All posts tagged: #toddlers

Firsts and Lasts

(Originally published in the Autumn 2018 edition of Little Treasures Magazine) “I re-homed the Mountain Buggy while you were out, it’s gone to a lovely family expecting a surprise third baby” my husband beamed at me, a look of expectant pride on his face as if I’d soon be whipping out a certificate for ‘The Most Helpful And Organised Partner’. “You WHAT?” I shrieked. “G-gave away the M-mountain Buggy?” He stammered, “The thing you said we should probably give away because Tilly is too big for it now? To a nice family? Was that not right?” Doubt flickered across his face as he edged towards the fridge to pour me a large wine. It was absolutely the right thing to do, better than my default plan based on leaving it under the house to gather that under-the-house-smell saying, “we really must re-home that buggy,” every time I trip over it while trying to hunt down the cat. It’s not that I didn’t want another family to benefit from the pram that had given me a …

Go with your gut

In the glamour stakes, the gut ranks somewhere alongside the armpit in the eyes of most people, and is generally left to its own devices. Far from simply being a means of getting food from one end of our body to the other, the gut is the powerhouse of our immune system, and a factory for brain chemicals. I spoke with Rosanne Sullivan from The WellBeing Centre in Auckland and found out why we should be giving this part of our body a whole lot of love and attention. “It’s estimated that roughly 80 per cent of our immune system is location in our gut”, says Rosanne Sullivan, ” and a significant amount of serotonin (our ‘happiness hormone’) along with other brain chemicals are made in the gut. Yet despite being one of our biggest organs, the gut is not often a popular topic of conversation. But it’s something we should pay a lot more attention to, as the negative effects of an under-performing gut can present in surprising ways. “The gut is a big, long …