It’s easy to spot a couple on a Date Night, especially if they’re parents. They’re the ones sat in the corner: he’s wearing a decent shirt, smart jeans and clean shoes; she’s sporting a full face of make-up, hair nicely styled, smart clothes. It doesn’t matter that they’ve gone down the Dog & Duck for a curry; they’re away from the kids for a night, and they’re going to make the most of it.

As parents, we naturally enjoy spending time with our children. The main highlight of my day is coming home from work – my two boys are usually quite excited to see me, unless there’s something particularly interesting on CBeebies, in which case they barely notice I’m there. But there are times, as horrible as it sounds, when it’s nice to be away from your kids, even if it is just for an evening.

If anything, it’s good for your health. As rewarding as parenthood is, there’s no doubting that it is pretty stressful, and all of that frustration and exasperation can’t be good for your heart – not to mention your mental health.

Parenting can also take its toll on your relationship with your partner. If you think back to how your relationship was before you had kids, and compare it to now, I would be willing to bet that you’d be able to see a marked difference. The love has remained – but the attention has dwindled as you both find your hands full of dirty nappies, bottles, instructions for the assembly of a cot, and No More Tears shampoo.

This is why date nights are so important. Not only do they give you space to breathe without inhaling a cloud of talcum powder, they give you time to spend with your partner to laugh and love and talk about anything and everything besides children. It has been proven that having a child often negatively affects a relationship, and so it is in your best interests (and those of your children) to spend some time apart from them once in a while.

It’s not like you have to spend a fortune to have a good time. Go to the cinema, go out for a meal…even if it’s just a walk in the park, you will soon find that the space and time will do wonders for your stress levels and your relationship.

But it goes a step further. Sometimes, you just need some time by yourself, away from your partner and your kids. That’s fine too, as long as your break isn’t taken during a particularly critical time, such as your child’s first nativity or whilst your wife is having contractions – and it’s also pretty important that you don’t disappear for a round of golf all day every day for a week; but it is also beneficial for you to let your hair down by yourself once in a while.

So don’t be afraid to dump your kids on a babysitter or your in-laws every now and then. You’ll reap the benefits later.

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I suffered from morning sickness for the first 16 weeks of my first pregnancy. It was horrid, but I still managed to work, and eating helped. I lived on bran flakes and went through boxes of them. Every week that passed, people would comment and say ‘it will stop in a few days’ but it seemed to go on forever. At 16 weeks, it was like a switch. It just stopped, no more sickness; but it had been enough to put me off pregnancy for a while.

So imagine my horror when six months after giving birth to Noah I discovered I was pregnant again. Honestly, New Year and alcohol are a potent combination: let this be a warning to you!

I had a feeling I might be pregnant and I knew I was late, but I had taken two tests and both had said negative.

So I carried on regardless, with my husband saying ‘See told you, you were being ridiculous!’

A week later I bought another test in town and low and behold it said pregnant! I immediately felt sick. I kid you not; I thought I was going to throw up there and then. ‘It’s all psychological’ I thought to myself, ‘get a grip’!

Since then I have since discovered that it is common to get a false negative with a twin pregnancy, as your hormone levels are so high.

I was already 8 weeks into my pregnancy and the sickness came on thick and fast. I tried to eat to make it better but it all came back up. I tried sickness bands, I tired ginger biscuits and tea and every possible remedy under the sun. I knew my sickness was bad but I kept telling myself to pull myself together. For goodness sake I was pregnant, not ill!

It started at first just in the mornings. Then it continued all through the day and then crept into the evenings. I was working four days week at that point and thank God I had an office coming off my classroom, because I would never have made it to the toilets. There was never a point throughout the day when I did not feel sick and I was being sick at least 10 times a day.

After three weeks of severe sickness and working I needed a day off to rest. I had been sick seven times that morning and it was only 7am!

I finally went to the Doctors who prescribed me anti sickness tablets. I was really apprehensive about taking them, but I could not look after the child I had and I was desperate. However, they just wiped me out and within minutes I would throw them back up again anyway. Being asleep would have been fine but I had another child to care for.

The sickness did not relent, it just got worse. I started to be sick in the night. I was beginning to feel like I was allergic to the baby and I was only 10 weeks pregnant. I was starting to resent it and wish it would just go away.

My Doctor signed me off work and I discovered that this severe sickness has a name: Hyperemesis Gravidarum, which literally means excessive vomiting in pregnancy. They wanted to admit me to hospital but I said no, I didn’t want to leave Noah behind; he was still a baby and I had never left him before. I was washed out and malnourished, and my weight was beginning to plummet.

I was now coming up to twelve weeks pregnant and I weighed two stones lighter than I did before I fell pregnant. I was sitting on the sofa at home with a bucket beside me when I got a call from the Doctor’s Surgery. The Doctor told me he had a very worried husband in his office and he needed to see me now!

I hardly had the strength to walk round there. When I arrived he took one look at me and said ‘You’re going to hospital, you need to be on a drip!’

I was devastated. I didn’t want to leave Noah but he assured me it would be for 12 hours and then I would feel well again. The thought of feeling well won me over.

When I got there though, they told me my ‘ketones’ were very high. If ketones are detected in your urine it means your body is breaking down fat rather than glucose to make energy (ketosis). It basically means you are starving. I looked awful- not white, but grey. Have you read Breaking Dawn from the Twilight saga or seen the recent film? How Bella felt pregnant…that was me, and actually, according to my friends, I looked worse! I should have tried drinking blood!

So a drip went up and there I stayed for not 12 hours but five days. They managed to reduce the ketones and get anti-sickness medication in me intravenously so I would not throw it up and the sickness slowed.

I had my scan whilst in hospital and the midwives kept saying, ‘Oh excessive sickness, it’s a sign of twins you know?’ I didn’t take it seriously, until the scan whilst I was in hospital revealed two little heartbeats!

The sickness kept going and going but after being discharged I was able to manage it with anti sickness tablets and keep some food down. It did not stop until 17 weeks but it felt like the longest 17 weeks of my life. Again it was like a light switch and just stopped with no rhyme or reason.

I have to say it was the most difficult bit of pregnancy for me and it took me weeks to regain full health and by that point with the growing twins inside me I was starting to just get huge. I feel I really missed out on the ‘blooming’ stage of this pregnancy.

They say sickness gets worse with every pregnancy you have. The thought of it over again fills me with dread but crazily I still want one more…am I a glutton for punishment?

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I remember the time when someone first asked me, whilst looking at Oli’s hair: “will he getting a haircut soon then?” and I replied with a “no not just yet”. The honest truth was that I never wanted to get his precious little blonde mop cut; it was so cute with the little curls that appeared after being washed and I wanted it to stay that way. His hair had taken so long to grow (he was a bald baby for such a long time) and I was so pleased that he actually had some. I liked the way it looked long on him and it just suited him. I thought if I was to get it cut they would take away all this precious hair of his.

Sadly it did get to the point where it really needed a cut, but another reason why we had put off his first haircut for so long was that he was a wriggler: he just doesn’t like to stay still at all. The thought of trying to get him to sit still in a hairdresser’s chair made my hair stand on end-he would surely scream the place down. I use a mobile hairdresser myself so instead I decided to take Oli to her house and we took along all the toys we thought we would need to distract him.

Oli's First Haircut

We were right about him not wanting to stay still. To allow the hairdresser to get near his hair we had to sit him on my lap and I had to hold him. I’m glad we picked someone who is used to children; she told us about how cutting children’s hair was quite nerve wracking at first because of how they like to move around-not good when you’re holding sharp equipment! So my one tip would be to go to someone who is experienced with cutting children’s hair and who is used to children not wanting to cooperate.

As well as trying to distract him with books and toys we tried to get him involved with his haircut by showing him the scissors and letting him use the comb to comb both mine and the hairdressers hair as well as his own. Part of me does wonder if I should have got it done earlier, even if it was just a little snip, so he would have been used to it from an early age. I guess it’s another lesson I’ve learned as a parent.

What was your baby’s first haircut experience like?

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January can be damp and dreary and it is all too easy to stay indoors all snuggled up on the sofa with a DVD and a box of biscuits waiting for warmer days. However, if your children are anything like mine, they need regular running and lots of fresh air if they are to function properly and not trash the house!

Here are my top tips for encouraging them out and about for enjoyable family walks as well as enjoying the park or garden throughout the winter.

1. Treasure Hunting: Take a treasure bag or box with you, an old shoe box will do, and fill it with special finds. To make it more of a challenge you can have a theme ‘collect 5 round objects’ or ‘5 spiky things’ or ‘5 different colours’. When you get home either display the finds on a nature table or use them to make a collage.

2 Animal Tracking: Take your magnifying glass and binoculars (deerstalker hat optional) and pretend to be detectives. There are lots of signs to look for (and lots of books to help you identify what you are looking at!)

• All the diggings and holes which mark out a badger sett (large) or rabbit burrow (small)

• Bashed snail shells on a song thrush’s stone plate

• Pinecones nibbled until they look like apple cores, all that is left of a squirrel’s lunch

• Molehills. Imagine the tunnel world below, when you get home make some tunnels with blankets/fabric draped over chairs and set up a mole hole

• Footprints (especially good on a muddy walk) Look at all the different shapes and styles of print and see if you can work out which bird or animal they come from

• Bones, pellets and pooh. Most children like looking for pooh and if you let them pooh spot they are in their element. We may think pooh is boring, they don’t, so look at the difference in size between horse pooh, deer pooh and rabbit pooh. If you can bear it, take a stick and have a poke to see if you can work out what they have been eating! You may be lucky and find owl pellets; owls spit out a pellet containing the bits of bones they can’t digest and children find these fascinating! There are usually small mammal bones to be found if you look carefully enough, my little boy has a gruesome collection of jaw bones which he keeps in a box to scare visitors!

If you take a camera with you children can record their findings and build up a booklet about their walks through the seasons. This works especially well on a regular and familiar walk.

3. Pack a Winter Picnic. Steaming hot soup from a flask when you have reached the top of the hill you fancy climbing or you reach a clearing in the forest is enough to tempt most children to walk just a little bit further.

4. Fossil hunting and skimming stones. The beach in winter is one of our very favourite places. Gone are the hoards of summer and it’s not far to walk before we have it to ourselves. Hunting for fossils, rock pooling, skimming stones and keeping the best ones to paint and decorate when we get home, all make for an excellent day out.

5. Fairy Houses and Giant’s Dens. Fairies need houses even in winter, collect sticks, moss, small pebbles and make little houses in the garden or out on a walk. If you are walking in the woodland you can build a den together big enough to sit inside; a perfect place for that winter picnic!

Happy winter walking!

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Christine lives in a ramshackle house in Somerset with her husband and four children aged 15, 14, 11 and 6 where she tries to hold everything together by blogging, freelance writing and placing buckets under drips.

Her background as a primary school teacher and her fifteen years of parenting have certainly given her plenty of things to write about! Last year saw her visiting Mozambique and New York with Save the Children and blogging for the Gates Foundation and the Department for International Development. This has strengthened her resolve to use blogging and social media to help make a difference to children’s lives.

You can find Christine blogging about all things family at http://christinemosler.wordpress.com/ and all things foodie at http://fabfoodblog.org/

Look out for a new post by Christine coming very soon on BornFree Mum and Dad.

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I never had a brother growing up. My mother decided in her infinite wisdom to spawn me a couple of younger sisters at a time when I thought girls were ‘gross’ and ‘yucky’. I was always keen on having a brother, someone with whom I could play Subbuteo and LEGO, and get into scraps with. Instead I had to make do with the various girly things my sisters offered – although one sister and I did have a game where we saw who could kick the other person the hardest in the crotch; but that’s a different – and more painful – story.

Twenty years later, I’m all grown up and have two sons, with about two and a half years between them, and it’s great to watch them grow up together. They’re not at the age yet when they’re constantly fighting – the eldest is 4; instead, the youngest just copies everything that his older brother does. But I find myself living out the brotherhood I never had through them.

I often wonder what they’ll be like when they’re older, and whether they’ll be an inseparable sibling duo, like the Hardy Boys or Ant and Dec (OK, so they’re not brothers by blood, but they’re practically joined at the hip). I want them to go to the same school, and for one to see the other getting picked on and wade in, fists flailing, having no regard for how much he is going to be told off, instead concerned only with the welfare of his brother. I want them to sneak food up to their bedrooms in the middle of the night, and for me to find them in the morning face-down in a sea of chocolate bar wrappers and cans of Coke.

When they’re older still, I want them to talk in hushed tones together about girls, and for one to console the other in the event of a break-up. I want them to be able to tell each other anything, to be best friends, to go out on the town and have a laugh knowing that each one has the other’s back at all times.

Moving on a few years, I want them to be Best Man at each other’s wedding, and to stand up in front of a hundred guests and tell story after embarrassing story, and I’ll be as proud as punch. And I want them to come over on Christmas Day when I’m old and grey and have lost most of my bladder control, and I can sit in the corner and watch them play with their kids before they nip off to the pub for a swift pint.

But that’s a long way away, and it’s doubtful that they’ll turn out exactly like that. They’ll probably fall out, or go to different universities, and end up being more friends than brothers. But only time will tell. One thing is for sure, though: no matter how big they get, they’ll never be able to beat their dad in a fight.

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It’s that time of year again when we start to reflect on the past year and start to think about what we would do differently this year. We set out on a mission to make New Years resolutions, all with the greatest of intentions but who actually keeps them?

I know that I am useless at it, but you see I make terrible resolutions and ones that I can never stick too.

These include things like:

1. Get fit (erm… yeah right, who am I kidding? The gym is like my allergy.)

2. Remember everyone’s birthday (sometimes I can’t even remember my own name so how is this humanly possible?)

3. Be a nicer person (I can’t help it, sometimes a good moan does us all the world of good!)

The problem is these resolutions are too general and not really achievable. In terms of getting fit, I would need to set myself some kind of challenge, like enter a race or something, but running just does not appeal (I don’t own a pair of trainers) and it requires time. And, if I ever get the gift of Time, what I really want is a cup of tea!

So I have been putting on my thinking cap because I do think it is good to reflect on your year and start to think about how you can move forwards. Lot of people fear change, but my worst fear is things becoming stagnant and nonmoving.

I have come to the conclusion that baby steps are the way forwards: goal setting. As a trained teacher and occupational therapist, I would always have an end target for the student or client, but also the break down steps to get there. So I feel resolutions should occur every three months, whereby you can stop, review, amend, push forwards and actually feel you are getting somewhere.

My first stop this year is the house. It is driving me mad! What I would really love to do is move but money says a big fat NO. Everything is old, filthy and shows evidence of little people! Whatever made us think a cream carpet was a good idea? I do not know. The carpet now looks like a very stained and splurged dirty watercolour and we really need a new one so that is a first 3-month plan! Then we set to the next resolution!

My next one is attempting to get Noah to try more foods. Baby step 1 – create and introduce a reward chart! See sounds achievable now doesn’t it?

OK, next: fitness…I am starting a Zumba class and I am going with a very motivated friend, so that will help and it started first week of January. Perfect!

Birthdays – I am going to have a Birthday Book and check birthdays for the following three months and buy cards ready. That way if I forget, which inevitably I will, I will only have to post them! Only a day late still counts, right?

It not rocket science. It will not change the world, but it will make me feel that I have not broken the rules by the end of the first month.

Achievable resolutions…all in easy baby steps!

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Two years ago, everything was about work. Five years of degrees and work experience meant I valued every second of my job – and it came before pretty much everything else.

Then I became a mum.

While I was on maternity leave, the new priorities of my life started to shift into focus. Yes, I still loved my job and yes, I still needed to earn money. But it wasn’t always going to come first.

It took nearly six months for me to make a final decision about returning to work. In the end the sums had the final say; once I’d paid out for childcare I would barely have had enough left in my pocket to pay for petrol. So I went freelance, working from home during term time (my husband’s a teacher) and doing back-to-back radio shifts during the school holidays when Daddy Daycare was at home to look after our daughter.

It was hard – no day off in three weeks, with a demanding baby and Mother Guilt constantly in my ear – but now, six months after returning to work, I’m about to start a new job. Leaving my old job and reassessing my priorities has opened new doors for me, ones which would have remained shut if I’d have taken the “safe” option and remained where I was.

Karen Eaves, a mum of two from Loughton, also made the jump to change her working life after having children.

“Before I was a mum, I was employed as Head of Curriculum and then Business Development Manager in a national music education company,” says Karen. “After having my second child, instead of returning to work, I set up my own business running a record label and online shop.”

But Karen warns against thinking going it alone is an easy option. “It’s extremely challenging launching your own business at the same time as being a mum. Being a mum is much harder than I imagined and running a business is much harder than I imagined. Both are full time jobs and it’s really hard to find the right balance. But the beauty of it is that I can juggle, and if I need to be flexible or change my working day to do something with the little ones, then I can.”

Charlotte Pearson is another success story. The mum of two, from Deeside, set up her own company after the birth of her second child. “My background is Sociology and Applied Social Studies. My first job out of university was as a substance misuse worker. I moved from there and worked in social research and then into commissioning and planning for children’s services. During that job I had two children, 21 months apart.”

But Charlotte found the job she was doing didn’t work well with being a mum of two. “Not long after my second child was born I realised that something had to change. I was working around 48 hours per week. My day consisted of nursery drop-off at 8am, working all day, and then worrying about whether or not I was going to get out by 5.10pm to race back to nursery. If I got stuck behind a tractor I would arrive at nursery to find the nursery manager waiting outside with my children – the last to be collected. It broke my heart.”

During her maternity leave with her second baby, Charlotte had already started investigating other ways of making a living. “I had set up my own limited company during my second maternity leave, with a view to working freelance as a consultant in the health and social care sector. In May 2009 I left my job.”

But, like Karen, Charlotte warns against thinking this is the easy option. “Work did not come to me. Every single piece of work I got was because I went looking for it. I must have sent thousands of emails over the first few months. Sometimes I would get lots of work all at once, sometimes I wouldn’t get anything. But my biggest motivator was my children. Six weeks into my business my daughter said to me ‘Mummy, I love your new job!’ That was all I needed.”

Tips for going it alone:

• Do your research and be organised. “It’s easy to let things slip with the business when you have young children, but if you’re organised you can just about stay on top of things,” says Karen.

• Make sure you have support. “People who can help out with little bits of babysitting if you have meetings etc are amazing,” says Karen. “I had a friend who came all the way to Norfolk with me for a meeting once, so that I could breastfeed my son just before the meeting.”

• Consider your childcare options. There’s a big difference between a nursery setting, childminder setting, or having a nanny. If you need help with childcare make sure you look into all the options and work out what’s best for you. The costs can also vary greatly.

• You can find out more about the different forms of childcare available, and the help you may be eligible to receive on the Direct Gov website: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/Childcare/index.htm

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At this time of year lots of people are thinking about starting diets or getting fit but do you ever make new year’s resolutions about your kids’ play? I work with young children and blog about play so it’s always on my mind but I also use the start of the year as a time to reflect on the children, what they’ve been enjoying during the last year and what plans we can make for more fun in the new one.

We always talk about our family new year’s resolutions with my two daughters and they make resolutions of their own. I’ve got lists of their plans going back a few years now and it’s fun for them to see what they’d wished for when they were younger. My nearly 9-year-old never did learn to fly! We try and have one over-all aim for the year, which we post on the fridge door so we don’t forget about it. This year we’re being mindful to include lots of opportunities in the year to ‘create’ – whether that’s painting, models, dens or just a playful mess! Both my girls are in school now and I see as they get older that there isn’t as much opportunity at school for the really creative play they enjoyed when they were younger, so it’s really important for us to preserve and encourage this at home. What would you focus on with your kids?

New year is also a good time to have a look around your home from your children’s point of view and see if it still provides them with all the play opportunities you’d like. Children grow and develop very quickly, especially in their first few years, so you’ll be used to reviewing every so often to make sure that your home is still safe for them as they move from crawling to pulling up to walking. I think it’s important too to check that your home is still providing them with fun play and learning opportunities as their development changes. It doesn’t take long to conduct a child’s eye audit, both inside your home and in your garden, and ring a few changes with the toys and activities you have available for them. A few added resources can be a springboard for a new year full of great play.

The start of a new year can also be a prompt to look at ourselves as parents and think about how we’re parenting. One mum I’m taking inspiration from this year is the author of the blog The Mommies Made Me Do It who has a whole section on her site called The Yes Album. It’s filled with glorious photos of her son having the best fun, drawing on his feet, jumping in puddles and climbing trees – all happening because his mum has taken on a ‘yes you can’ approach to her son’s desire to try things, get messy and be daring. I’m going to try and say yes to my kids’ crazy, playful requests as much as I can in 2012.

That’s my plan for the year – what’s yours? Please leave a comment and share what New Year’s play plans you have for your kids.

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Happy New Year to our BornFree Mum and Dad community!

We hope you’ve had a wonderful time with your family and  friends over the festive season. Best wishes to you all for a very happy, healthy and prosperous 2012 from everyone at BornFree UK.

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It can feel financially a bit bleak once Christmas has come and gone. It’s not just the gifts is it? There are pantomimes and new clothes, meals out, bottles of wine, new decorations and then the Boxing Day sales. By now you probably have a full tummy, a full house and an empty purse.

My house is always chock a block after Christmas. My children (like many) have more toys than they really need and after Christmas…well it can get a little out of hand.

My generous dad taught me as a child that each year before Christmas I was to give 3 good quality toys away to children who didn’t have any. My sister and I would carefully pick out 3 toys each to take along to Barnardos to bring a child some Christmas cheer. This also created a little space for Santa’s stash of new toys. My children do the same, they choose three toys each to take to the local shelter to bring some joy and make some space a few days before Christmas. It is one of our traditions.

However lovely this may be, clutter still prevails and post Christmas is a great time to tackle it. I usually resolve to manage my money better and have a tidier house in my New Year’s resolutions, so making some money from the Christmas clutter ties right in.

Here are my top tips….

Don’t hold on to things you don’t need. Netmums have sales boards where you can list all the children’s’ grown out of items like bikes and bouncy chairs. Because these sale boards are area specific, collection is often easily and quickly arranged which makes them convenient.

If you have had a new mobile phone for Christmas you can go to Money Saving Expert put in the make & model of your old one and find the best price/place to sell it.

For children’s clothes and toys I would suggest local NCT sales are a great place to sell as people go looking for exactly these items. eBay is another good option for clothing bundles and well…. anything really!

If you have duplicate gifts and can’t return them to a store either sell them on Amazon or eBay or consider allocating them as a birthday gift to someone else. Simply wrap them up and pop them in your present drawer as this will save you money later on.

If you had a new ipod, Blu-ray or Xbox for Christmas you may want o sell your old cd’s, DVD’s or play station games Music Magpie is the perfect place to do this

Car boot sales are always a good option as you can sell all manner of things in one go but be sure to go out in your thermals and take a flask. It is winter! Check out. Car Boot Junction for the nearest sale

Too many books for your bookshelf? Books sell well on Amazon. It costs nothing and takes just moments to list.

Gumtree is also a good place to put hard to post items for sale such as cots and stair gates and prams. It is fast easy and free to list.

Clearing your clutter will lighten your load and hopefully make your purse feel heavier. Have fun earning back some of that Christmas cash you spent and have a look at these websites and make a start. They are all easy to use and either free or very inexpensive.

I wish you a happy, peace filled New Year.

Photo credit: metro-focus.com

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It’s the same story every January. I set myself a handful of New Year’s resolutions – eat less junk, exercise more, wear underwear every day – with the best of intentions. Then, a week later (two, if I’m being particularly diligent) and my resolutions are a little pile of ashes in the corner of my brain as I gorge myself on a hamburger whilst sitting down and not wearing boxers.

So this year it’s going to be different. I’m going to focus on my parenting skills and my children as the theme of this year’s resolutions, and hopefully that will be incentive enough to ensure I follow through.

What are my resolutions, then? Well, I’d like to take my sons outside more. All too often I will have a spare hour or two on a weekend afternoon and choose to stay inside rather than go through the faff of putting coats and shoes on my children, walking to the park and then having to keep them within arm’s reach at all times. It’s about time we all got some exercise.

Secondly, I need to raise my voice less. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I scream and yell in my children’s faces, but I do tend to start barking orders and shouting a little bit if things don’t go exactly according to plan. In my mind, you see, I was a super-well-behaved little boy, so my kids should be the same. In reality, I was a little git, but I don’t remember those times.

And finally, I need to make sure I read to them both at bedtime, every night. I do try to do so now, but there are some days when – to put it bluntly – you just can’t be bothered to read ‘Mog the Forgetful Cat’ for the umpteenth time.

I like to think I’m not alone, so I took to the Internet to seek the advice of other mums and dads around the globe, and here are their resolutions – some serious, some not so serious:

Helen123, Pregnancy Forum – For DD, it is to try to spend more time with her reading and understanding the Bible and to help her more with her mathematics. For DS, my resolution is to wean him off his dummies and take him to more ‘mums and tots’ places to encourage more sharing and interaction with children his own age.

SAHDandproud, Twitter – To do more craft at home, but I made this resolution when I was a bit drunk.

Karenandbump, Pregnancy Forum –I go back to work in a demanding role in January, and my resolution is to make sure that my boys always come first and that on my non-working days our time is focussed on them more than it is on errands.

Handhat, Twitter – To carry on regardless…

Mammywoo, Twitter – To get sterilised.

What are your resolutions for 2012?

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Our social networking team will be taking a short break over the festive period and we’re looking forward to catching up with you all again on Wednesday 28th December.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our wonderful fans, followers and friends who have made this year so special. We are so grateful to everyone who makes up the BornFree Mum & Dad community and we give special thanks to everyone who has generously contributed their time to provide wonderful blog posts and leave lively and interesting comments here on the blog, on our Facebook page and on Twitter.

We wish you all, and your loved ones, a wonderful Christmas full of love, joy, and fun.

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Christmas takes on a whole new meaning when you have children of your own. Since having my two daughters our celebrations have been so much more fun, as we’re enjoying everything through the eyes of the girls, who still really feel the magic of Christmas. Having kids also adds extra complications to the festivities though, as you try to balance their wishes with those of an extended family, and give them a wonderful treat time without either breaking your family budget or getting too stressed.

I think your children’s first few Christmases are a great time to really consider what Christmas is going to mean to you as a family and to decide what your ‘can’t-miss’ traditions are and what isn’t so important for you.

Here are our top five Christmas traditions – are they the same for your family?

Watch your baby grow – We always like to take time at Christmas to record just how much our children have grown. I have a friend who has ten years’ worth of photos of her family standing in front of their Christmas tree, recording how the kids have changed since their very first Christmas. We like to make some kind of handprint craft each year, so we have a growing set of family history decorations.

Combine cultures – Christmas can seem a time of year where you’re trying to please all the family at once but for us it’s also a time to really focus on what makes our family who we are. We have certain traditions that belong to each side of the family and which we combine together specifically because one is the way grandma does it and one is the way granny does. I think this is especially important when you have family from other culture or generations who lived in another country. Keeping up certain traditions from another time or place helps your children understand how their family is shaped.

Create an heirloom each year – We love lots of home-made touches to our Christmas and one special tradition for us is for each child to make a new decoration for the tree each year. They are always something simple like a salt dough star or a pinecone covered in glitter but they’re lovely too see when we get the box of decorations out each Christmas.

Mix in some magic – whether you believe in Father Christmas or not, it’s so much fun to mix in some magic for the children to enjoy. We make a batch of glittery reindeer food to sprinkle outside the front door, so the reindeers can spot us from the sky, and the kids are always wide-eyed when the carrots they leave out have vanished on Christmas morning.

Treat yourself – perhaps my favourite tradition is to make sure there is time for doing nothing over the holiday. We have lots of pantomime dates, family parties and carol concerts to enjoy but for us Boxing Day is time off, a chance to stay in pyjamas for most of the day, to relax and to let the children enjoy playing with their new toys.

What about you? Do you have any special traditions which are an essential part of your Christmas? And if this is your first Christmas with a new baby, do you have any special plans?

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The Supermarket Tantrum happens to all parents at some point, so I’m told. For us, it was in the sweet aisle of Sainsbury’s. My four year-old son wanted a packet of Jelly Tots, but we were in a rush and I didn’t want to spend any more than I absolutely had to. Plus, we had sweets at home.

And so I said no, and went to push the trolley forward when my son imploded in a tantrum the likes of which have never been seen before. It’s like his face just burst into a beetroot-red sphere as tears streamed down his cheeks; all of this accompanied by a scream so ear-shatteringly piercing I’m sure that jam jars over the other side of the supermarket shattered in unison.

“NOOOO!” he yelled, through short gasps. “I WANT SOME –SOME – SOME SWEEEETS!”

Staying remarkably calm and incredibly British, I acted like nothing was happening, despite feeling the burning eyes of people as they peeked around the Pot Noodles to see what was going on. Don’t make a scene, I thought. Just ignore him, he’ll get over it.

Turns out he didn’t get over it. In fact, what he did was proceed to lie down in front of the trolley so I couldn’t push it, staging some kind of protest. In the end, I gave up, abandoned the trolley and hauled my still-screaming child out of the shop and into the car.

I was reminded of this event when Stuart–one of the producers at BBC Radio Coventry & Warwickshire–rang me to ask whether I’d go on the morning show to talk about one question: are children worse behaved now than they were a generation or two ago?

It’s a good question, and once on the show the discussion progressed for a good fifteen minutes. Parents who had children a decade or so ago, it seems, tend only to remember the good bits. The times that they played up were but faded memories. Nowadays, though, all you hear about are groups of naughty children causing a disturbance, breaching the peace, and generally being a thorn in the side of people everywhere.

‘I blame the parents’ seems to be a common response to juvenile nuisances; but it holds a lot of truth. As parents, we are continual examples to our children, every second of every day. They learn their morals from us, their ethics, their sense of respect and discipline. And yes, maybe it helped that in yesteryear you could smack your children without worrying that the Politically Correct Brigade would shop you to the police, but that is no excuse for poor behaviour today.

Encouraging your child to join an organisation such as Cubs or Brownies seems to be a great way of instilling the values of respect and trust that they need to behave decently. Membership numbers have been growing year on year, and children are led by a strict Code of Conduct, by which they must abide.

No child will ever be perfect, and if anyone tells you that their little Jimmy or Jenny is good all the time, they’re lying. But any decent parent doesn’t want their child to be a part of the rowdy gang at the back of the bus who makes old ladies nervous, or the group of kids you see being loud and sweary. You never hear of the few kids who stand up to let a pensioner sit down, but they do exist; and it’s up to us to make sure that our child is one of them.

What do you think? Is children’s behaviour worse than ever?

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