Diary of an (ex)London mum

Its been a hot week and, rather unusually,  it feels like a proper summer has arrived in London.  With the warm weather and longer nights, we have been spending more of our evenings outside. Today we went to the London Aquarium on London's South Bank in the afternoon,  and ended up spending the evening exploring the rest of South Bank's offerings. For a start there was a real food market behind the Royal Festival Hall which we visited before the aquarium. We had already had lunch but the smell of the food made us hungry again. Hog roasts, vegan curries, crepes, specialty chocolates- you name it, they have it. It was the best of informal eating and the first time Baby has been to anything like this. He must have wondered why people were randomly giving him food to taste but obliged with the tastings anyway. The food market will be on every weekend during the summer and we will surely visit again. There was, as always, a variety of performers by the river and they att...

As we are still in the process of potty training, I am not sure if our strategy will work out O.K. in the end. However, I did find it helpful to read about/listen to other people's experiences so I thought I'd share ours as a work in progress. It seems to be going very well at the moment.  It is not the fastest strategy but it is quite stress free.  We have always been of the opinion that each child is different and therefore we will need to adapt whatever we read or heard from other people to suit our child's temperament.  Baby is quite chilled out and we have found that most things work out easily as long as we are calm as well, so we've pretty much let him lead us after we had made the decision and prepared a few things to help him along the way.  We did our fair share of reading and asking around before we decided to start.  I have to say that I did panic slightly when people mentioned that they had used potty training camps: could it really be so bad ...

People's views on having animals in captivity will vary and there will be those amongst you who will feel quite strongly against keeping animals in zoos and aquaria.  However, the learning opportunities at these places for a child are immense.  I am a firm believer in the power of 'seeing is believing' and have no doubt whatsoever that Baby learns more efficiently from meeting those things that we talk to him about from books or TV documentaries.  I think the images of animals are captivating and a good picture is great; seeing the animals move and do things on TV will keep him transfixed for hours (literally), but seeing them for real makes him think and talk about them forever.  He makes a link with them and they become important to him- they are part of his world. We knew that from observing him when we visited city farms and, about six months ago, after watching Finding Nemo for the N-millionth time, we got an annual membership to the London Aquarium . ...