Welcome to the March Carnival of Natural Parenting: Vintage green!
This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Code Name: Mama and Hobo Mama. This month we’re writing about being green — both how green we were when we were young and how green our kids are today. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

I have a confession to make I have no recollection of my childhood. That’s an exaggeration. I do have three or …

Riley has started talking. Even when she’s not actually saying words (at least not ones that I can understand) she babbles. Today she sang along to ‘Twinkle Twinkle’. I nearly died from the cuteness of it alone. She has been starting to say words and mimic words for awhile. But I have really seen it explode over the last week. She was slow to talk, at first. Probably because she didn’t need to.
Mostly she says single words like ’shoes’, ’shorts’, ‘help’ (finally! It’s a welcome change from the grunting), ‘Josh’, …

I’ve written about Riley’s birth in bits and pieces but never really told the whole story from beginning to end. And as this is my 300th post, it seemed like I good idea.

I was overdue. I hadn’t had any contractions or braxton hicks contractions for that matter, or so I thought. I felt as big as a house. Every now and then I’d have mind-numbing shooting pains run down my leg and my knees would buckle with it. I couldn’t sleep because I was that huge and my hips were …

This month I’m in a partnership with GreenKiddie. They’ll be featuring some of my blog posts on their website, and in this post I’ll be featuring an interview with the creator, Natliya Deleva. This isn’t a sponsored post, although I did win a prize through GreenKiddie’s competition here. It seemed like a great month to focus on green issues. It is the theme this month in the Carnival of Natural Parenting, and it’s probably something that I could focus on more – I’ve talked about my successes and failures in …

It’s hard to know why, but some days, despite having a glorious toddler who is great company, a loving husband and a great family, I feel alone, isolated and sad. Perhaps it’s a shade of depression, and if that’s all I’m left with, that’s pretty damn good. On those days, I miss my mum (Hi Mum!). That’s an inside joke. I never call her mum, I have always called her by her first name. And we keep in touch most days on the phone, and we skype. But it’s not …

This is a joint post with Amber at Unlikely Mama. You can follow her on twitter here. We thought it would be fun to look back on what our expectations were before we had our babies and how they’ve changed a year on (for Amber) and two years on (for me).
Having Children
Amber: Let me start from the beginning.  I never “expected” to have a baby.  As my online moniker hints at…it was highly unlikely that I would become a mother.  Not because I couldn’t, but because I NEVER wanted to.  Not until …

Amber at Unlikely Mama nominated me for my very first blogging award here.

Following on from Amber’s post there are a few things I need to do to share the love:
1. thank the person who nominated me for this award
2. copy the award &; place it on my blog
3. link to the person who nominated me for this award
4. share 7 interesting things about myself
5. nominate 7 other beautiful bloggers
All About Amber

Amber is a great friend of mine, who I met on twitter. I vaguely remember suggesting that a second pregnancy …

We are on a strict budget at the moment. Really strict. We want to be debt free (other than our mortgage) by July or August. Money annoys me. Or the lack of money annoys me. After we got married we had close to $40,000 in debt between personal loans and credit cards. Nightmare. So to be in a position to have paid that off completely within 4 short years is a real achievement. I love that now whenever I buy something and they ask savings or credit, I always say …