LIFESTYLE: Why I'm happy I married young... and other stereotypes

Today is a bit of a personal post inspired by a couple of posts I've read recently.
The first is from Amie Hayward, who like me, married in her early 20's.
The second is from Alice. I know Alice in real life, we're even good friends. We're basically the same age (approximately seven weeks between us) and are incredibly like-minded, however our actual lives are polar opposites. In fact we often joke how completely opposite our lives are.

Alice recently defended her lifestyle in this post and it's honestly one of my favourite a blog posts. She loves a night out with drinks, has no immediate plans for marriage or kids and fairly regularly updates our group Whatsapp chat to 'Alice is getting drunk'. I love Alice's lifestyle because she loves it, she damn well chose it and she owns it.

Me, well you all probably know I followed the stereotypes. Met a guy, fell in love, moved in together, got engaged, got a cat, got married, got another cat, bought a house and are having a baby. I married at 23. I was engaged at 21. I moved in with Dann at 19. I met Dann at 18.
Our weekends and evenings are spent renovating our house, cooking together, planning for the future and binge watching our favourite shows.

FOOD: Friday Night Homemade Chicken Laksa Curry and Coconut Buns

In my house, we love love love Thai, Japanese and Chinese food, particularly if it is home cooked or from Wagamamas. Whilst diving through our Jamie's 15 minute meals book (see previous recipe here) we found a Thai Chicken Laksa that we just had to try. For once we actually stuck to the recipe very closely, and had a lot of the spices already in the house. Towards the end of this post you'll also see Coconut Buns too. By the way,  this post is VERY picture heavy - we actually took almost 60 photos doing this!

BABY: Pregnancy update - January - Weeks 15 to 18

I thought I'd do a monthly review of my pregnancy for you lovely readers. Although I totally love seeing weekly posts on other blogs, I have so many other posts to write which I also think you'll love, so I'll do a round up for you all.

This post covers week 15 to this week of 18, and what an eventful few weeks it has been.

FOOD: Sunday Comfort Food - Mustard Lamb & Irish Mash

We love a good Sunday roast in our house, and we love winter comfort food. And we absolutely adore trying new recipes and experimenting with food.

So when we found this Mustard Lamb and Irish Mash recipe in Jamie's 15 minute meals book, we knew we had to try it! (FYI I bought this as a Christmas present for Dann as we adore the show on Food Network) You can also see the original recipe with no amendments here. 

I'll start off by saying that these recipes absolutely never take 15 minutes. As you'll have seen in this test post, Jamie has to be a food magician to get it all done in 15 minutes. But they are perfectly doable in half an hour. And that is just fine by me.

BABY: The highs and lows of the first trimester

As you guys and gals will hopefully know I'm expecting my first little one (you can read the announcement here) and I'm truly over the moon and excited.

Like many women I kept the news pretty quiet for the first 13 weeks which I'm not going to lie was hard, especially when you want to shout from the rooftops. Some of my closer friends knew from about 8 weeks or so, mostly due to some of the rather irritating downsides to the first trimester.

So I thought I'd share some of my highs and lows of those secret 12 weeks.