Week 42 – invasion of the Welsh

As the first grandchild on both sides of our families, Ioan was always going to receive more than his fair share of attention from his grandparents. My mum lives in London so gets to see him regularly, but just for a few hours at a time, and Andrew’s parents live in Wales so see him […]

GBBO week 5 – Danish pastries

I was going to title this blog post ‘Easy Danish pastries’ because the dough I used was a cross between a rough puff and an enriched dough, so it wasn’t as much hard work as it could have been … however, it wasn’t that easy either, so I thought it best not to mislead with […]

Week 41 – Asia to Columbia on a plate

Looking back on my week’s photos, I can see between the thousands of pictures of Ioan that most of our food has been Asian inspired this week, with a little pop across to Colombia for lunch with the girls. First up was a prawn stirfry for meat-free Monday – although I normally like to avoid […]

GBBO week 4 – Chinese style duck filled yorkie puds

For the first time batter has featured in the Great British Bake Off … and probably the last time as the news reaches us that the show is moving over to Channel 4 without Mel, Sue, or Mary Berry. Sad news, as whatever Bake Off becomes, it won’t be the same series we all fell […]

Week 40 – how wonderful life is while you’re in the world

So, with Ioan at 8 weeks old, we had our first night out without him. My brother, who pretends he is not a  big softy even though he already dotes on Ioan, babysat for us. We were completely confident that Jason would be fine with Ioan, but would Ioan be fine with Jason? He has […]

Week 39 – a carb-tastic week

Obviously, as any new mum could have told me, I didn’t manage to meet my meal plan every day this week. However, I didn’t do too badly … and I even managed breakfast on Friday (Ioan started crying the second I took this photo!): Obviously I didn’t manage to make my own spinach and ricotta […]

Week 38 – a new normal

Since the birth of our son, life has changed dramatically. Of course that won’t surprise you – whether you have kids or not, you know that a baby in the house means that your life is dictated to by a tiny human who can only communicate through crying (and the odd scream), who you simply […]

Week 37 – saying goodbye to Henry

Being one of life’s worriers, as soon as I got my cat Henry fifteen years ago, I started worrying about the inevitable day when we’d have to say goodbye to him. Henry seemed quite keen to start using up his nine lives almost straight away by developing a chronic illness which included crystals in his […]

Thoughts on being a (greedy) mum – month 1

Before I had my baby, people would say to me that when I am a mum I won’t understand where the time goes; I won’t have time to even drink a still-warm cup of tea; I won’t care about work any more, etc. Honestly, I could not believe that my life would change so much […]

Week 36 – trying to meal plan again

Our little bundle of joy was four weeks old yesterday – I can’t believe that in four short weeks our world has completely turned upside down (and I can’t believe that I am still alive on so little sleep!). As a self-confessed control freak, I do find the  lack of structure a challenge, but want to embrace […]