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Apparently this is the new rite of passage for 12 year olds. Seriously?
By KATE HUNTER ‘Children these days generally move into a double bed once they hit double figures,’ said the saleslady at the bed shop. ‘Really? All of them?’ My friend Jules was shocked. ‘Well no,’ the saleslady paused. ‘A lot go straight to a queen size.’ I was shocked too. [read more]
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A hospital birth would have saved Kate’s baby.
By MAMAMIA NEWS Kate* has three children, two of whom were born via caesarean section. When she became pregnant with her fourth child, she went to the Internet in search of more information about the possibility of having her baby at home. Convinced by endless data and statistics she found online, Kate made [read more]
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Who needs an epidural when you can have an orgasm?
By MAMAMIA TEAM She’s been called the ‘mummy messiah’. A saviour and liberator of mothers everywhere. A (non-medical) expert on childbirth. And she wants YOU to have an ecstatic birth. What is an ecstatic birth you ask? Well, for a start, it involves a lot of pregnant shagging and sex toys [read more]
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BERN: ‘I’ve never helped at the canteen’ + 5 other reasons why I’m not a ‘Supermum’.
By BERN MORLEY I overheard some ladies at school the other day declaring loudly that “She is a total Supermum, so organised and always immaculate”. Oh, they weren’t talking about me, no they were discussing some other mother that is on the P & F committee, helps in the classroom on a daily [read more]
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Does every working mum feel like this?
By SENATOR LARISSA WATERS There are some text messages that strike fear into the hearts of parents, especially when they’ve been typed from hundreds of kilometres away. When the words “Lana has high temp taking her to doc update u at 2” flashed across my Blackberry while I was in the middle of a [read more]
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Having a baby improves your social life. Seriously.
By NICKY CHAMP “Your life is over when you have kids!” It’s a popular catch phrase often trumped out after announcing one’s pregnancy (there’s nothing like a happy congratulations) but as it turns out there’s an unexpected upside to starting a family. A new study has revealed that having a [read more]
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Two men experience childbirth, their wives sit nearby drinking coffee.
Two men in the US decided to give their wives a Mother’s Day gift they’ll never forget – making the brave decision to experience childbirth in the form of simulated labour pains because well as they put it, “women exaggerate everything”. Take a look at the video and watch how they quickly renege on that [read more]
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A new medical test that has midwives and expectant mums fuming.
By MAMAMIA TEAM “Excuse me, ma’am, can you please get out of the vehicle and breathe into this device?” “Um, of course but hold on a moment, I’m heavily pregnant.” “Oh we know. This is a smoking breath test.” Okay, so although it’s unlikely that the police force will be involved, a [read more]
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Reader story: “Today my heart broke just a little bit.”
By ANONYMOUS Today my heart broke just a little bit – the tiniest little crack that I’d put aside especially for this moment. It was the day of her first period. I knew it was coming, the writing was on the wall and maybe I even felt it just a little [read more]
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This Mother’s Day, let’s recognise ALL mothers…
By KATE BOCCA “A mother is not defined by how many children you can see, but by the love that she holds in her heart.” - Franchesca Cox This Mother’s Day I will not wake up wondering how long I have to pretend I’m still asleep until someone remembers what day it [read more]
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Google wins Mother’s Day with this video.
By NICKY CHAMP I am not known for being soft of heart in the Mamamia editorial office, but I have a lump in my throat and strange water tears threatening to spill after watching this video. I guess something happened to me when I became a mother, please don’t tell anyone. Google has launched [read more]
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From mother to daughter: “I wish I could explain to you why I felt that way.”
By ANONYMOUS To my darling daughter, As you come of age, on your eighteenth birthday, I can’t help but remember your early months, and how I felt – I feel it is important for you to know this part of your life. I still don’t fully understand why they were so [read more]
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The ridiculous trend gaining popularity amongst new mother
By NICKY CHAMP If Jessica Alba jumped off a bridge, would you do it? Okay, that’s a bad example. If Jessica Alba wore a girdle to regain her post-baby body, would you do it? The reason I’m asking is because the old-fashioned restrictive garment is gaining popularity amongst new mothers –including [read more]
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Beautiful: A father’s letter to his little girl about who her future husband should be.
By DR KELLY FLANAGAN Dear Cutie-Pie, Recently, your mother and I were searching for an answer on Google. Halfway through entering the question, Google returned a list of the most popular searches in the world. Perched at the top of the list was “How to keep him interested.” It startled me. I scanned several of [read more]
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KATE: The sneaky way some schools are using NAPLAN.
By KATE HUNTER Next week two of my three kids will sit the NAPLAN tests, and I couldn’t care less. Seriously, if the testing was done and I wasn’t informed of my kids’ individual results I wouldn’t be bothered at all. But I seem to be alone in my ambivalence. There [read more]
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The pregnant husband blog that’s going viral right now.
Oh, internet. Thank you for giving us so many reasons to laugh. Jeffrey Bausch – known online as ‘The Pregnant Husband’ – started a tumblr when his wife was three months pregnant, chronicling the ins-and-outs of pregnancy. But because this is the internet, there’s no need to just write about pregnancy. Mere words on a [read more]
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One of the most raw, most honest stories we’ve ever published on Mamamia.
By SHELLY MURDOCH I lay here as Dan impatiently paces back and forth in front of the bedroom window, stopping only to peer anxiously through the blinds, out of the window and down our dark street. I lay here waiting, for what seems like much longer than 15 fearful minutes. I [read more]
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“Very quietly, very politely, my son has been asked not to sit NAPLAN.”
By BERN MORLEY “Today wasn’t a good day.” This statement is delivered to me quietly and matter-o-factly by Sam, my 11 year Autistic old son, as I arrive home from work. It’s taken me many years to refer to him as this. Autistic. I’ve clung to Aspergers, like it’s [read more]
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Parents? Here’s a post you’re going to want to bookmark.
By BEC SPARROW This is one of those posts you’re going to want to bookmark. Trust me on that one. I’m going to be honest with you. I only barely survived the Easter kindy/school holidays with my sanity in tact. Within an hour of the first day of holidays I was already contemplating [read more]
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It affects one in five women – so why is nobody talking about it?
By JANNETTE ARMSTRONG My husband and I are in our early thirties and have been married for four years. I have a rewarding, fulfilling and demanding career. We travel a lot. We love to eat out. We spoil our fur-kid (our dog, Darryl) absolutely rotten. Our life is rich in so many ways. [read more]
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Yes, you can be pro-family, pro-child AND pro-choice.
I love my child. I also support abortion rights. Why is that provocative?
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KATE: “It’s official. I’ve turned into my father.”
By KATE HUNTER It’s official I’ve turned into my father. I’ll wander through the house, flicking off lights, muttering, ‘This place is lit up like a Christmas tree.’ My kids look at me blankly. No, it doesn’t. There is no tinsel, no glittery angel. Our house is not in the least Christmas-tree like. [read more]
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BLOG: The day you realise your 13-year-old daughter is no longer your ‘little girl’.
By BERN MORLEY It has started. Boys. Maddie, aged 13, has been invited to attend, through Facebook, an event named ‘The Lad’s Party’. Yeah, no, that won’t be happening. After looking crestfallen and stomping out of the room after being denied attendance, she reluctantly emerged from her room some hours later to [read more]
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The Retro Mummy debate. Care to weigh in?
By ALYS GAGNON The things that are pissing me off the most about the Retro Mummy debate are a) the fact that the damn thing is capitalised (seriously, can we stop putting people in boxes?) and b) there is a bit of judgement about the choices made by mothers coming from women [read more]
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Why I was reluctant to give up my ‘single mother’ title.
By WENDY FONTAINE For the past four years, I have called myself a single mother. I certainly am one, which is to say that I have full custody of my daughter and I’m not married. When Angie was two years old, her father fell in love with another woman [read more]
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Motherhood lie #11: You Are Your Own Harshest Critic.
By JILL SMOKLER Having a teenager in the house has been detrimental to my self-esteem. Sometimes, I want to treat her exactly the way she treats me, but that would be child abuse. —Scary Mommy Confession #252463 I’m a horrible mother. My kids watch too much television, they eat too much [read more]
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The latest trend in “hipster” parenting.
By NICKY CHAMP Prepare yourselves. Parents are letting their babies, some as young as newborns, roam freely about without nappies on. Scandalous, I know. The method, known as Elimination Communication (EC) is gaining traction among “hipster” parents in Brooklyn (NYC) and has been the subject of several articles from The Times, Mail [read more]
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Group Therapy: Is IVF worth the cost?
By ANONYMOUS I’m 34. My husband (turning 30 this year) and I have been trying for a baby for 6 months. I met my husband when I was 31 and we married 1.5 years later. We decided to wait a year before trying to have kids. I’ve had horrendous periods for years and [read more]
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“Does it make coffee and raise your children too?”
By JO ABI Ironing sucks. There’s just no two ways about it. It’s actually worse than vacuuming. Ironing is NOT fun, I don’t get ANY satisfaction out of doing it and if I could get away with it I wouldn’t ever iron, EVER. It doesn’t help that I have a [read more]
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‘I’m not sure why Ken doll has no Willy’ and 9 other things I never thought I’d say before having kids.
By NATASHA LESTER In fact, this is a list of 10 things I never thought I would hear anyone say. Until I became a parent and realised that parenting is all about having weird and wonderful conversations with your children. So here are 10 of my personal favourites; unbelievably, these are all things I have [read more]