Dear Autumn,
I can’t believe how big you’re getting. Sometimes it feels so long since you were born and you were so tiny, sometimes it feels hardly any time at all. One thing is for sure, I can’t imagine life without you and I’m so glad to have you in it.
Today is #TimeToTalk day, a day all about increasing mental health awareness by talking about it and perhaps reaching out to someone with mental health issues to make sure they’re doing okay. Here I have a guest post from a close friend of mine who had her daughter 7 weeks before I gave birth to Autumn and has unfortunately been suffering from OCD since during pregnancy. I’ll be posting about mental health quite a lot on my blog, so I thought it would be interesting to ask her to write a post for me about her experiences so I could find out more about what she’s been going through but also to spread awareness of perinatal and postnatal OCD.
Please be aware that as with lots of things regarding mental health, this may be triggering.
Today I’m quite excited – partly because yesterday Autumn discovered her foot and I’m hoping today’s the day she puts it in her mouth (I find it so cute when babies do that) and because today is the start of the ‘Sunday Review’ posts I’ve decided to start writing!
I enjoy reviewing products – in the past I’ve been sent vouchers or products for free in return for reviewing them for companies. These have included Tesco’s Free From Range products, a Veet Easywax, YUM spreads and Dove compressed deodorants. As such, I thought I’d start reviewing products each Sunday here. My current plan is to review beauty products and baby things alternate weeks, but that may change in the future. Anyway, my review this week is about the Quinny Zapp Xtra 2 stroller and the birth inlay that you can use to enable you to use it for babies before the age of 6 months when they can use it without.
Yesterday, I read on Mumsnet that Gary Lineker has called for homework to be banned. He said:
‘Homework should be banned. All it does is drive a massive wedge between parents and children, because you end up having to do it for them, and it’s stressful. They get stressed and they don’t want to do it’.
As both a mother and Social Sciences student, I have found the State of Child Health Report 2017, which was published today, concerning. Poverty in the UK and how it affects the issue of children’s health is something I have been studying this academic year and found very interesting.
Although it’s encouraging to read that we are better than the US, how and why is it that we are worse than a lot of other European countries? We have the fifth highest rate of infant mortality in Europe which is extremely worrying and this is much higher in deprived socio-economic groups. As I glance at Autumn asleep peacefully next to me, I feel quite angry that not more is being done to prevent these small, beautiful, innocent babies from dying.