What happens when your grown up child moves back home after finishing university or being made redundant? As the recession bites, many of us are facing the reality of our adult children becoming permanent fixtures in our homes once again. University is finished, jobs are hard to come by and living in the big bad world is expensive. Some mum’s [...]

What happens when your nest becomes empty, all your chicks have flown and you look at your big daddy bird and think ……WOW – a big fat nothing?  Boredom, ennui, same old, same old -  whatever way you want to put it, it now seems that this is one of the most powerful marriage killers of our generation. Plain, old [...]

Life begins at 40 – or so the old adage goes. However for many women this is a decade rife with life changing events which can turn what seemed to be a stable and steady road into the most challenging obstacle course. There are relationship breakdowns, stroppy and difficult teenagers, older children leaving home, ill and dependent parents, redundancies, money [...]

We had a traumatic incident in our family a couple of weeks ago. Now on the scale of terrible things to happen in your life it  rates quite low, but at the time it was awful and put a dampener on what should have been a really lovely day. It was a family wedding. One of those weddings where I could actually really [...]

I don’t know about you but way back in the day when I was doing exams, life was very different. I am not necessarily saying that this was a good thing. My parents, loving and supportive though they were, believed a little too much in the benign neglect school of thought when it came to education. Whether we did well [...]

Do you  ever wish you had the time and indeed the cash for a professional facial treatment?  Well, here at PlanFreeMum we understand the importance of looking after your skin but also of looking after your wallet. We have put together a guide to a perfect facial which will leave your skin feeling glowing and fresh with minimal impact on [...]

 Many of us, especially as children, found ourselves desperately trying to please the important grown ups in our lives. As we grew into adult women this may have reinvented itself as trying to always please a best friend or a boyfriend and then on into our middle age we find that we are still behave in the same manner in [...]

One of the most horrible side effects of the menopause is insomnia. Lack of sleep caused by imbalanced hormones and night sweats can really impact on your day, leave you feeling tired and lethargic and even cause depression to set in. Many women cope really well with everything else the menopause throws at them but really struggle to control this [...]

One of my very favourite quotes is by Abraham Lincoln. He once said “if someone told me I had six hours to shoot a bear I’d spend five hours polishing my gun”. His point is that preparation is everything. So whether you want to paint a door, bake a cake or even shoot a bear, laying the groundwork will impact [...]

We all know carbohydrates have had some awfully bad press over the last few years but are they really our enemy or are they an important part of every healthy diet.  Well, scientists and nutritionists tell us that carbs are the body’s preferred source of energy and problems only arise when we choose the wrong types (a bit like when [...]