I’m starting the year with a resolution to continue supporting the good works that bloggers can do by becoming part of the Mom Bloggers for Social Good with 400 founding blogging Mums.  I know I am in great company and hope that we can make some noise in 2012 for all these good causes.

Mom Bloggers for Social Good is a global coalition of mum bloggers who currently span eleven countries – United States, Canada, UK, India, Spain, Nigeria, Singapore, Netherlands, Malaysia, Jamaica, and the Philippines  – who care about spreading the good news about the amazing work non-profit organizations and NGOs are doing around the world.

When the campaign partners need to reach the masses about new initiatives, advocacy campaigns, or fundraising efforts we will work collectively to spread the word through our social media and blogging platforms to spread the word.

Here’s where you can follow the campaigns in social media:

If I don’t see you there, please follow the hashtag to join the conversation.

When: 17 September 2011

Where: Save the Children, St Johns Lane, London, EC1M 4AR

Time: 9.30am for tea and croissants, 10am start, 4pm finish.

Children welcome

Save the Children’s blogging conference is for all bloggers and vloggers. It’s going to be a fun packed and informative day with sessions from leading bloggers, prominent You Tubers and special guests.

Whether you’re a You Tuber, a parenting blogger, food, politics blogger or travel blogger we’d love to see you. We’re putting together a day packed with brilliant workshop sessions for all levels of experience.

Join our campaign

Come and spend the day with your blogging friends, learn new skills, meet Save the Children’s healthworker heros and join our healthworker campaign.

Health workers are critical to saving lives: they are the single most important element of any health service. Without them, no vaccine can be administered, no life-saving drugs prescribed, no family planning advice provided and no woman can be given expert care during childbirth.

We’ll be providing lunch too. Workshop details below.

Register now using the sign-up form to the right of this page.

9.30am: Arrive for tea and croissants

10am : Welcome and introduction

10.10 :  Amanda Mealing, actor and Save the Children Ambassador, talks about her experience visiting our work in Sierra Leone and hosts our live video chat with a healthworker in the field.

11.00 :#Pass it on:

Hear from our three mums who followed the journey of a vaccine from a warehouse in Maputo, Mozambique to a rural clinic. Together we reached just under 30 million on Twitter, had over 150,000 You Tube views, had hundreds of bloggers up and down the country blogging, we met politicians and encouraged world leaders to pledge enough money to pay for vaccines. With Chris Mosler, Tracey Cheetham, Lindsay Atkin and Liz Scarff

11.30:Tea break – sponsored by Netmums

12.00: First workshop sessions:

1) Blogging 101: Everything you need to know about blogging but were afraid to ask

If you are new to blogging or want to know how to set up your blog from scratch and how you can blog to support Save the Children then this session is for you. This roundtable discussion will be led by our expert bloggers.

• Chris Mosler, http://christinemosler.wordpress.com
• Nickie O’Hara,  www.iamtypecast.com
• Kate Gunn – representing Netmums,  http://katetakes5.blogspot.com
• Jennifer Howze -  http://www.britmums.com, www.jenography.net
• Elinor Shields, Mumsnet - http://www.mumsnet.com/
• Sarah Blakemore, Save the Children

2) Get Vlogging: Inspirational stories of how to use YouTube for social good

This roundtable discussion will enable you to get top tips on vlogging from the experts and get inspired as to how you can use your skills to support Save the Children. Our speakers:

• Lindsay Atkin, http://www.youtube.com/user/liliesarelike
• Myles Dyer,  http://www.youtube.com/user/Blade376
• Kristina Horner,  http://www.youtube.com/user/italktosnakes
• Liz Scarff, Save the Children

13:00:  Lunch break: we will be providing lunch.

14:00:  Second workshop sessions:

1) Taking your blog to the next level

Roundtable discussion: this session is designed for those who have been blogging for a while. Learn how to build a loyal following, create quality content and build an audience around a particular niche topic. Our speakers:

• Eva Keogan - www.nixdminx.com
• Sally Whittle - www.tots100.co.uk , www.the-mads.com ,www.whosthemummy.co.uk
• Maggy Woodley - www.redtedart.com
• Josie George - www.sleepisfortheweak.org.uk
• Tracey Cheetham - www.tchee.co.uk
• Saira O’Mallie – Save the Children

2) From floods to famine: multimedia storytelling using photography and film

This practical film session is hosted by Rachel Palmer our multimedia expert. Rachel will give a fascinating behind the scenes insight into both our life-saving work and her job producing and commissioning photography in some of the world’s most challenging environments.

From Niger to Somalia Rachel’s job is to commission and shoot incredible photographs that we can use to bring the world’s attention to events like a forgotten famine or under-reported natural disaster. This session will be practical and you will come away armed with top tips on how to film content for your blog, how to shoot for your edit and what makes a good visual story.

• Hosted by: Rachel Palmer, Save the Children

15:00: Gareth Owen: When disaster strikes- dispatches from East Africa

Gareth is our Director of Emergencies, when a humanitarian disaster strikes Gareth is the first to know. But how do we do what we do? Gareth will be focusing on the current crisis in East Africa.

15:55:Closing statement and thanks.

16:00:Finish.

We’ve had long lazy days in the park playing rounders, hours spent on the swings in the park and lazing around in the garden and with the sun shining, there’s no way I want to feel that my daughter can’t stay out and play in the sunshine – it’s such a rare treat after a long winter. So we’re already stocking up on sunshine skin care, and we don’t leave home without it.

We’ve been using Nivea products for years and this new range offers top protection and it’s water resistant so it’s perfect for making the most of the sunny weather whether you are by the pool or fooling around in the garden.

NIVEA SUN® to help keep sensitive souls protected is the latest innovation from the experts at NIVEA is 100% free from perfume, colourants and preservatives helping to reduce the risk of skin allergies and especially developed for kids’ sensitive skin. I’m going to give it a go myself too!

The new launch offers all of the usual NIVEA SUN benefits and has been developed for the most sensitive of skins with a formulathat is dermatologically approved and hypo-allergenic and with the very high protection of SPF 50+ and offering immediate protection.

With the highest quality UVA and UVB protection system it helps protect immediately against sunburn and long-term skin damage while the very water resistant formula helps keep kids sensitive skin protected all day.

NEW NIVEA SUN Kids Pure & Sensitive keeping precious skin protected in the purest way possible and you can find more about the whole range here.

NIVEA SUN Kids Pure & Sensitive Sun Lotion and Sun Spray SPF 50 RRP £16.84
Available from March 2011 – Boots exclusive

This is a sponsored post for Nivea brought to you by Nixdminx and Handpicked Media.

He writes for children, specifically teenagers and his work has sometimes courted controversy. But he’s adamant that story telling is incredibly powerful and that whenever we write, we are trying to find a story to tell.

He says that we and the cultures we belong in are all about the stories. He was confounded by the stories coming out The Congo; that children were being accused of being witches and chased out of their families. He said it was incomprehensible and explained how people became witches; they were given their witchhoods by being approached in their dreams in the ‘nightworld’ and exist in a wholly surreal and fantastic world, unlike the dayworld. In the night world, these activities are powered by human flesh and blood – rather like vampirism I suppose. He explained the construct of society and that the man is the provider for his wife, children and her family. If things went wrong, the family maybe advised there is a witch in the family and that could be a child; the child then has its night wings burned away by hot wax and all other tortures are given to get a ‘confession’. Children between the ages of seven to eleven are the most picked on and in the last ten years or so there has been an explosion in this phenomenon, 80% of street children are ‘witches’.

Symptoms of being a witch are supposedly; bedwetting, skin disease, answering back, being to stupid, being to clever.

Melvin collected folk stories when he was out there and he also told stories to the street children there; little red riding hood and the big bad wolf were the two favourites he told and he was fascinated about their universality.

His favourite story is available on his blog and Save the Children here (link to come later) told to him by a small boy on the equator; it involves letter writing monkeys and bonobos.

A-lister Gywneth Paltrow has established her llifestyle and family blog/newsletter Goop and a year or so on, there’s still lots of negative backlash. I’m not exactly sure why – it’s a pretty, well designed, considered, and sometimes wistful, statement of who she is; yet it’s had a pasting. It’s more genuine than, say, the lifestyle pages of Vogue. At least when I read her thoughts on London, I don’t feel I’m being sold something, which I so often do when I ready glossy mags fattened by advertising. I love what she does, and by the way, if you haven’t seen Glee, you have to watch her in this.

Celebrity Mommy bloggers aside, Dooce is the leading US Mom blogger, and a great success story to boot. One of my favourite blogs, Gawker, has run a piece on the amount of attention she receives which you can read here. There’s a bit of ‘So what?’ about it when I read it – and I wonder why shouldn’t she get media coverage if she’s a trailblazer, and why is a blog bashing another blog? Well, there are no rules in the blogosphere which makes it such an interesting and frustrating place to be.

Sadly, blog-on-blog bashing is becoming an all too familiar story. I don’t do it myself because I have neither the time nor the inclination, but it’s tough to be on the receiving end one way or another. It’s a very weird feeling to read a blog post written about something you do, or are doing, and the comment trail that follows. It’s then that you have to take on board that blogs are to some degree public property once they are put out in the web at large (and don’t ever forget it, for good or bad). It’s a sympton of the cyber conversation culture that love and snarkiness co-exist – free speech resonates with others and comments can take as little time as a text message to write and post.

But all hope is not lost. Dooce is owned by Heather Armstrong and if you’re into blogging and you can’t fail to have heard of her, she has very resourcefully turned snarking on its head and her army of dissenters into a new art form. It makes me laugh out loud that she has developed a huge ad revenue stream from her ‘hate mail’ by publishing it on an area of her blog for people to read – it turned out to be hugely popular, obviously people love to read a good snark if it’s at someone else’s expense – if only I could the same from spam comments!

And who are the other US Mommy bloggers worth checking out? I’ve just got two super special reads to recommend, and both of them have made me cry with laughter and they also are shit hot writers, so well worth taking a few quiet moments to read and enjoy the stillness (by that I mean after the kids have gone to bed!):

Nashville, Tennessee based Suburban Turmoil is a favourite of mine which I have definitely not had enough time to read of late. While it’s a window on another world it airs the common themes of modern life with a large dose of humour

MTFF is another one, she’s a Brit with a massively creative life, and her blog is choc full of beautifully written prose

And if you don’t know what snarking is, it is by definition:

a) A strange creature created by Lewis Caroll

b) A sarcastic, caustic comment or interaction in cyberspace

In this world of abridged classics and dumbed down literature, it takes more than a deep breath to launch into Shakespeare, and an even bigger one for King Lear, especially when it’s an outing for a 10 year old.

We rocked up to The Roundhouse in Camden last Saturday for a three and a half hour performance by the RSC – we were packed full of high anticipation and no idea what to really expect. We’ve seen just about every musical going but had yet to experience Shakespeare, let alone a tragedy.

I’m not ashamed to say I had reserverations. Last time I visited the venue it was for a Grace Jones gig, how on earth were they going to make it worthy of the RSC?

As we arrived, I heard some great gasps of awe, and we hadn’t even gone inside;
‘Mum – this place is amazing!’
‘Oh blimey, we’re not even in there yet.’ I thought.
‘It’s great isn’t it?’ I replied as we waltzed in. I looked around, there were no other kids,
‘Eek!’
‘What?’
‘Let’s get some snacks..’
‘Mum, there aren’t any other kids here?’
‘I know.’
‘That’s cool’
‘I (ahem) know….yes, that’s cool.’

We grabbed what sustenance we could from the bar and went to take our seats. The interior was unrecognisable from my last visit, and if I’m not mistaken, a modernist reconstruction of The Globe. It made the experience even more intense to walk around the periphery of the pop up theatre and find our level, row and seats and, then discover the whole setting. The minimal stage set was intriguing, transluscent clouds of dry ice wafted across the space. We took our seats, rather worryingly in the front row since we were prewarned about gloopy things and water coming into the audience and didn’t have waterproof clothing on. Eerie music played and a bright light shone from the upper reaches of the set through cracked windows. You can hear the sound track on this short clip released by the RSC.

As we waited an actor walked on stage, and seating himself against a wall, he waited too – he was Edgar, the disinherited son of Gloucester. We were quite scared by the atmospheric setting, a good start in my book. The first scene began, courtiers took the stage and then King Lear, on the cusp of his descent into madness, arrived. This was serious heavy theatre with the potential to fall into parody – the challenge of the cast was to hold our attention and draw us in and it didn’t take long.

As Lear began to question the depth of love from his daughters, I began to question my wisdom – was this going to be a little bit too much? The costumes were stunning but would the acting hold up? I’d read a not so flattering review of the production in The Standard, but didn’t take it to heart, but let’s face it, no one likes to see a turkey. Theatre is a big commitment of time and money and a great experience is not always the outcome.

We waited for the characters to unfold the drama, and as Regan and Goneril waxed lyrical, and Cordelia became outcast, the story began to roll out its glorious tragedy against an austere backdrop – I looked to my side to see a little face in thrall to the drama, and much to my amazement, she knew who everyone was… The cast was quite jawdropping, Regan, played by Katie Stephens and seen here with Geoffrey Freshwater as Gloucester, were our two favourites.

Admittedly, as the interval drew near, the flowery and dated language was a little much to bear but the plot was strikingly clear and the players were part and parcel of bring its complexity to life. I was grateful the prose had not been updated, it struck a chord with the both of us and stretched us beyond our usual limits. We had plenty of time to review the players while taking in the quality of acting and the delivery of the lines. While someone beside us fell asleep, the rest of us were rapt. Not only was the cast multicultural, but the costumes veered from Medieval to Second World War regalia, and this played very well into the cross currents of the plot; loyalty, love, legitimacy, war and lunacy, in no particular order. Our imaginations were not just powered by the production but also by its history and how this story has survived for centuries.

When we reprised our seats for the second half, we were both agog. Eyeballs were extracted and sutured, a dynasty destroyed and its future tragically curtailed through dastardly deception. And that is King Lear, the much maligned Shakespearian tragedy that is often consigned to the bottom of the pile when it comes to experiencing The Bard. It was a great experience and I feel that we have seen a production of great note; whatever your age, it’s a great thing to see and it won’t disappoint, or leave you.

On a lighter note, when I pointed out to my daughter the wonderful emerald dress that Cordelia wore in her last scene, I was told in a rather exaggerated stage whisper:

‘She looks like Fiona from Shrek‘

Well, that puts it all into perspective when it comes to high drama doesn’t it!

So the cultural aspiration in our household for 2011 gets a big tick and so does the production. My misgivings about the complexity of the production have been put aside as it’s been a cultural experience that we’ll never forget.

And what’s next? We’re doing a bit pop culture and going to see Gnomeo and Juliet, followed by As You Like it starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate – it’s all in the mix isn’t it?

One thing’s for sure, Shakespeare never dies.

The production moves to Stratford, the New York soon and tickets are available here, it’s unmissable and worth every penny.

And on the inside, this is what is under discussion today. A crowd of Mums and small children gather around the healthworker to learn about a balanced diet. This is such a clever way to demonstrate it – the food groups are all placed in a bowl which sits on bricks. In the bowl, you can probably spot rice, okra, lentils and oil which all go to provide balanced nutrition for weaned infants and children. The food is removed piece by piece and so are the bricks so it all falls down. It is such a simple idea, there are no complicated charts involved or calorie counts or illustrations of food groups – and it is highly pragmatic and really works.

This is run by Save the Children and is helping Mums to feed the right foods in equal measure. The Mums all share their experiences, so if one of them has just stopped breast feeding and has started their child on solids, the knowledge pool is shared.

This kind of education helps children grow strong and means they can fend off the common illnesses a lot better. Mothers are encouraged to breastfeed their children for a minimum of six months and preferably for up to two years. This is really helping to wipe out incidences of diseases which are a result of malnutrition; rickets, beriberi, kwashiorkor are on the decrease. Child health in Barisal is improving and the children we met looked healthy and vital. Height is improving too, another sign that nutritional awareness is key.

This simple solution of nutrition on a plate is a brilliant one.

My point of pain which I feel with both facebook and youtube, is that as a blogger, I have to split my blog name up. So nixdminx becomes Nixd Minx (see below). Because this is a personal blog I just don’t see the need to create a fan page or group, may I should have but it doesn’t seem right. It’s the same with my youtube channel, I really want to rename my personal channel to my blog name but I can’t. It seems such a simple thing to do so why can’t I? Don’t you remember when you could change your IM name on a whim on messenger? It also means that people miss out on me when they’re looking for me. Grrrrr.

Nixd Minx

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I grew up in a very political household. My very Conservative Mother believed that women should earn less than men so in response to the challenge I grew up as an ardent Leftie feminista (replete with designer handbag, shoes and champagne flute). My elder sister though is a dyed in the wool Tory. But she still wears nice shoes (not as nice as mine though).

So how do you explain politics to a 10 year old? Especially when that child is your one and only daughter? It’s quite a passionate topic so I have to admit I’ve found it a bit difficult to stay calm and unemotional. Deciding to rise above it all, I did watch two of the televised debates with my daughter and friends (hers and mine). Not soon into the screenings I had to excuse myself as I became bitter and enraged by the discussion and was on the verge of hurling stuff at the TV. Grrrr.

1997. I was overjoyed when Labour got in, I got in at 5am and rang people singing. The world has definitely moved on however since those heady days of champagne socialism and the shiny new optimistic-modernised-’Brit Pop’-dot com-wonderworld we lived in for a while. So roll on tomorrow. It’s going to be very different from back then.

And today? We’ve been hassled by the hustings left, right and in the middle here in leafy riverside Chiswick and not least of all at the school gate. On the homefront, I’ve had far too many leaflets through my door, including the BNP ones, to find it funny anymore.

I’m not saying it is a waste. I’ve been interested in the whole process and politics has a rich and complex place in my life. If only it were really simple and the decision could be clear cut.

For a 10 year old it appears that is really is. Miniminx has been giving me daily updates of the campaign trail at her junior school. She was a wobbly voter and undecided for a while. Unconvinced by policies, looking to make a decision on who her vote went to by how much she liked them.

She came home yesterday with her mind made up. She has decided that since the LibDems have nothing on offer it’s a two horse race between the Conservatives who are offering Mac Air notebooks and the Greens who are offering wind up laptops.

What happened to Labour is anyone’s guess I suppose.