Written for SR Nutrition by Claire Burgess, Family Consultant.

The not so ‘Terrible Twos’?

We often assume that our children have adult logic in order to understand the world that they are in. The first and most important thing we need to do is to remember that they are children – they have only been in this world for 18 months/ 2 years and are just trying to make sense of their ever-changing environment.

What are we experiencing on a day to day with our toddlers? The temper tantrum? Demanding certain clothes/colour of cups/toys, positioned in a certain way? Are they answering “no” to anything you ask them? Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? Do you feel that you are continually saying “no” but with no results?

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We spoke to Rebecca to find out about her career as well as her inspiration for setting up London’s Little Thinkers, an online community which shares educational and engaging ideas for ‘London’s Little Thinkers’!

Written by Claire Burgess, Family Consultant.  It might not feel like it when we are only a few weeks into the holidays, but it’s that time of the year where everyone is thinking and talking about ‘starting school’! When I was planning this blog I was going to cover the usual things to think about when you child is about to start school for the first time, but then realised that even if your child is already at school – be it primary or secondary – they experience very similar emotions and uncertainty about going into a new school year…it isn’t just about starting school.

We at Bespoke Family have been lucky enough to experience some Dazzle and Fizz Children’s parties first hand and they are nothing short of incredible.  We spoke to Charlotte to find out more about everything she has achieved after setting the business up when she was just 24, where the inspiration comes from for all of these amazing themed parties and how she manages to always exceed the brief!

Written by Claire Burgess, Family Consultant.  I had one of my first experiences of travelling with children right at the very start of my career.  It was with 8-month-old twins, a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old.  I vividly remember the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ that we had to pack - anyone would have thought we were going to live in a desert for months, with no access to shops or even running water!

The charity BRAAIN , an invaluable resource for parents and carers of children with ASD and ADHD, was set up in October 2017. We met Nikki at her day job as Head of Communications at Tamba (The Twins and Multiple Births Association) and were so inspired by her we wanted to know more about why and how she had set up BRAAIN. Here Nikki explains how it all came about:

“I met Emma at a positive parenting Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) course. After chatting about the lack of support for families with children with special needs in the area, we decided to set up Time Out Support Group. At one of the first few sessions, Helen offered to help with the group. We had already discovered that there was a huge need for greater support for parents, so decided to expand the support group and developed BRAAIN.” 

Written by Claire Burgess, Family Consultant.  Babies and sleep is a topic which is discussed a lot - it is expected that our youngest children won’t sleep well / through the night in their first few months, but often our older children can develop sleep issues for various reasons, which can leave parents at a loss as to how to resolve them! 

Following our series of blogs on sleep we thought it would be interesting to get to know a bit more about Vicki and the invaluable work she does with The Children’s Sleep Charity. 

Written for Doddl.com by Claire Burgess, Family Consultant. The term fussy eating (or sometimes picky eating) is commonly used to describe when children start to refuse food, but I would prefer to use a more positive reference, and this would be ‘choosy’ eating.  So, do you have a choosy eater?  Have you suddenly noticed that your child, who has eaten pretty much everything up until now is now refusing food that they have always eaten?  Or have they narrowed down their choices to only eating certain foods, perhaps just beige food such as pasta, potatoes etc (which is very common), or only eating certain vegetables (if any) or things such as cucumber/tomatoes etc.  If so, it might help to reassure you if I say that it is completely (and developmentally) normal for children to go through this stage.

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Written for Doddl.com by Claire Burgess, Family Consultant. Very often when we start to introduce our babies to food we think that it must be bland, basic and not very much fun!  That is absolutely not the case as we want to show our babies the wonderful world of food and how they can take time to explore, taste, touch and smell all of the amazing foods we have!

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