Family Time

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  • Welcoming a new life with humanist naming ceremonies

    Welcoming a new life with humanist naming cerem...

    Lucy Dulieu describes the personalised celebration that welcomes a child into the world... What is a humanist naming ceremony? A humanist naming ceremony marks the arrival of a new child to a family in a nonreligious way. They are often held for babies and toddlers, but ceremonies can also welcome older adopted children to a family, or step-children to a blended family. Each ceremony is personalised and allows parents to celebrate their child as a unique individual, to reflect on the wonder and responsibility of being a parent, and to share in front of family and friends a commitment to their child on their journey to independence.  Warm and welcoming, humanist naming ceremonies are child-centred and inclusive. They can be held anywhere: a garden, a village hall, or in a woodland surrounded by nature. Led by an experienced humanist celebrant, they often happen at the start of a larger celebratory...

    Welcoming a new life with humanist naming ceremonies

    Lucy Dulieu describes the personalised celebration that welcomes a child into the world... What is a humanist naming ceremony? A humanist naming ceremony marks the arrival of a new child...

  • Voice of a Grandparent: Anita

    Voice of a Grandparent: Anita

    I’m Anita and I have four granddaughters of school age. Only one goes to a school establishment, while the other three are home educated. Being a lady of a certain age, the news that my eldest daughter wanted to home school her children at first horrified me. I knew of no one whose children did not go to school. School is part of life, isn’t it? That first day when you leave your mother at the school door and enter the world of ‘standing on your own two feet’. It is where you discover how to be independent for a few hours a day while learning the basics of the three R’s. It is where you make friends for life. Or is it? I went to school in the 1960s and 70s when corporal punishment was rife, although I was never a victim of it. There wasn’t a national curriculum,...

    Voice of a Grandparent: Anita

    I’m Anita and I have four granddaughters of school age. Only one goes to a school establishment, while the other three are home educated. Being a lady of a certain...

  • How to have a plastic-free party that doesn't cost the earth

    How to have a plastic-free party that doesn't c...

    Following a recent run of family celebrations, two things struck me. One was how toxic the balloons tasted when I was blowing them up, and the other was how much plastic rubbish there was after each of the parties. This got me thinking about what alternatives I could use to the usual plastic paraphernalia that surrounds parties, without becoming a plastic-obsessed party pooper. Anyone with children knows the drill following a party. They come home high on sugar, clutching a plastic party bag full of plastic-wrapped sweets and a variety of plastic tat that gets discarded as soon as the sweets have been consumed. I have been a part of this trend and have sent more than my fair share of children home with such things before spending an hour scooping up all of the party rubbish into several black bin bags and heading home grateful to have survived. However,...

    How to have a plastic-free party that doesn't cost the earth

    Following a recent run of family celebrations, two things struck me. One was how toxic the balloons tasted when I was blowing them up, and the other was how much...

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Parenting support

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  • How leaning into instinct has improved our parenting lives

    How leaning into instinct has improved our pare...

    In my first, delirious months of motherhood, I hungrily searched for tips, tricks and ‘hacks’ that might make my son sleep for longer stretches. Night feeds were spent scrolling through forums; daytime cluster feeds were spent thumbing through books about baby sleep. Seemingly, other babies slept. Other babies could be put down. Why couldn’t my baby? While I was searching desperately for external guidance, my instincts were screaming at me. On the rare occasions that my son slept for an hour or so in his crib, I was too anxious to sleep. I felt strongly that he should be next to me at all times, but I’d read the warnings about bed-sharing. In my anxious, sleep-deprived state, I took these warnings at face value and persisted with trying to put him down in the crib. Nights were spent sat up in the nursing chair, as I tried to defy basic...

    How leaning into instinct has improved our parenting lives

    In my first, delirious months of motherhood, I hungrily searched for tips, tricks and ‘hacks’ that might make my son sleep for longer stretches. Night feeds were spent scrolling through...

  • How NLP techniques can support in motherhood

    How NLP techniques can support in motherhood

    Motherhood can be a rollercoaster journey, full of glimmers, magical memories, tough days, long nights and moments of doubt. Being a mum is twofold: supporting your child to grow and be healthy and happy, and also nourishing yourself to grow too. In becoming a mother, you can learn so much about yourself, though this can be met with uncertainty, limiting beliefs and negative internal chatter, especially of ‘not being a good enough mum’ or feeling guilty for needing (and wanting) your own space. Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) can support mums to move beyond this. It is a tool that can help to build self-awareness. As an approach, NLP seeks to understand and improve human communication and behaviour. It was developed in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who believed that by modelling the language and behaviour of successful people, they could create techniques to help others achieve similar success....

    How NLP techniques can support in motherhood

    Motherhood can be a rollercoaster journey, full of glimmers, magical memories, tough days, long nights and moments of doubt. Being a mum is twofold: supporting your child to grow and...

  • A birth mother and a non-birth mother, Alice Ellerby considers her parental role

    A birth mother and a non-birth mother, Alice El...

    On Children by Kahlil Gibran Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.They come through you but not from you,And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you withHis might that His arrows may go swift and far.Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;For even as...

    A birth mother and a non-birth mother, Alice Ellerby considers her parental role

    On Children by Kahlil Gibran Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.They come through you but not from you,And though they...

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Pregnancy & Birth

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  • One mother shares her ritual of burying her placenta

    One mother shares her ritual of burying her pla...

    It’s a mild autumn night. While singing, a procession of my closest female friends is moving into the backyard. I am kneeling down to touch it for the first time. Holding the umbilical cord, I am pulling the placenta out of the bag in which her inedible part has been frozen for the last four months (I drank the edible part in fruit smoothies the week after giving birth). How interesting to hold my own organ in my hands! The organ that was created by my body to nourish a new little being. The organ that secreted all the magical and crazy pregnancy hormones. The organ that provided my baby with nutrients and enabled him to breathe. The organ that protected him against infections and supplied him the required antibodies before he was born. The organ that my body created just for this. It is the only organ that a...

    One mother shares her ritual of burying her placenta

    It’s a mild autumn night. While singing, a procession of my closest female friends is moving into the backyard. I am kneeling down to touch it for the first time....

  • How trust and faith can help heal birth trauma

    How trust and faith can help heal birth trauma

    Throughout my second pregnancy I became aware of a theme emerging: that of faith, i.e. trust. It first came up in the early months; the word just kept popping into my mind and repeating itself throughout. I paid special attention because this was a quality I knew I needed more of. Through my rebirthing training I have learned that our early imprints from gestation, birth and childhood have a massive impact on our psyche and the way we view the world, creating a filter through which we decide the meaning of events. Also, more mysteriously, somehow the things that we expect have an amazing way of happening, be they positive or negative. When we have any challenging experience, our birth imprints get activated and will give us quite a ride unless we become aware of what is going on and work with it. Pregnancy is one of those times in...

    How trust and faith can help heal birth trauma

    Throughout my second pregnancy I became aware of a theme emerging: that of faith, i.e. trust. It first came up in the early months; the word just kept popping into...

  • Hypnobirthing: Erika Townend encourages us to use our senses

    Hypnobirthing: Erika Townend encourages us to u...

    How do you begin to understand the notion of hypnobirthing? For some, depending on your lived experiences, this may come quickly, yet for others, hypnobirthing might be a curious concept that might take some time to get your head around. Perhaps you have never even thought that this could be relevant to you. Maybe a hypnobirth looks unattainable to you too. As with other things in life, we’ve all at some point been in awe of Someone Else’s strength and stood in astonished admiration of their resilience. Well, that Someone Else can be you too, in your labour: cool, calm and controlled. Would hypnobirthing sound more relevant and attainable if I told you that its power is already right there inside you? Remember, we all hold exceptional skills, it’s just that sometimes these skills are lost amongst the humdrum of life and the ever-turning hamster wheel. But buried somewhere in...

    Hypnobirthing: Erika Townend encourages us to use our senses

    How do you begin to understand the notion of hypnobirthing? For some, depending on your lived experiences, this may come quickly, yet for others, hypnobirthing might be a curious concept...

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