28 parenthood confessions

We all know that parenting is hard work. And we all know that there is no real right or wrong way to bring up a child - with a few exceptions of course. But it's really easy to get bogged down with the perfect appearance of parenthood that is broadcast across social media and blogs. Hey, I'll even admit that I don't exactly publish posts on all the crappy bits of having a baby. I want my bit of the internet to be as positive as possible, but I also want to be realistic.

I've made a lot of mummy friends through this blog via social media, and they are all great girls. I'm loving see all the new babies joining us month by month (at getting mildly broody too - my tiny baby is getting big very fast!). One thing I've noticed though is that we don't always share the little secrets of parenthood.

So today's blog post is a little, ok, maybe a bit of a large list of confessions from my six months as a parent. None of them of really big issues, just little things, that I';m sure many parents have experienced, or that new ones are going to shortly. The secret side of parenting.

Henry's six month update

It's that time of the month again!!
Yep Henry is another month older, and we've hit the half way mark to his first birthday, and my return to work!
Not going to lie, it's been the fastest six months of my life, and I'm slightly scared how fast the next six months are going to go.

We're fast on the approach to our first Christmas as a family, which I'm so so excited about, and Henry has many super cute outfits - which I bought in 6-9 months, so they're going to be too big initially but thought they'd get better wear out of them!

As with his five month update, I'm going to include a little list of facts and fun bits about Henry:

Time travel for parents with Lifecake

Since Henry was born I've become a bit of a photo junkie. Ok,well, I've always been a bit of a photo junkie - you only need to look through this blog to see I spam you guys with about 100 photos for every blog post - sorry about that.

But since Henry arrived, my photo addiction has definitely gotten worse. To be fair, he is super cute, and as he's gotten older I've definitely been taking more and more photos (some of this may be down to realising I didn't take as many as I would have liked when he was really little, probably due to life adjustments and lack of sleep, so I'm compensating). And like any self-respecting mother I want to share ALL of the photos. However I'm very aware that not everyone on my Facebook friends lists wants to be inundated with photos of Henry. And I have a set criteria for images for my blog, so a lot of them aren't appropriate.

We also live quite far away from both sets of Grandparents, so they only really see him every couple of months, and through photos.

Recently I was contacted by Lifecake to try out their mobile phone app* which is specifically designed for parents. I'll describe the app the way the team does "parents can upload images and videos of their child, creating a seamless timeline of every moment. They can then privately share them with friends and family". Basically this is absolutely perfect for us. And I'm going to tell you why.

Gingerbread Houses with Friends

I think one of the best things about Christmas has to be the food. Am I right? There's nothing like really good good to get you in the festive spirit.
And the food at Christmas is always so special too. Pigs in blankets, mince pies, chocolate log, Christmas pudding, turkey, candy canes and gingerbread houses.

And I seriously love gingerbread houses. We decorated our own a couple of years back, but as this is the year of starting traditions, it only seemed right to get decorating again.
As Henry is still a little young (OMG next Christmas guys, next Christmas is going to be amazing!!) we decided to have a decorating contest with our friends (and Henry's Godparents) Alice and Arran one Friday night!

Alongside our competition we had Bailey's and Bucks Fizz, pigs in blankets and mince pies of course, to get really Christmassy.

We picked up the houses with lots of decorations and icing from Tesco.
Here's some photos from our evening - we even voted on a fave - but you'll have to wait til the end of the post to see who Twitter crowned as our winner!!

6 things I've learnt in six months as a parent

I actually can't believe I'm writing this post.
Well I can, but it's come around so so fast. Every single month when I write Henry's update I can't believe another month has gone by.
It's singularly been the hardest and best six months of my entire life.
I've grown so much as a person and changed so much in these short six months, but bringing my little human into the world has been the best and biggest achievement of my life.

There have most certainly been really really hard days, hard hours, more tears than when Alice in Wonderland tried to drown Wonderland and many a frustrated moment. But there's also been the biggest smiles, smiles that hurt my face and brought happy tears, laughter from an entire room, and the biggest sense of pride.

Every day brings a new challenge and a new adventure, even on the days when we've stayed at home away from the cold. And honestly, I could not imagine my life any other way. Henry, my little boy, the light of my life, has taken my breath away.

So he's to six months, and six things I've learnt in that time.