EmmaKelly's Blog

To my little chicklets…. As a parent, I make lots of promises to you. I also make lots of promises to myself. My New Year's resolutions when I was 18 were, of course, very different to those I make now as a *cough* year old. (Shush!) Anyway, now that I’m your mum, I’m more keenly aware of managing you two little people, who are so impressionable and innocent, and that it is up to me to...

I know we see lots of posts about ‘things I wish I knew about being a parent’ and it made me think – what is it that I’ve learned about being a parent that I didn’t know before? Of course, there’s the obvious stuff like the all-encompassing, overwhelming sense of love you have for this tiny human being; but there’s also the other side. The practical side. The day-to-day, humdrum...

What does your baby like to play with? My son prefers to play with the box the toy came in, rather than the toy. Actually, he usually eats it. I can’t seem to stop this child from eating foreign objects – last week it was a clump of my hair (ew), before that it was a feather from a cushion. I swear he is going to cough up a furball soon… Anyway, I digress. A problem I face as a parent is...

I’m very lucky to have what they call ‘A Gentleman’s Family’. I’d never heard the term until I had my second child, which gave us one of each child – a boy and a girl. Apparently this type of ‘traditional’ family is known as ‘a gentleman’s family’ and when my son was born, there were lots of congratulations and references to this. I was clueless at the time what it meant. But...

I was totally spoiled with my first baby. Five months, boom - she slept through the night and we never looked back. I went back to work when she was six-months-old and luckily, never even imagined what other people had to deal with at night-time while juggling the demands of work also. I never experienced the gut wrenching, mind numbing, prop-your-eyes-open-with-matchsticks exhaustion that many...

You know those memories you have of your childhood – those silly but special ones that stick with you forever? We all have them if we’re lucky. My parents gave me the gift of a fantastic childhood and it’s funny what stays with you. As a child of the 80s, my fond recollections are of holidays to Donegal beaches, where one minute the sun would be shining and 30 seconds later, the rain would...

Two little words that are the bane of my life: baby brain. It's really not a myth. For me, it's seriously real. Before my children arrived, I was Mrs Organised. Every aspect of my life was run to the tiniest little detail; I had diaries, lists, notebooks, stickers, post-it's, coloured pens and everything underlined, ticked etc. Sometimes I even wrote things on a list that I'd...

Is there anyone out there who can give me some advice please? How – HOW – do I teach my toddler to share with her little brother? I’m stumped. Honestly. Don’t get me wrong, she adores him. She pets him, cuddles him, kisses him and is generally quite obsessed with him. It’s so lovely to watch their relationship grow and see how their personalities fit together. They played a game the...

“Oh, you’re off on your ‘baby holiday’ then?” said a colleague to me before I left work to have my second child. Cue the blank stare from me. Was he joking or serious? Thankfully, I knew him well enough to know he was kidding me, but it got me thinking – is that what some people think? Baby – yes. Holiday? No. Really, no. With my first, I think I even deluded myself into thinking...