Real Mummy

I've got news. Big news. The kind I've been sitting on for weeks and honestly I'm surprised I didn't crack sooner. I'm launching a brand new podcast. She's called Real Mummy Reads. She's the sister podcast to Real Mummy. And I keep calling her my new baby because that's basically what she is. Real Mummy Reads is a book review podcast. But not a fancy one. Not a literary one. Just me on the couch i...

**Episode Description:** Episode 50. I can't believe we're here. This one's for you. Every mum who's listened at 3am with a baby on your chest. Every mum who's cried in the car and then pressed play. Every mum who sent me a message saying "me too." You changed my life. I started this podcast so you'd feel less alone. Turns out, you made me feel less alone too. This episode is my big, messy, teary...

I took a photo at a birthday party. Didn't think twice. Then I got a message from another mum and my stomach dropped. Every family now has different photo rules. Every school event has a reminder about what you can and can't share. Every friend has a different line. And you don't always know where that line is until you've crossed it. I crossed it. In this episode I'm talking about what happened,...

I added it up. I wish I hadn't. $400 on ashwagandha, mushroom coffee that tasted like a wet log, magnesium spray, seed cycling kits I didn't understand, and a greens powder that's been sitting in my cupboard so long it might be alive. All because a glowing woman on TikTok told me it would fix my tired. Spoiler — I'm still tired. And now I'm also broke. This one's for every mum who's ever bought so...

I survived the newborn stage twice and thought I was tough. Then my toddlers turned 18 months and chose violence. This episode is about the banana meltdowns. The refusing to wear pants. The climbing the bookshelf like a tiny rock climber. The weeing behind the TV. The bolting through car parks like they've been released into the wild. I made three dinners once. She ate a yogurt pouch and half a cr...

My eldest was reading novels at six but couldn't do the climbing wall. My youngest could climb before she could walk but stuggled with her words. Same parents. Same house. Totally different kids. I got so caught up in the comments and the comparisons that I nearly missed how brilliant they both are. Just in their own way. In their own time. This one's about why I stopped measuring my kids against...

Remember when you thought your kid just had a cold and then three days later the whole house was dropping like flies? Yeah. This episode is about that. The back-to-back sickness years. The gastro. The hand foot and mouth. The time my toddler sneezed directly into my open mouth. I'm a nurse and I still couldn't keep my kids healthy. If your house currently smells like Vicks and Dettol, this one's f...

My girls sleep through the night now. They dress themselves. They eat on their own. So why am I more stressed than ever? Because the worry didn't go away. It just changed shape. I went from checking if they were breathing to checking if they're okay. Like really okay. The kind of okay you can't measure with a thermometer. My girls are 5 and 6 and I'm already losing sleep over friendships, mean gir...

I walked into the lounge and found both my girls on the couch — dead still, mouths open, eyes glazed — watching JJ sing about bath time. Cocomelon. Obviously. And the meltdown when I turned it off is something else entirely. So I did what any normal mum does at 11pm when they can't sleep — I went down a Google rabbit hole. What I found about how the show is actually made (and what it's doing to li...

It's 11:30pm. The kids are asleep. I'm in bed Googling whether my four-year-old should be reading yet, and one article says it's a sign of giftedness while the next one says pushing it causes burnout. So which is it? In this honest, slightly fed-up, very relatable episode, I unpack the modern mum trap — every single choice has a study that says you're right and a study that says you're wrong, and...

I need to talk about Off Campus. I have been BURSTING. None of my friends are up to the same episode and I cannot sit with it for one more day. This is the late-night, headphones-in, kids-in-bed episode — a confession about the spicy show that took over my group chat, woke up a part of me I'd forgotten was still in there, and gave me something to actually look forward to after 8pm that wasn't a lo...

I've toilet trained two kids. Two. And I'm not being dramatic when I say it's one of the hardest things I've done as a mum — up there with a newborn, face-up there with sleep regression. Everyone warns you about sleep, the dummy, teething, starting solids. Not one person sat me down and said: Lucy, toilet training will break you just a little bit. This episode is the warning shot, the confession,...

I had been doom-scrolling at 10pm when I kept seeing one phrase — butter mum. I thought it was about cooking. It wasn't. It was a name for the soft, unbothered, melt-into-summer mum I grew up with — my mum, in the 90s. This episode is the whole reckoning: the list of 40 holiday activities I did three of, the dinosaur sandwich nobody ate, the Bluey guilt, and the phone call to my own mum that flipp...

My four-year-old judged my cooking last night. Out loud. To my face. So this episode is the full nugget-night confession — the 5:30pm chaos, the kids who change their food rules every twenty minutes, the snack-drawer treasure chest, and the guilt that shows up the second the tray hits the oven. Plus, why a good mum is just a mum whose kids ate dinner.

It's 8:47pm. The kids are asleep — probably. This episode is the full bedtime play-by-play: the stories that don't count, the teaspoon wees, the water that "tastes old," and the philosophical question about fish feelings I got at 8pm on a Tuesday.

I didn't sign up for this. One toddler dance class to fill a Thursday morning, four years later I'm googling ballet barres at midnight and crying at the end-of-year concert. This is a confession episode about how I accidentally became a dance mum and somehow… kind of love it.

I stood in my kitchen last week holding a hot coffee. Still hot. And both my girls were playing together. Laughing. Making up games. No one was crying. No one was pulling anyone's hair. No one was screaming "MUUUUM." And I thought — when did this happen? Because four years ago? School holidays nearly broke me. A baby and a toddler. Two kids who couldn't play together. Days that dragged on forever....

I am finally saying the thing every mum thinks but nobody admits — I don't enjoy playing imaginative play with my kids. From Barbie marathons to being cast as the sick dog in pretend vet, I unpack the guilt, the generational shift in what we expect of ourselves, and why just watching from the couch is more than enough.

I was making toast and made the mistake of looking at my phone. And I saw kids. Kids the same age as mine. And I couldn't move. This episode is me trying to say out loud what I think a lot of mums feel but don't know how to say — that weird guilt of watching the world fall apart while you're standing in your safe kitchen. The guilt of caring. The guilt of not doing enough. The guilt of still being...

So I watched a reel of a mum doing a full workout, meal prepping 15 organic lunchboxes, and applying a full face of makeup. All before 7am. And I was on the couch in yesterday's shirt eating crust off a tiny plate. Cool cool cool. This episode is about that feeling. The one where you know it's just a highlight reel but your brain doesn't care. The one where you feel behind on something you never s...

I made four cups of tea a day and drank none of them. I typed "I'm not doing great" and deleted it. I sat on the kitchen floor and realised I hadn't said a full sentence out loud all day. Then I walked into a room with plastic chairs and bad lighting. And someone said, "I cried in the shower because I dropped a spoon." And I thought… oh. It's not just me. This one's for the women who texted back f...

I wasn't going to record this week. But I watched that Louis Theroux manosphere documentary last night and I haven't been able to think about anything else since. It was 2am. I was lying in bed feeling sick. Thinking about my girls. Thinking about the boys being fed this stuff right now. Thinking about what happens when those kids grow up and meet each other. So I got up and recorded this. This ep...

My first 3am Google search as a mum was "will a baby have hiccups forever." I was genuinely concerned she'd be forty. In an office. Still hiccuping. And people would ask if she was okay and she'd say "mum didn't fix it." It got weirder from there. Poo charts. Cot escape plans. Whether I was holding her too much. Whether she'd be sad if she fell asleep without me. And then the funny ones ran out. A...

Everyone says "look after yourself, mama." Cool. When? Between the school run and the meltdown or during the 4 minutes I get to pee alone? Let's talk about it.

I was going to be the cool mum. The patient mum. The mum who never yelled. Plot twist: I'm none of those things. And maybe that's not the tragedy I thought it was.