk a step further must be rinsed from your face as soon as the school gate hoves into view. Perkiness is perfectly acceptable; effusive joy just annoying at that time in the morning.
2. A laundry pen.
   Sod sewing in nametapes. Name stickers also excellent.
3. Unlimited pants.
   You’ve got all their uniform assembled, you’re nailing it…then you realise you’re out of pants. How this can be when you do 18 loads of washing a day is unknown, but I guarantee it will happen one day.
4. A “child’s artwork storage plan”.
   Whether you store your kids’ creations on the fridge, in colour-coded A3 folders or that big shiny “storage device” in the corner of the kitchen, decide on your plan so you don’t waste minutes dithering over every splodgy scene that comes home. Whatever you do, make sure you know your drill by Christmas, the mothership of child’s craft.
5. A “School Crap” email folder. If you already have a child at school, you’ll know what I mean. If you’ve just started – prepare to be amazed.
6. Sick bag. In case you’ve had one too many the night before and the school stress tips you over the edge. Also useful for children.
7. Balls of steel. Someone might be mean to your child. Teacher, child, whoever invented Maths. You will have to take this on the chin and / or deal with this as appropriate.
8. Uncompetitive attitude. Hard, hard, bitter hard as this may be to muster, the path of “which reading band / Nativity part / tiddlywinks team / Kumon group is s/he?” leads only to despair.
9. Car chocolate. ESSENTIAL. Preferably pre-loosened so you don’t make any telltale wrapper noise.
10. Your pre-baby brain. You know, the one that knew stuff. Like 8×7, and where the hell everything is in this house.
11. Wine. End of.

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#172344134 / gettyimages.com Humans are a kindly breed, generally. They rarely say what they think to your face, above all if it’s about your children. But through years of experience, I have decoded a few popular phrases uttered in the direction of your offspring.

	Is it a boy or a girl? Where are its eyes?
2. We are a child-friendly pub / restaurant / café / museum.	We are not a child-friendly pub / restaurant / café / museum.
3. Oof, she’s a heavy one, isn’t she?	What’s in your boobs, chocolate milk?
	Are you feeding him at all?
	I’m not sorry at all. Your child blatantly just hit mine.
6. Bit snuffly, isn’t she?	Take her to hospital now!
7. I’ll text you to arrange.	I’m never having her for a playdate again.
8. He’s very sensitive, isn’t he?
9. They’re very lively, aren’t they?	Seriously, if they don’t stop jumping round my furniture, I’m going to kick you out.
10. She’s very shy, isn’t she?	Oh my goodness, she’s wet.
11. She’s been absolutely fine.	She’s taken my house to pieces and made everyone cry. Don’t ever darken my doorstep again.
	Does she ever stop talking?
	Are you the most irresponsible mother ever?
14. How old is he, again?	He’s a shortarse, isn’t he?
16. We are all about encouraging children to read.	If your children don’t stop running round the library, I’m calling the police.
17. She’s a good girl, isn’t she?
18. He’s really bright, isn’t he?
19. Your children are so sweet together.	Are you going to intervene before they kill each other or what?
21. Thirsty little fella.

#88801529 / gettyimages.com Obviously, many people say these things and mean exactly what they say, bless their hearts. For the others, smile sweetly – and avoid them for the rest of your life. Parenting: Then and Now. Then: baby bent over. Now: he does baby yoga. 

When you can’t keep the naughty cupboard a secret, is it time to just give it up altogether?

I don’t like chocolate…I LOVE IT! Yet, wherever I hide it, the children find it, like little demon mice scampering all over my pathetic attempts to conceal sugary goodness from them.

I remember a time when I could keep everything – chocolate, biscuits, sweets, lunchbox treats – safe from everyone. Everyone but myself, of course. But I knew that when I came back to my packet of Freddos after taking the first one, there would still be five left.

However, since the children got agile, what I now find is worse than no Freddos – it is five empty Freddo packets, which for one glorious moment look like there’s at least one left for me. But no. My hopes are dashed and my breath taken away by the sheer gall of them.

I know where they get it from. I used to sneak biscuits and all sorts all the time at home. But I’d never have the nerve to leave empty wrappers! Showing not only no concern about getting caught, but no respect either. Is this the kind of ship I run, that I can be freely despoiled of my chocolate goods by my tiny crew, confident that no repercussions will ensue?

Well, it stops here, I tell ye! The naughty cupboard is to be no more!

I’ve had my eye on it for a while. It’s not the ideal naughty cupboard set-up for a number of reasons:

1. It’s right by the fridge and the microwave, so every time I am over there (which is pretty much all the time), I’m tempted to snaffle a square or two, and usually do.
2. It’s dangerous. Not (just) to my waistline, heart health and all that stuff, but to the little monkeys who climb up there and dangle in the corner while they take their pick.
3. It’s full of mouse poo. For some reason, perhaps because I have an obsession with wicker, I use a woven basket to keep my naughty snacks in. As my main treat of choice is Green & Black’s 70%, little black shavings are always escaping through the cracks, making it look like a litter basket for mice. Yeesh.

So, I’m decommissioning the naughty cupboard – but does this mean I’m turning to a life free from sugar?

I’m afraid not.

My chocolate is going in a tub in the sitting room drawer, so I have to actually consciously cover ground and go through two doors to get to it. (I’ll let you know how that goes…!)

And the boys’ snacks?

They’re going in the oven.

I just have to remember to take them out before I turn it on…

Disclaimer: This post is not sponsored by Freddos or Green & Black’s. Quite the reverse.

No one should have to diet alone. But is a virtual fitness pal the answer?

I’ve got a new best friend. Always there for me, day and night. Never judges or tempts me with a night in with some prosecco. I’ve seen her around before but I’ve only really got to know her this year as I began my countdown to 40 and a slinky party dress, and thus the first sustained effort in my life to shed a certain number of pounds.

She fits in my pocket and never sleeps. She is My Fitness Pal.

I’m sure you’ve heard of her – but if you’re not one of her millions of pals, she is an app. A calorie counting, nutrition-assessing, fitness-tracking app. She works by the basic premise of weight loss:

 Burn more calories than you consume = weight loss

 Simples, huh?

But like every great tool, My Fitness Pal has its limitations. It’s only as good as the data you put in. And this is where her Jekyll and Hyde nature is revealed, as my little breakdown shows below.

My Fitness Pal: Friend or Foe?

Friend: It records every calorie you eat. So on a good day you feel virtuous and positive.

Foe. It records every calorie you eat. So when you’ve eaten 80% of your daily limit by 11am, it’s soul-destroying.

Friend: It has a huge database of every food you can imagine, generic and branded, with calories and nutrients already there for you.

Foe: It doesn’t cover things that I eat regularly, like:

Three chips soggy in cold bean juice

A mouthful of pasta and pesto with grated cheese – just to check it still tastes the same as the last million times

The scrapings of mash in the end of the pan

A pre-mouthed Malteser

The squashed Quavers in the crease of the baby carseat.

To cover these daily inevitabilities, I tried to create an entry to cover such daily delicacies, but here the app saw me coming. You can’t just put in “Sundries” with an estimated number of calories. That’s where all diets fail – the unrecorded consumption of incidental snackery that passes in front of your starved eyes when you are at your weakest.

So if I can’t be bothered to break down my casual snackage and am feeling honest enough to log it, I just do a Quick Add of 100 calories. That should cover it, right!?

Friend: You can cheat and it doesn’t say anything.

Foe: But you are only cheating yourself. Yawn. If I don’t lose the predicted weight, I can’t help but feel my app is silently glowering at me: “Well, if you’d just told me the truth, you wouldn’t be in this predicament, would you? I told you exactly what to eat to lose weight and you not only went against it, but lied about it. No, no, I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed.”

Friend: It doesn’t judge you.

Foe: But it makes you judge yourself. I suppose this is a good thing, but who really likes a friend who tells them they’re eating too much chocolate / drinking too much wine for their health?

Friend: It shows you how much of your recommended intake of vitamins and minerals you have eaten each day.

Foe (or design flaw): If you eat loads of fruit and veg (as I do most days), your Vitamin C is off the scale, but is represented in “bad” red font, like when you go over your saturated fat limit.

Foe / Design Flaw 2: It shows me that I eat way lower than my sodium limit a day – which means I now add salt to everything as I feel like I can, where I never did before…

Friend: It projects your success when you complete your entry for the day: “If every day were like today, in 5 weeks you’d weigh X lbs.”

Foe: 1) Every day then has to be like today for it to come true. 2) 5 weeks never comes…!

Friend: It’s the only person in the world who cares if you lose a pound. If I find I’ve lost a pound, I feel a bizarre urgency to rush and tell My Fitness Pal.

Foe: It doesn’t really care. It’s an app.

Friend: It works.

Foe: If you never let it go.

What do you think of My Fitness Pal, if you’ve used it? What are your tech tips and tricks to weight loss – or do you leave tech right out of it?

I’d love to read your replies while I enjoy a guilty glass of prosecco with my new best Pal…

This post is part of my #40till40 series – counting down to my big 4-0 in a couple of weeks!

Note: This is not a sponsored post. My Fitness Pal is free and this is just my opinion of it.