A year ago today……

Cast your mind back, what were you doing this time last year? You were probably knee-deep in Quality Street wrappers and quietly weeping for the extra tyre you were carrying. What was I doing (apart from wading through Quality Street wrappers and prodding at my spare tyre in disgust)?

Was I –

• Meeting up with Ryan Gosling to tell him face to face that his declarations of love for me needed to stop? That it was getting embarrassing as I am a happily married woman with children? NOPE. Although, I hasten to add that I am happily married with children.

• Penning my satirical guide to parenting – (titled –  All of the wine)? A guide that would be declared by Times magazine to be – “an honest and refreshing guide to parenting that has never been seen before. This woman is a genius”? Nope.

• Was I designing a new gadget that would earn me billions and cause me to be hailed by parents everywhere “their saviour”? Nope.

What I was actually doing –

I was staring at the yawning year that was ahead, cursing the never-ending rain and eating all of the left-over mince pies. It was as I munched through my third mince-pie that I decided to do something. Since becoming a stay-at-home mum I have found it to be both rewarding and brilliant. I consider myself very lucky in that I am able to be a stay-at-home mum who is able to take and pick the girls up from school. However, I also find being a stay-at-home mum mind-numbingly boring at times. I love them but spending nearly all of your time with two mini-dictators can take its toll. You start to lose yourself. You find yourself telling your husband v-e-r-y  s-l-o-w-l-y to eat his midget trees. Someone asks you your name and you call yourself – “Youngest’s Mummy”. This made me realise that I had to change something NOW before I started wasting away from “Mumuenza”

Mumuenza – a common affliction that affects stay-at-home mums. One of several strains, also see Mumzombie that affects working mums.

Signs and symptoms of Mumuenza

Mumuenza can creep up gradually and often take hold before the mum or their family has realised. Common symptoms include:

• Carrying around a Mary Poppins bag that weighs three tons and carries everything but the kitchen sink and then not having the one thing that you need

• Talking really slowly and patronisingly in a sing-song voice

• Dabbing at everything and everyone with a hanky

• Obsession with anti-bac hand gel

• Calling everyone sweetie-pie

• Calling vegetables and fish by different names – mini trees for broccoli and tuna becomes the swimming chicken

• Knowing the grading system for poop

• Leaving cold cups of tea everywhere

• Looking frazzled and dazed

• Forgetting your own name and birthday

Treatment of Mumuenza

Place the mum in a warm bath with a glass of wine and a good magazine. Leave for one hour.

I had decided that I had an extreme case of Mumuenza and one bath was not going to sort it. Therefore, a year ago today I started writing this blog and overnight I became a multi-millionaire and secured several book deals.

No, that would be a lie.

But, I did start writing this blog. This is not going to be another gushing post about how amazing blogging is (although I do have a love/hate relationship with it), nor am I going to share all that I have learnt with you because to be honest I haven’t learnt a lot. I am, however, going to say thank you for reading me and thank you for the emails and comments. That has been rather lovely. I have had some very cool things happen as a result of my blog. Thanks to my blog I can now say that I am an award winner – huzzah! However, I have also learnt that winning an award might be lovely but it really doesn’t change anything. My blog has enabled me to raise money, talk about challenging subjects and to connect with people worldwide. When I started this blog no-one I knew in “real” life knew about this blog. One year later and lots of people in my “real” life know about my blog, including my family and some of Mr C’s family. You would think that this would make me think twice about what I choose to share and for a while I did worry about offending friends and family but then my Mum gave me a good talking to and told me to “carry on writing as you are, that is what makes you – YOU. Just write as if no-one is reading” Wise woman, she might now regret it after I chose to write about my bikini line (very tongue in cheek, I am not really a Chewbacca) and decided to tell everyone how Dad had made Mum village gossip.

Thank you all for reading. Cheers xx

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