I've found another forum to spam

I like forums. They provide a means for like minded (and sometimes complete opposites) people to get together and spout off. I like forums that provide a chance for me to get my teeth into a topic and to really say what I mean rather than having to tone it down on some commercial sites.

So, it was with great delight I followed a link from Katie's blog to the What's Your Opinion On? forum, which had been set up after a wee flounce from a commercially sponsored site that shall remain nameless but whose initials are BC.

I love this place. Here we can have massive disagreements on all sorts of subjects but without anyone falling out or getting into a snit. There's a great bunch of people on there, we don't all agree, but so far we all seem to respect everyone else's opinions and it's great!

You can find the forum here

While I'm on the subject of Buy British Month

It's not just wool that attracts me to the lovely ladies at Buy British Month. I got two stunning T-shirts for Mike and I from Cat at Nappy Elite.
She's the lovely lady who makes the Kiwi Quick Flips which lots of mummy's have found to be a godsend for night nappies. I've not tried one yet, but they're on my list to give a go once I have spare (ahahahahaha) cash.

But, this post is about T-shirts not nappies so on we go. Cat posted up a couple of Tees she done on the Cloth Nappy Addicts forum and I thought one of them would be perfect for Mike for his birthday in July. So I popped off a PM to Cat and sure enough, they could be made in XXL and, as it would be rude not to, I decided I was having one myself.

Mike wouldn't shut up about wanting to know what he was getting and so when the parcel arrived, I had to open it and show him and this is what we got.

Wool, it's for more than just jumpers!

I have a new addiction. I never really thought of myself as having an addictive personality but it seems that I was wrong.

Drink - take it or leave it. Cigarettes - stopped dead when I was pregnant with James. Drugs - never been interested. Cloth nappies - urm well, you see, they're soft, and have embroidery on them. Wool - a whole new ball game!

I am addicted to wool. Not just any wool though, beautiful, gorgeous, soft merino and cashmere and Blue Faced Leicester. The sort of wool that gets turned into soakers, shorties, crops and longies.
It started, really, with envy at Katie's collection of wool for Lal. Then Sarah posted some pre-loved longies on Cloth Tots and I bought them to give them a try for James and well, it just sort of snowballed from there.

My aunty Jen made me some soakers, just plain smokey blue, work fab at night over James' BumHuggers and Baby Beehinds. Then I saw some wool hand dyed by the fabulous Sarah at Babylonglegs and I was hooked.

We now have a beautiful pair of custom shorties which are actually a bit more like crops, knitted by Yvonne at The Nappy Garden (those of the snail) and another pair on the way from the same fabulous girls in the most amazing colour combination of black, lime, orange, yellow, purple, pink, they really are a many coloured dream pair!

Then I bought a combo from Buy British Month on the great Cloth Nappy Addicts forum, a Pickle Paints T shirt with Emmie monster (she likes little snails and walking with dandilions, how cute is that!) and some shorties knitted by Evelyn at The Soaring Sheep.
My friend Zoe is knitting me some longies from the Sleepy Times Knit pattern in another Babylonglegs colourway called Big Cat, all browns, oranges, blacks and yellows, like a little tiger and the lovely lovely Jo at Halobaby is saving me some of her VHC dyed wool to knit into something at the end of BBM.

A Thought On Snails

I've always been fond of snails, I put it down to Bryan the Snail from the Magic Roundabout. My mother is horrible and stands on them so they don't eat her plants. She says they're just slugs with a shell but I think they're more than that.

You don't see slugs in children's books but there's lots and lots of snails and so I figure, they're better than slugs and they're definitely cuter.
So, it was with huge delight that I discovered that my custom shorties - oh didn't I mention them before? - have got a little snail embroidered on the left leg.

The shorties, or possibly crops depending on how long James' legs are when we get them hopefully tomorrow (not that James' legs grow or shrink daily but you know what I mean!) came from Lisa and Yvonne at The Nappy Garden. I bought some new Bippi Stuff bibs for James from them during Real Nappy Week and they had a free draw that everyone who bought something was entered into.

I won!

I never win anything usually so it was a bit of a shock, but a very pleasant one, to be told I could choose to have something knitted for James. We've got a couple of longies I bought pre-loved and my wonderful friend Zoe is knitting us another pair, so I thought, as it's allegedly going to be getting warmer as we move into Summer, that I should get some shorties.

Lisa asked what colours I'd like and I thought something in greens and yellows, spring like colours, would be wonderful for this time of year and she found the most gorgeous wool which has now been khitted up by her mum Yvonne into James' shorties.

You can find a picture of them on their blog here

Goldfish memory

Is it true that the humble goldfish has a memory of about five seconds? I suppose it would probably be a good thing if it were so as I'm not sure how many of them would choose to commit hare-kiri by flipping out of the bowl instead of going round in yet another circle.

But, is there a point to this random musing on the life of a goldfish. Well yes, it's an example of just how my brain is functioning, or not, at the moment.
Since having James I must admit that my brain, that once managed to hold its own in a room full of national journalists and still get an exclusive story, now can't always even manage to remember to fill the kettle up before switching it on.
It means, if anyone's still keeping up with this ramble, that I keep forgetting about this blog.

Poorly baby

James has had the vomiting bug once already, about a month ago. That involved me sitting up with him all night for two nights in case he was sick and choked. It wasn't pleasant to watch my little boy dry heaving.

He also had the most horrendous explosive poo, fortunately that didn't last very long so you can imagine how overjoyed I was to be woken up on Tuesday to the sound of him coughing and making choking noises once more.
I went to get him from his cot and he was boiling hot, I mean his skin was burning up like he'd been exposed to the sun for hours. But he didn't have a temperature. Still, I took him downstairs, got him some milk, gave him some of it and then tried the Cheerieos when he projectile vomited all over the high chair tray. Thank God that it was on is all I can say.

So, off we went upstairs, got him changed, woke his dad and told him we were off to the doctor's, which is, fortunately, just over the road. We arrived, I registered him with my usual doctor, yay six people in front of us, this was at 8.30am.

I took James into the children's playroom, where he promptly vomited again. Fortunately my cousin Lucy was on hand to watch him while I went looking for tissue and cleaning lady and to apologise to the staff for his explosion. Rang his dad and he came across with the changing bag and some more clothes to change him into. Which he then threw up all over again.

Anyway, an hour or so later, during which time poor James has just sat like a little teddy clinging onto his dad, we see the doctor, who rules out a throat infection and pronounces the vomiting bug once more.

So, another two nights of sitting in the feeding chair with James in the travel cot in the spare room just in case and now explosive poo. Unfortunately, his cloth nappies are feeling the brunt of it and so we're back in disposables overnight so that we don't end up with everything getting stained.

Ah the joys of motherhood!

Nappy obsession

I am, I will happily admit, obsessed with nappies. Not the disposable variety you get in the supermarkets, but the fabulous cloth ones you buy from the interwebs.

I blame it completely on the girls from my Baby Centre birth board. Miana runs her own company selling nappies and accessories from home and Emma has just some of the most gorgeous custom fluff for her son Ewan that I've seen.

Of course, being female and all that, I was covetous and envious of the gorgeous fluff and so I went to investigate further, found the Cloth Tots forum, where people offer up their new and pre-loved nappies to a new home, and from the BC Cloth Nappy Forum, I found Wee Notions, Upsy Daisy and the work at home mums who knit the most gorgeous soakers, shorties and longies to go over baby's nappy and give them the cutest bums.

There's another person who is to blame for me considering cloth in the first place though, outside of the Leeds City Council nappy woman who came to speak at my ante natal classes, and that's my Aussie friend Kath. Her little girl is just about a year older than James and it was Kath who first showed me that a cloth resuable nappy no longer resembled the Terry nappies of my childhood which required industrial boiling for a month to get them clean.
My Dad is proud of the fact that he could get my and my brother's nappies cleaner than my Mum when he had to wash them. He's regaled me with tales of standing in the kitchen stirring a pot full of terry towelling for hours on end - I think he's exaggerating, but probably not by much.