The post 7 Tips to Surviving Shopping with Babies and Toddlers appeared first on Making Mama.
]]>We all know the story. You went out to the local shopping centre to get a few jobs done. You had a list of 10 items and only three got ticked off. The baby cried because she was tired and couldn’t sleep. The toddler threw himself on the floor in a tantrum when you wanted him to hurry up with the pull along shopping basket and you tried to ‘help’. Mr Independent wanted to do it all.by.himself. Ugh. The whole thing was a disaster.
In the ideal world we would all have a village of support where you can pass your baby and toddlers to someone else’s loving arms to care for while you get stuff done.
We all need to get stuff done, right? It might be the errands at a shopping centre, or it could be grocery shopping. Trying to do so with babies and toddlers in tow is definitely not easy. It does vary from family to family depending on the temperament of the child and how many children you are wrangling, and other factors outside our control. Here are my top tips I’ve learned along the way by experiencing the hard times:
Being a mother is one of the most rewarding experiences a woman can go through. We all have different stories though – some mums have had the fortune of easy breastfeeding, a settled baby who sleeps for long periods, and babies and toddlers who have calm temperaments so they can get out and about and get stuff done. Conversely, there are mums where things are tough. The unsettled baby, the one who hardly sleeps a wink, the exhausted mum who just can’t go out because the baby or toddler cries all the time. If you are this mum, you can feel like a failure because you don’t have the ‘happy child’, you are a failure because you can’t achieve just a few errands or one whole grocery shop without incident and it all equals one big fat feeling of loneliness. So to help you, I’d recommend following at least one of the above tips. It’s amazing how much better you will feel to achieve something without the screaming child.
There’s a story about a mum who was overheard in the supermarket saying to her toddler who wanted a toy, “not today, but it’s okay, there’s only 2 more aisles to go”. They went down the next aisle and the toddler threw himself on the floor because he wanted the chips and his mum said no. The mum said, “I know this feels hard, you are tired, but we are nearly finished and then we’ll go home”. As the mum was going through the checkout and the toddler was still crying and wanting the lollipop on display, she said, “you’ve done so well, it’s time to go home and rest now and then do something fun!” The observer approached the mum and complimented her on how well she had spoken to her toddler in a difficult time. The mum turned and said, “oh, I wasn’t talking to him, I was talking to myself!”
If you are looking for more help with mum hacks, check out the workshop called The Messy Life.
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]]>The post Sanity tips for mums with babies and toddlers appeared first on Making Mama.
]]>It’s really common for mums to look for sanity tips after they have a baby. One of the things many mums tell me is how overwhelming they find it when they first come home with their baby. There’s so much we just don’t know before we have our baby, some of which we just don’t learn because our village has been lost, and some of which because we need to simply experience it to understand it. Like sleep deprivation. Did you EVER know how hard that was going to be?!
The problem is that with the loss of the village, and the loss of family in close proximity to many new mothers, new mums are often left feeling alone. Even for mums like me who knew quite well how to CARE for a newborn, I didn’t know how it felt to be sleep deprived and I had never breastfed before. I had never cared for a baby whilst having severe abdominal pain from a ceasarean section, and I had never experienced severe nipple pain before whilst also caring for a baby. So I was in a new zone. Is that where you are?
At the Making Mama Village workshop series we cover a lot of this content in the last session. Mums need to learn tips to save their sanity, but also to realise you don’t have to do it all. It’s okay if you are not doing everything perfectly the way you might have done before you had children. You want to feel supported in your efforts to do the very best you can. At the end of the day your children will know that you loved them by what you say to them and how you act with them, not because you have a gourmet meal on the table each night and a clean house. We’ve moved on since the 1950s thankfully!
Have you signed up to join the village yet? Go here to do so: https://makingmamavillage.com.au/
You can check out more about the workshops on offer here: https://makingmamavillage.com.au/services/
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]]>The post Mum Hacks appeared first on Making Mama.
]]>Anyone who is a mum knows how incredibly exhausting it can be in the middle of all the joys it also comes with. Unless you have an amazeballs mother’s group who share the ins and outs of everything to do with parenting, you might have missed some of the little life hacks to help you get through the days and the weeks.
Do you wish you had this magic list of hacks? You’ve come to the right place! I’m all about supporting mums. If I hear of a great tip I’ll be sure to let you know! I want all mums to feel supported so they can focus on loving their children and focus on the joys that motherhood can bring. I don’t want mums to feel so bogged down in the mess of life that they can’t see the happiness that is mixed in. So here is my list of mum hacks to get through your days. Some are things I did when my kids were babies/todders and some I’ve found from other sources:
At the Making Mama Village workshop series we cover a lot of this content in the last session. It’s important for mums to learn tips to save their sanity, but also to realise you don’t have to do it all. It’s okay if you are not doing everything perfectly the way you might have done before you had children. It’s important that mums feel supported in their efforts to do the very best they can. At the end of the day your children will know that you loved them by what you say to them and how you act with them, not because you have a gourmet meal on the table each night and a clean house. We’ve moved on since the 1950s thankfully!
Have you signed up to join the village yet? Go here to do so: https://makingmamavillage.com.au/
You can check out more about the workshops on offer here: https://makingmamavillage.com.au/services/
The post Mum Hacks appeared first on Making Mama.
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