I have recently been asked to try out the Colgate Total Pump toothpaste, and it's a game changer! We're all really impressed with it, and can't believe we've never considered it before. Did you know, that the first toothpaste pumps have actually been around since the early 80s? Just a little late to the party then  ;)

It's not just the pump that's great about it - you can't beat the classic! We've most recently been using a different brand, but my husband has mentioned that Colgate Total feels much smoother in texture, and all three of us like the mild minty flavour. I will definitely be adding it to our shopping basket again in the future, since it suits (almost) the whole family.

If you shop online with Waitrose, it's available HERE - definitely a good one to add to your shopping list.

This post contains Amazon affiliate links, meaning that if you buy anything by clicking on the links in my post I'll get a few pennies in commission ;)

Anyone else has a dino maniac? Adam has been obsessed with dinosaurs for so long now, that I don't even remember when it started any more! The dinosaur phase has been mad, and although he's still asked for a dinosaur for his birthday, with all the other stuff that interests him I have a feeling that it might slowly start to fade away. That's why we've thrown a small dinosaur themed birthday party for him, because it's potentially the last time he'd want one and I would feel bad for the rest of my life that he had never had it 😂

Anyway, if you also have a young dinosaur lover at home, I've compiled a list of gift, party and experience ideas for one - most of them we have actually bought or have done at some point with ours!

1. DINOSAUR TOYS

Well, obviously - the very basic! Every young dinosaur lover needs some to star with, right?

Our top dinosaur toys choices include:

• Basic dinosaur figures. Get single pieces of the child's favourite ones, or go for the full set. There's loads available in The Works, B&M, eBay, Amazon and all the toy stores. I can't actually believe how many different ones there are, and most importantly that if Adam gives me any dinosaur name I can actually always find a figure of one!

2. DINOSAUR BOOKS

We have a fair few. Well, quite a lot actually. Although when I had a look through them before writing this, I've realised that majority are gifts from my parents, hence they are in Polish. Mostly translated though, so I went through our favourites and tried to find the English originals for you.

• First Dinosaur Encyclopedia

• Spot 50 - Dinosaurs - this one is a part of Spot 50 series of books. It's a little guide to, as per title, 50 dinosaur species. Each of them is accompanied by an illustration, labels, and key information.

• Natural History Museum, London - The whole of the museum is just an amazing day out for the kids, but you can also just go specifically for the dinosaurs which are probably the most popular gallery. There you can find part of the first ever skeleton of a T-Rex discovered, skull of Triceratops, the most complete skeleton of Stegosaurus in the world, and a whole gallery of other prehistoric fossils. The museum also offers a tonne of activities on their website.
• Gulliver's Dinosaur & Farm Park, Milton Keynes - We visited this one on Adam's 4th birthday. You will wander around the park filled with more than 30 different kinds of animatronic dinosaurs roaring and moving around. There are also dinosaur rides (sadly this was unavailable when we visited), observation tower, river cruise and the reptile and bug centre. Once you're done with the dinosaurs, you can move on to the farm, meet some animals and hop on the tractor ride. They also have a new addition of giant animatronic insects.
• Dinosaur Isle, Isle of Wight - According to the National History Museum, it's the "Dinosaur Capital of Britain" with over 1,000 fossils on display at the Dinosaur Isle museum.
• ROARR! Dinosaur Adventure, Norwich - It's woodland trail where you can meet a herd of life-sized dinosaurs, plus a chance to play paleontologist digging out fossils and bones.
• Dan-yr-Ogof, National Showcaves Centre for Wales -  Home to over 220 life-sized dinosaur models, it's one of the largest dinosaur parks in the world. 

5. DINOSAUR MOVIE NIGHT

To finish off the dinosaur themed party, or if you're just planning a quiet day in, how about a movie?

• Jurassic Park franchise - That probably goes without saying! We weren't sure if it was suitable for Adam, but gave it a go with an option to turn it off if it got too much for him. He was probably 5? when he went through all of the movies, and absolutely loved them! That will obviously vary from child to child, so next on the list are some 100% child-friendly animations.
• Dinosaur (2000) - This animated feature by Disney follows the story of Aladar, young Iguanodon who was raised by a family of lemurs. After surviving the meteor shower, they set out on a journey for the new home, and befriend a herd of dinosaurs along the way. 
• The Good Dinosaur (2015) - A Disney/Pixar production, set in an alternate history, in which the meteor that was supposed to cause the dinosaurs' extinction misses the Earth. It tells a story of a young Apatosaurus, Arlo, who lives with his family running a corn farm. They keep their crops in a silo that gets rummaged by a caveboy, and Arlo's mission to catch the thief causes him a whole load of trouble. They become unlikely friends, and travel together through the dangerous landscape to be reunited with their families.
• The Land Before Time - This one is a franchise of 14 animated adventure films. The first one was released in 1988, but still makes a great watch for the kids (we got couple of them from my parents on DVDs).The films follow the adventures of a group of young dinosaur friends, who learn valuable lessons about life and friendship along the way.

Are we still in lockdown? Does anyone know what's actually going on? I've recently heard the term "mockdown", and that seems to sum it up about right. No-one seems to care any more. Since the relaxation of some rules, it feels like it's back to normal for some - full beaches, full parks, full streets. Only in the shops you can still see the social distancing in place, but that seems to vary too. 

I don't even know which week of this we're at now. Probably should've been keeping a weekly diary, to keep up! It's nearly 3 months now, isn't it? Who'd have thought that we would be spending that long in isolation! We still haven't really started seeing people - had couple of socially distanced visits from friends on Eid and that's it. Current rules now allow people to meet outside in the groups of up to 6, but that means we still can't arrange meetups with friends because our group would be larger than that. 

For now we still choose to stay at home. Shops have reopened on Monday, but we're not really in a rush to go queuing for hours for Primark, as nice as it would be to just pop into the city centre for a glimpse of normality. We're sticking to the walks in a quiet park, and might plan a little day out somewhere since the travel is allowed - seaside, maybe? Peak District? Or at least a local forest or something? Let's see.

We need to get out of here though, because we've all had enough. We're all moody and snappy, kids are bored to death. Adam could really benefit from going back to school and socialising with his classmates, but it seems that he won't be back until at least September - our school is pretty small, and the kids that are currently back are spread across various classrooms, so there just isn't enough space for all of them... 

For now it's homeschooling for us then. Well, I use this term loosely - all our initial enthusiasm and structure went out of the window weeks ago. We just do school work as and when we feel like it - some days it might be a full-on session, and some it's just a couple of pages. On some days Adam is really keen to do the tasks that his teacher post on the Class Dojo app, on others he just doesn't want to do anything. Sometimes it's a breeze, sometimes we all get frustrated when he takes an hour to complete a page. If this whole thing taught me anything, is that homeschooling is definitely not for us!

To sum this up, we've all just had enough. I don't think we'll be going back to "normal" any time soon, but rather need to adjust to this new "normal" for quite some time yet. We just need to find ways to keep our sanity.

You know how you sometimes get that random craving, or see someone post a photo/video of some food online, and you just HAVE TO eat it? Seems to be happening to my husband a lot ;)

The other day he decided he wanted homemade jalebi. Well, challenge accepted!

The thing is, if you look up a jalebi recipe, they all seem a little complicated. Mixing at least two types of flour, adding curd/yogurt, leaving the batter for fermenting... Whaaat? Plus it's still a struggle to get any plain flour, so I kinda needed a recipe that would use self-raising! 

So after quite a bit of search, I finally came across some instant jalebi recipes, and decided it's doable ;) My recipe uses self-raising flour, but if you happen to have plain flour, add 2 teaspoons of baking powder for each 1 cup/150g. It's so easy and my jalebis got a lot of love from you guys on Instagram, so I thought I'll just put it up in time for Eid for those who could fancy trying it :)

Ingredients:

For jalebi:

For sugar syrup:

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup water
• optional: 1 tbsp kewra or rose water, or cardamom powder

Method:

Start with making the syrup. Place sugar with water in a pan, add the flavouring of your choice. Bring to boil, then lower the heat and gently simmer until the syrup thickens. Once thick, keep aside until cool.

To make jalebi, mix the flour, yellow colour (if using) and water into a creamy batter - a little thicker than you'd do for pancakes. Transfer the batter to the container you'll be using for piping - you could use a piping bag with a small round nozzle, but most common method is to use a sauce bottle like the one below:

Heat up some oil in a pan - we found it best to just use normal, shallow frying pan. If you try to deep fry them, the jalebi batter will sink to the bottom before it floats, and this will stop you from achieving the spiral shape.

Make sure the oil is really hot - test by squeezing a dot of batter out. Squeeze the batter out in the shape of a spiral, starting from the middle and working outwards - don't worry about the perfect shape though, mine were all over the place and still made quite an impression with the family in Pakistan ;)

Once they change colour to golden, take the jalebis out and dip in the sugar syrup for a minute or so - make sure you've let your syrup cool down first! This way they'll absorb enough sweetness, but will remain crunchy.

A month between posts again - that's going well, eh?

I've been quite demotivated with the whole lockdown situation. I thought I'd blog more, document it somehow... but to be honest the days just blend into one. Honestly, if I don't check my phone I don't even know what day it is now.

The school had provided learning packs, online resources and all... We made a basic homeschooling plan, just to have some kind of routine to make sure we do actually do a bit of homework - that went out of the window by now, we just go with the flow. After the initial lockdown period was extended, our school got us to join Class Dojo where teachers post activities for kids to do, and that's our only motivation now - apart from that we just do little bits as and when we feel like.

So, a month into the lockdown, the Ramadan started. I thought it would be a bit of an odd one, but you know what? Not really. We never really stock up ahead of it, we hardly ever host or go out for iftar. If anything, it's actually been a little easier - physically, at least. Without school, we don't bother with bedtime that much, and Adam is enjoying being able to have iftar with us every day. We plan our meals a little better - Mr just does a big shop on his days off, there's no little top-up trips every other day (and on empty stomach, we all know that doesn't end well!), we've been a bit more creative with our meals and trying to use what we already have. 

We've had the "big" announcement on Sunday, regarding plans towards ending the lockdown. If anything, that's left me more confused than before. The Government moved away from "Stay Home" slogan and replaced it with "Stay Alert", but still kinda advise staying home as much as possible... But also allow to go out more and even travel within England. I don't know about you, but I'm not planning to go anywhere just yet. I'm also glad that both my kids will still be staying home, at least for the foreseeable. Not sure who came up with the idea that EYFS are the best group to be sent back to school first, with kids that age virtually unable to practice social distancing, but I'm happy that Adam is in Y2 and not in the first group set to be coming back. Who knows though, by allowing people to go out more (not that some haven't before), we might get ourselves into second lockdown even before they go into the next proposed phase of easing the restrictions.

It's looking like Eid at home too - we're heading into the last 10 days of Ramadan, and there definitely won't be a change until then. I'm half expecting to see our street full of people visiting each other against the rules, but my plan is to decorate the house, get kids' gifts out, dress up, make a nice meal and just stay home - maybe a little outing to the park if the weather's nice.

Bit late to the party, I know 😉 Schools have been closed for 3 weeks now, the official lockdown has been in place for nearly as long too. We've been staying home for 4 weeks now though, because Adam got chickenpox earlier in the week that the school closures were announced.

As I'm writing this, the lockdown measures were supposed to be reviewed after those 3 weeks, but with the PM having contracted the virus himself and hospitalised, and the Government claiming they don't have enough evidence to support amending the restrictions, we're still under the same lockdown conditions for the time being. 

So I thought I'd just document this extraordinary time while we're still experiencing it.

It's really been a strange time for everyone. When we first heard about the outbreak in China, and then a few single patients were identified around the world, who would've suspected it will result in a global pandemic? In the UK, the first cases were identified in early January - I think at that point everyone still expected it will be contained. Fast forward to March, number of new cases is doubling daily. A decision was made to close the schools once they're done for the week on Friday the 20th, and just few days later, on Monday evening, the PM announced a full lockdown where people are only allowed to go out for essential shopping, work, and a daily dose of exercise. We're not supposed to socialise with anyone outside of our own household though, so no meeting friends for a walk, no playdates etc. (Yeah, I know we all know this - it's a diary entry to reminisce upon once it's all over 😉)

So, our 4 weeks at home so far... Not gonna lie, it's been tough. It wasn't too bad at first - Adam caught chickenpox, so we became housebound anyway. Once he got over it, Aminah got it. And she went through it a little bit worse than Adam did, especially at night - we'd had three pretty much sleepless nights together, which really didn't help.

I think what makes this time extra challenging for all of us, is not that the kids are at home 24/7 - it would've been Easter break now anyway, we get half term breaks ever so often, then we have them at home for the summer... The challenge is the fact that we can't meet up with family and friends, we can't take holidays or even travel for a day out away from the city, we can't even go to the park to let them run around the playground. As I don't drive, Mr is the one taking all shopping trips, plus he still goes out to work, so he at least gets some time out of house - I'm having a rare bit of time on my own right now, as he's home today and kids decided to stay downstairs with him 😄

All we're allowed to do is take a short stroll away from other people - we've done it yesterday for the first time since the lockdown. I've been really apprehensive about it before - we've had some lovely weather recently, and all I could hear around was kids playing outside (probably in their own backyards, but if you can't see them you just worry they're out everywhere around the street), and saw lots of people walking past our windows. We are lucky though, because we have two parks a short walk away from the house - one is a regular landscaped park, with playground, sports area, some other play equipment scattered around - and I expect that even in this lockdown it might be full of people (a friend actually messaged me with a photo of a large gathering there, completely ignoring the rules...). But the other one, "wild" park as we call it, isn't usually that popular with people - normally you'd just meet a few dog walkers and maybe someone jogging. I was worried it might've become more popular now, but I was pleasantly surprised to see it almost empty - we probably passed just a handful of people. I must say it was really good to just walk around for a bit, because last time I went out was 2 weeks ago when our car broke down, and as Mr couldn't drive to the shops, I took an opportunity to get out, even if it was only a half-an-hour trip to Asda and back. I totally get why the Government decided we're allowed that "exercise" time outside, it's just a shame some people are abusing it - last week there were like 700 social gatherings recorded in Greater Manchester! We can only hope this kind of stuff won't affect us all by getting slapped with stricter rules!

Rambling a little here, but I'm kinda trying to just sum up how I've been feeling this past few, strange weeks. It's something my generation haven't experienced before, probably never expected to, and hope we don't get to see anything else like it, once it all gets better. When you think about it, it's history in the making! I was just checking something earlier, and there's even a Wikipedia page for the UK lockdown 🙈

Probably gonna write more about it, now that I started - so much for my regular blogging, again 😂 It's a seemingly great time to write though - I was about to say "not that I have much more do do" here, but that's not exactly true when I'm stuck at home with bored kids, is it? Plus the whole staying home thing is definitely taking a toll on my sanity - I'm an introvert and generally like staying home, but it's a bit different when you *have to* stay put, rather than choose to 😂 I've been a little deflated lately, failed with organising kids' time, and generally haven't been very productive - we've actually all been pretty grumpy... But I'm feeling a bit better now, and hoping to still turn the things around and get through this in a more positive way.

Welcome for the first time in this new year, and the whole new decade!

I'm not really one for making New Year resolutions, because I break those very quickly. Well, I do make a little list of goals, but don't like calling them resolutions, because those always seem to be along the lines "I WILL do so and so". I prefer the term "goals", because these are thing I'd like to do, that I aspire to achieve. 

Thanks to Ronni from Multicultural Motherhood for inviting some bloggers to share our 2020 goals - make sure you click through to her blog, check out her post and all the others!

Here are a few of my little goals for 2020:

1. BLOG REGULARLY