Latest news with #morningroutine
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Video: Golden Retriever Won't Let Owner Have ‘Peaceful Morning'
For people who dream of quiet mornings and slow wake-ups, living with a dog can be a harsh reality check. This is especially evident if that dog is a 70-pound fluffball with no concept of personal boundaries or patience. One Golden Retriever's very hands-on approach to waking up his owner in a morning video has gone viral for being as annoying as it is adorable. Bodie has no concept of 'five more minutes.' In a morning video uploaded by his owner, Sophie, the Golden Retriever is seen in bed with her, doing everything in his power to make sure she's awake. The text overlay reads: 'waking up with a golden retriever,' setting the tone for what unfolds next. Despite Sophie clearly wanting to sleep a little longer, Bodie has other plans. He presses his head against hers, leans his full weight onto her body, and keeps nudging her persistently. Even when she tries to gently push him away, he responds with playful nibbles on her hand, turning the moment into a funny, if not slightly chaotic, game of resistance. The interaction goes on for a while before Bodie finally gives in (sort of) and snuggles beside her, clearly satisfied that his mission is complete. In the caption of the morning video, the Golden Retriever's owner jokes, 'Is a peaceful morning too much to ask for?' The internet wasted no time jumping into the comments with full support for Sophie. One user joked, 'He's like 'if I'm up, you should be too!'' Another wrote, 'Brodie [sic] let momma sleep my boy,' showing sympathy for Sophie's struggle. Others affectionately dubbed Bodie the 'Golden Retriever Alarm Clock,' a nickname that feels perfectly fitting. Living with a dog means giving up a bit of personal space, and sometimes a peaceful morning. But for most, it's a trade-off worth making. The post Video: Golden Retriever Won't Let Owner Have 'Peaceful Morning' appeared first on DogTime.
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- Lifestyle
- Daily Mail
How to make your child sleep: A celebrity consultant reveals her five magic rules so many parents get wrong including the REAL time to put them to bed
Have you seen the '5 to 9' trend on social media? Popular among Gen Z, it involves people sharing videos of their early morning routines – between 5am and 9am – which normally include lighting candles, exercise, journaling and many minutes spent crafting the perfect matcha latte. Unfortunately there is a whole separate group of 5am-ers who are having a less Instagrammable time as dawn breaks: parents of young children. For the past six months, my second child (now 18 months) has regularly risen for the day between 4.30am and 5.30am, and our #5to9 features nappy changes, climbing the sofa, playing with Duplo, and a fair amount of crying (from all parties involved). Often I've found myself visiting the playground as the sun rises, or pushing the buggy around waiting for my local coffee shop to open at 6am.
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
Forget the tradwife, meet the radwife: abandoning perfection in favour of ‘good enough' parenting
Most mornings, I'm woken at 6am by my alarm (the baby crawling on to my head). I stretch, go downstairs, fill a bowl with iced water and, the theme of Transformers playing in the background, write my journal (a list of emails-I-forgot-to-reply-to). I drink hot water with cider vinegar to regulate my blood sugar levels, followed by tea using the baby's leftover milk. Dragging a chilled jade gua sha spoon across my face in an attempt to reverse the ageing process, I then make my young sons' porridge. While they eat, I plunge my face into the iced water until I can't breathe, and begin my three-step routine (two La Roche-Posay serums followed by SPF). Some mornings, I run. Others, I cry into a coffee, albeit one made with organic milk, before taking a mushroom gummy to take the edge off the day. My partner and I divide childcare dropoffs – we're late for both and broadly OK with that – and each have one day a week with the youngest. This is my routine. You might think it's elaborate and weirdly specific, and you'd be right. Yet we live in an age of routines shared online, often in pursuit of some sort of personal optimisation – I'm aiming for somewhere between writing 2,500 words before breakfast (Anthony Trollope) and 5am cold plunge (fitness guru Ashton Hall). And however elaborate my morning seems to you, to me, it is nothing compared with the pernicious routine of the tradwife. For the uninitiated: the tradwife is a married woman, usually conservative and/or Christian, usually white (though not always), of the belief that her place is in the home. She is feminine, usually kempt, often dressed like Betty Draper, but increasingly workout gear in neutral tones too. Though at home, she is not a stay-at-home mother, rather someone who performs as if she is, documenting her life in dizzying, up-close fashion for us to wonder: who's doing the potty training? The tradwife is not new: in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft described these sorts of women as birds 'confined to their cages [with] nothing to do but plume themselves and stalk with mock majesty'. But in recent years she has rebranded, growing from traditional role to niche subculture, to full-blown digital movement (her current incarnation is the Maha – Make America Healthy Again – mom, who wangs on about her distrust of vaccines and suncream to camera in head-to-toe florals). Historically, tradwives earned nothing. These days some out-earn their husband through shilling products, presumably to pay for a small team of helpers to do the actual childcare. Last week, I watched Nara Smith, a 25-year-old, South African-German mother-of-three make pannacotta from scratch in a Ferragamo dress. It would be impressive were she and her peers not so clearly sidestepping a traditional career for one that involved packaging their cookie-baking for the algorithm. As capitalism squeezes us ever tighter, the fantasy of escaping into being a wife and mother feels ever more vivid I am not the first wrung-out mother to take umbrage with this sort of performance. Yet as the cost of living crisis squeezes us ever tighter, the fantasy of escaping into being a wife and mother becomes more vivid. I am, after all, a hard worker, a mediocre baker and a realistic mother whose life is a delicate balance between task and failure, app-reliance and guilt. One colleague describes me as 'frazzled but focused'. So I prefer the term radwife. To be a radwife, you don't need to be married. I'm not. Perhaps you saw children as a choice, not a mandate, or came to them slightly late (mid to late 30s), like me. You're not afraid of giving them plain pasta four nights in a row provided they brush their teeth. You batch cook where possible, bribe your children when possible, and buy fish locally (though largely to offset the amount of parcels coming through the door). You miss deadlines for work, lose sleep over ultra-processed food (UPF), and are overly familiar with the unsung heroics involved in 'leaving the office early' to get the kids. But you can also use a drill, a lawnmower and always finish the veg box. Of course, this is often in tandem with a rad dad or partner, who shares the same tensions, childcare and anxieties. What else? The radwife is aware of trends, would never wear an elasticated waist (unless it's her Adidas Firebird tracksuit – she burned her Lucy & Yak dungarees once the youngest started nursery), but always, always chooses comfort. Her heels are a bridge to her former life, and though she rarely wears them now, she'll never get rid. Other radwife-ish things: baseball caps, a fringe (it's that or botox), one wildly unsensible coat on principle. To unwind, she reads cookbooks like novels, Grazia at the doctor's and the LRB on the loo. She reads the Booker shortlist, though she's a sucker for covers with interesting typefaces. For her holiday, she has packed Ocean Vuong, but will quietly leaf through self-help book of the moment The Let Them Theory when no one is looking. It's with some discomfort that she watched a version of herself in Amandaland (Amanda) and The White Lotus 3 (Laurie) – it's not uncommon for the radwife to be divorced. Radwife-ish things include baseball caps, a fringe (it's that or botox). She reads cookbooks like novels, Grazia at the doctor's and the LRB on the loo The tradwife caused a major stir globally; not surprising, perhaps, given that it is largely a fantasy role which hinges on personal wealth, and is almost totally removed from the maternal ideal it promotes (it's also, in part, why Meghan Markle's With Love Netflix series, with its unnecessary pretzel decanting, feels so ill-timed). I'm not bothered by the perfectionism this movement peddles – wake up, it's Instagram! – but I am by the way it impinges on normal life. When did making fish pie from scratch once a week become trad-coded? The difference is, tradwives idealise this stuff – the radwife strives to go beyond it. It's precisely this tension that makes the radwife a perfectly imperfect parent, what developmental psychologist Donald Winnicott called a 'good enough mother'. So you might forget to put sunscreen on your children sometimes – at least they're wearing secondhand clothes from Vinted. You make socially conscious non-judgmental parenting decisions which prioritise your sanity over their sugar intake. We need conflicts 'in order to survive painful choices', says Ora Dresner, president of the British Psychoanalytic Association. There will not be a perfect decision and parenthood is defined – just like life – by ambivalence. We will see, inevitably, the good and the bad in every choice we make, 'but we should not see conflict as a negative concept; that unless you are absolutely certain about your choice, you are failing'. 'On the contrary,' Dresner says, 'the ability to be aware of these often painful feelings is essential if the mother is to find the way that works best for her.' The reality is, it's OK to feel bored by your children, but utterly lost without them. It's OK to want to go to work, to drinks – but also OK to want to rush home to do phonics. 'We as partners, friends and society must be aware of this and support mothers to feel validated as they try to find their way,' adds Dresner. Many mothers suffer from 'churnout': burnout from trying to shift back and forth at speed between partner, worker and mother mode Rad is short for radical. But maybe it's about being radically normal. Most mothers I know suffer from what I call 'churnout': burnout from trying to shift back and forth at speed between modes (partner, worker, mother). Writer Frankie Graddon of the Mumish substack talks about the ambient threat of 'The Call' at work (a sick child) and the guilt of 'beige dinners'. This might sound a little obvious. But we live in delicate times. Only the bravest among us are off social media, despite the fact that we know, on some level, that it is full of 'false messages that others are doing far better', says Dresner. 'I don't think it's possible to find the perfect balance or perfect choice. But to be able to observe our conflicts, and to some extent tolerate them, might offer a degree of freedom from internal and societal pressures, and what social media drives in us,' she says. Ideally, we wouldn't shapeshift so much. Ideally, we would live in a world in which there were time and resources to allow for parents to work less, or more flexibly, without barely scraping together the nursery fees. Four-day weeks. Cheaper, subsidised childcare. Instead, capitalism has taken the notion of empowerment and turned it into a world in which all hands must be on deck for the profit motive. For some women, it's a form of feminism that means that if you're not a high-flying earner, then who are you really? As Rosanna, a 35-year-old film producer and mother of two, tells me: 'As much as I value the role of mother, I would feel 'less than' if I didn't work – and I've certainly struggled with that feeling when out of work or looking for work.' Certainly, many tradwives are more interested in marketing than mothering. But if big business is responsible for the idea of putting a career first (see Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and 'girl bossing', a mid-2010s movement that became a byword for pseudo-woke corporate feminism) and trad-wifing feels like a cop-out, something in the middle seems like a reasonable reaction. Rosanna loves parenting and loves working, but still feels that 'capitalism sucks and rams this idea that unless you're earning a living and acquiring status, you are not quite valued'. The other day, I was chatting to my friend Jo, who is a parent of two. She said that, initially, 'motherhood shook me apart, identity wise, and I clung on to work as something to define me. But now I work to provide – and fulfil myself. I don't need the workplace in the same way I once did.' Taking this metaphorical step away from work – from the churn of the machine – is not a betrayal of the 1970s feminist fantasy. That dream was co-opted, used to sell a life that only meant something if it was dedicated to corporations. When I'm scraping porridge off the pan, and I'm late for work, I think about the tradwife and wonder if she too burnt the porridge. Probably. But at least I'm OK with it. Lighting assistant: Declan Slattery. Styling assistant: Sam Deaman. Hair and makeup: Natalie Stokes at Carol Hayes Management using Tatcha Main photo Red gingham dress: £200, Anthropologie. Sandals, £109, Dune London. Necklace, £118, Astley Clarke. Bow earrings, £38, Anthropologie. Trug, £37.95, The Worm That Turned. Aprons and gloves, stylist's own Above photosPink floral dress: £49.99, New Look. Aprons and gloves: stylist's own. Green quilted jacket: £155, Whistles. All other clothes writer's own. Cycle helmet loan:
The Guardian
14-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- The Guardian
From tradwife to radwife: abandoning perfection in favour of the ‘good enough' life
Most mornings, I'm woken at 6am by my alarm (the baby crawling on to my head). I stretch, go downstairs, fill a bowl with iced water and, the theme of Transformers playing in the background, write my journal (a list of emails-I-forgot-to-reply-to). I drink hot water with cider vinegar to regulate my blood sugar levels, followed by tea using the baby's leftover milk. Dragging a chilled jade gua sha spoon across my face in an attempt to reverse the ageing process, I then make my young sons' porridge. While they eat, I plunge my face into the iced water until I can't breathe, and begin my three-step routine (two La Roche-Posay serums followed by SPF). Some mornings, I run. Others, I cry into a coffee, albeit one made with organic milk, before taking a mushroom gummy to take the edge off the day. My partner and I divide childcare dropoffs – we're late for both and broadly OK with that – and each have one day a week with the youngest. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. This is my routine. You might think it's elaborate and weirdly specific, and you'd be right. Yet we live in an age of routines shared online, often in pursuit of some sort of personal optimisation – I'm aiming for somewhere between writing 2,500 words before breakfast (Anthony Trollope) and 5am cold plunge (fitness guru Ashton Hall). And however elaborate my morning seems to you, to me, it is nothing compared with the pernicious routine of the tradwife. For the uninitiated: the tradwife is a married woman, usually conservative and/or Christian, usually white (though not always), of the belief that her place is in the home. She is feminine, usually kempt, often dressed like Betty Draper, but increasingly workout gear in neutral tones too. Though at home, she is not a stay-at-home mother, rather someone who performs as if she is, documenting her life in dizzying, up-close fashion for us to wonder: who's doing the potty training? The tradwife is not new: in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft described these sorts of women as birds 'confined to their cages [with] nothing to do but plume themselves and stalk with mock majesty'. But in recent years she has rebranded, growing from traditional role to niche subculture, to full-blown digital movement (her current incarnation is the Maha – Make America Healthy Again – mom, who wangs on about her distrust of vaccines and suncream to camera in head-to-toe florals). Historically, tradwives earned nothing. These days some out-earn their husband through shilling products, presumably to pay for a small team of helpers to do the actual childcare. Last week, I watched Nara Smith, a 25-year-old, South African-German mother-of-three make pannacotta from scratch in a Ferragamo dress. It would be impressive were she and her peers not so clearly sidestepping a traditional career for one that involved packaging their cookie-baking for the algorithm. I am not the first wrung-out mother to take umbrage with this sort of performance. Yet as the cost of living crisis squeezes us ever tighter, the fantasy of escaping into being a wife and mother becomes more vivid. I am, after all, a hard worker, a mediocre baker and a realistic mother whose life is a delicate balance between task and failure, app-reliance and guilt. One colleague describes me as 'frazzled but focused'. So I prefer the term radwife. To be a radwife, you don't need to be married. I'm not. Perhaps you saw children as a choice, not a mandate, or came to them slightly late (mid to late 30s), like me. You're not afraid of giving them plain pasta four nights in a row provided they brush their teeth. You batch cook where possible, bribe your children when possible, and buy fish locally (though largely to offset the amount of parcels coming through the door). You miss deadlines for work, lose sleep over ultra-processed food (UPF), and are overly familiar with the unsung heroics involved in 'leaving the office early' to get the kids. But you can also use a drill, a lawnmower and always finish the veg box. Of course, this is often in tandem with a rad dad or partner, who shares the same tensions, childcare and anxieties. What else? The radwife is aware of trends, would never wear an elasticated waist (unless it's her Adidas Firebird tracksuit – she burned her Lucy & Yak dungarees once the youngest started nursery), but always, always chooses comfort. Her heels are a bridge to her former life, and though she rarely wears them now, she'll never get rid. Other radwife-ish things: baseball caps, a fringe (it's that or botox), one wildly unsensible coat on principle. To unwind, she reads cookbooks like novels, Grazia at the doctor's and the LRB on the loo. She reads the Booker shortlist, though she's a sucker for covers with interesting typefaces. For her holiday, she has packed Ocean Vuong, but will quietly leaf through self-help book of the moment The Let Them Theory when no one is looking. It's with some discomfort that she watched a version of herself in Amandaland (Amanda) and The White Lotus 3 (Laurie) – it's not uncommon for the radwife to be divorced. The tradwife caused a major stir globally; not surprising, perhaps, given that it is largely a fantasy role which hinges on personal wealth, and is almost totally removed from the maternal ideal it promotes (it's also, in part, why Meghan Markle's With Love Netflix series, with its unnecessary pretzel decanting, feels so ill-timed). I'm not bothered by the perfectionism this movement peddles – wake up, it's Instagram! – but I am by the way it impinges on normal life. When did making fish pie from scratch once a week become trad-coded? The difference is, tradwives idealise this stuff – the radwife strives to go beyond it. It's precisely this tension that makes the radwife a perfectly imperfect parent, what developmental psychologist Donald Winnicott called a 'good enough mother'. So you might forget to put sunscreen on your children sometimes – at least they're wearing secondhand clothes from Vinted. You make socially conscious non-judgmental parenting decisions which prioritise your sanity over their sugar intake. We need conflicts 'in order to survive painful choices', says Ora Dresner, president of the British Psychoanalytic Association. There will not be a perfect decision and parenthood is defined – just like life – by ambivalence. We will see, inevitably, the good and the bad in every choice we make, 'but we should not see conflict as a negative concept; that unless you are absolutely certain about your choice, you are failing'. 'On the contrary,' Dresner says, 'the ability to be aware of these often painful feelings is essential if the mother is to find the way that works best for her.' The reality is, it's OK to feel bored by your children, but utterly lost without them. It's OK to want to go to work, to drinks – but also OK to want to rush home to do phonics. 'We as partners, friends and society must be aware of this and support mothers to feel validated as they try to find their way,' adds Dresner. Rad is short for radical. But maybe it's about being radically normal. Most mothers I know suffer from what I call 'churnout': burnout from trying to shift back and forth at speed between modes (partner, worker, mother). Writer Frankie Graddon of the Mumish substack talks about the ambient threat of 'The Call' at work (a sick child) and the guilt of 'beige dinners'. This might sound a little obvious. But we live in delicate times. Only the bravest among us are off social media, despite the fact that we know, on some level, that it is full of 'false messages that others are doing far better', says Dresner. 'I don't think it's possible to find the perfect balance or perfect choice. But to be able to observe our conflicts, and to some extent tolerate them, might offer a degree of freedom from internal and societal pressures, and what social media drives in us,' she says. Ideally, we wouldn't shapeshift so much. Ideally, we would live in a world in which there were time and resources to allow for parents to work less, or more flexibly, without barely scraping together the nursery fees. Four-day weeks. Cheaper, subsidised childcare. Instead, capitalism has taken the notion of empowerment and turned it into a world in which all hands must be on deck for the profit motive. For some women, it's a form of feminism that means that if you're not a high-flying earner, then who are you really? As Rosanna, a 35-year-old film producer and mother of two, tells me: 'As much as I value the role of mother, I would feel 'less than' if I didn't work – and I've certainly struggled with that feeling when out of work or looking for work.' Certainly, many tradwives are more interested in marketing than mothering. But if big business is responsible for the idea of putting a career first (see Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and 'girl bossing', a mid-2010s movement that became a byword for pseudo-woke corporate feminism) and trad-wifing feels like a cop-out, something in the middle seems like a reasonable reaction. Rosanna loves parenting and loves working, but still feels that 'capitalism sucks and rams this idea that unless you're earning a living and acquiring status, you are not quite valued'. The other day, I was chatting to my friend Jo, who is a parent of two. She said that, initially, 'motherhood shook me apart, identity wise, and I clung on to work as something to define me. But now I work to provide – and fulfil myself. I don't need the workplace in the same way I once did.' Taking this metaphorical step away from work – from the churn of the machine – is not a betrayal of the 1970s feminist fantasy. That dream was co-opted, used to sell a life that only meant something if it was dedicated to corporations. When I'm scraping porridge off the pan, and I'm late for work, I think about the tradwife and wonder if she too burnt the porridge. Probably. But at least I'm OK with it. Lighting assistant: Declan Slattery. Styling assistant: Sam Deaman. Hair and makeup: Natalie Stokes at Carol Hayes Management using Tatcha Main photo Red gingham dress: £200, Anthropologie. Sandals, £109, Dune London. Necklace, £118, Astley Clarke. Bow earrings, £38, Anthropologie. Trug, £37.95, The Worm That Turned. Aprons and gloves, stylist's own Above photosPink floral dress: £49.99, New Look. Aprons and gloves: stylist's own. Green quilted jacket: £155, Whistles. All other clothes writer's own. Cycle helmet loan:
Telegraph
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Rev Richard Coles: ‘I found a bromance in the jungle with a 25-year-old lesbian'
5am I'm an early riser. I like to think it inclines to virtue so I can do something useful like washing up or writing books. 6am I start with morning prayer. It's an obligation for everyone who is ordained in the Church of England. Even though I'm retired as a vicar, I help out at a church near me, St Mary's in Eastbourne, East Sussex. 7am I might boil myself an egg and have some soldiers. I'm on Ozempic at the moment – I just want to be less fat. The appetite in my head remains but the appetite in my body has greatly diminished. I was in New York the other week and normally I would be gorging on strip steaks and burgers but I ate like a bird, much to the amusement of my friends. I don't know how much I've lost. I've decided not to look. 9am I might go out for a walk. I used to have two sausage dogs: Daisy, 15, and Pongo, 14. I lost them last year and miss them. I spend a lot of my time at home playing the piano. It's my great indulgence. I've got a piano teacher now and I'm trying to rebuild my technique. I don't miss pop music [Coles was in the synth-pop duo The Communards]. I'm really happy with what I'm playing, which is mostly classical. Or I read – often non-fiction. I love Careless People, from the whistleblower at Facebook [Sarah Wynn-Williams]. She reveals what we all suspected – a company that begins full of social justice ends up being a ruthless monopoly. She's a brave person. My new book, A Death on Location [out now], has become a bit like visiting friends tinged through the darkness of murder. It's especially interesting now because the first one, Murder Before Evensong, is being filmed for television. I'm visiting the set a fair bit and talking to the characters I've invented, who are now flesh and blood. Matthew Lewis [Neville Longbottom in Harry Potter ] is playing Canon Clement and Amanda Redman is Audrey. 1pm I'll have a salad and hummus, which my partner, actor Dickie [Richard Cant, 60, the son of the late children's television presenter Brian], has introduced me to. 3pm I might go out on my bike. I've got an e-bike to spare my knees and I go around looking more and more like that woman in The Wizard of Oz [Miss Gulch]. I loved being in the jungle [Coles came third in I'm a Celebrity last year]. I really did enjoy sleeping outside, and I found prayer helpful there. Prayer came under medical necessity, so I used to get access to the medical room. I had thought I might get a bromance out of the jungle. I did get one – only with a 25-year-old lesbian influencer [GK Barry]. GK and I have a continuing friendship and we are trying to arrange a reunion with everyone. We are trying to get Coleen [Rooney] to agree to have it at hers as we all want to see her media room. 6pm You can drink with Ozempic – but your thirst is also a bit diminished. On Ozempic I just want to cook smaller portions. I did a cookery course at Ballymaloe last year and I love Sabrina Ghayour's Persian cookery. We have a division of labour – Dickie does gardening and decor; I do laundry and cooking. 8pm We might go to recitals at the Wigmore Hall, or quite often I slob on the sofa and watch YouTube. I think social media has scrambled my ability to engage with entertainment. Occasionally we will watch something really good, like The White Lotus. 10pm I'm a fairly poor sleeper. I take a while to drop off, especially if I doom scroll.
