Karisma Kapoor has played many roles—from successful actor to businesswoman—but her favourite is being mother to her two beautiful children, Samaira and Kiaan. In My Yummy Mummy Guide, she shares with you all her experiences from managing her pregnancy to losing all the weight afterwards to disciplining her kids. Here is great advice on finding the perfect maternity outfits, decorating your children’s rooms, juggling work life and motherhood, and planning the most stylish kiddie parties. From the first trimester to school’s first semester, from growing-up issues to teen fads, My Yummy Mummy Guide is the most fun-filled best friend any mother could have. • How to be glam at 40 weeks • Finding that perfect nanny • Managing me time • Losing 24 kg in 9 months

Body stories capture a nuanced, interconnected, interactive, and complex telling of our understanding, perception, and experience of and through our bodies. Plenty has been published on body image but image suggests a static fixed body, unmitigated through our social interactions and varying times and spaces. This book is not a "how-to" guide for fat confidence. It's not a compendium of fat suffering. It's simply a collection of narratives about what it's like to survive in a weight-hating world. It resists the ways that marginalized bodies are being written and researched and put into other people's ideas about our existence. The stories in this book are celebratory and are painful. They look at intersections of race and queerness; they destabilize womanhood by presenting a range of possible female embodiments. They explore issues of disability and madness. The full range of possibilities that are collected here give a picture of what it means to live in a society with strong and powerful messages about size, about normalcy, about what a moral and healthy life and body look like. This book is a snapshot of its place and time, but these stories remind us that we're here to stay. The body stories will change but we will keep owning our own narratives. While story, especially written by women, is often seen as outside the academic canon, these stories, these creative offerings, are theory, are research, and are activism. They are nothing less than the blueprint for liberation. Writing about fat and about bodies outside of medicalized narratives, without ignoring the impact of race, sexuality, class, ability, gender, fashion, appearance, and beyond, is radical and rigorous. It is impossible to think about the future without wishing for liberation. Liberation can come in many forms. It can mean an awareness, the ability to confront. The stories in this book display the ways that liberation isn't a finish line or a thing we can complete—rather it is a million small actio

We are the first generation in recent history to not know if our children will have a better life than us. Over the past thirty years, the dream of upward mobility and stable and securely paid employment has dissipated. This collection draws together insights from the disciplines of cultural studies, literary theory, psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, social policy and sociology, in order to explore the complex and contested status of “the family” under neoliberalism. At one end of the spectrum, the intensification of work and the normalisation of long-hours working culture have undermined the time and energy available for private family life. At the other end, the fantasy of the nuclear family as a potential “haven in a heartless world” is rapidly unravelling, supplanted with a hypercompetitive, neo-traditionalist, mobile, neoliberal family seeking to capitalise on the uneven spread of resources in order to maximise the futures of its own children. As neoliberalism has always been split between socio-economic realities and the expectations of where we “should” be, we are always living with the anxiety of being left behind and the hope that the best is yet to come. The chapters in this collection signal the troubles of the neoliberal family: in particular, the gulf between the practical conditions of family life and the formation of new fantasies. The volume addresses the neoliberal family in a range of contexts: from the domestic, reproductive and bio-political regulation of family life, the representations of the neoliberal family on television and across social media, to the negotiation of family dynamics in maternal memoirs. The work provides a much-needed corrective to the critical emphasis on the macrostructures of the neoliberal world.

With the prominence of one-name couples (Brangelina, Kimye) and famous families (the Smiths, the Beckhams), it is becoming increasingly clear that celebrity is no longer an individual pursuit-if it ever was. Accordingly, First Comes Love explores celebrity kinship and the phenomenon of the power couple: those relationships where two stars come together and where their individual identities as celebrities become inseparable from their status as a famous twosome. Taken together, the chapters in this volume interrogate the ways these alliances are bound up in wider cultural debates about marriage, love, intimacy, family, parenthood, sexuality, and gender, in their particular historical contexts, from the 1920s to the present day. Interdisciplinary in scope, First Comes Love seeks to establish how celebrity relationships play particular roles in dramatizing, disrupting, and reconciling often-contradictory ideas about coupledom and kinship formations.

A bittersweet novel about re-inventing yourself from the author of THE STARTER MARRIAGE. Shy, sweet-natured Lucy Collins is used to being pushed around. For the first eighteen years of her life, her widowed mother Judith ruled the roost. Now Lucy's husband, her seven-year-old daughter and even Buster the cat boss her about. But her mother's premature death leaves Lucy an orphan at the age of thirty-five. She's devastated...but she's also free. After a lifetime of being a disappointment to everyone, is it finally time Lucy grew up? As she clears out her mother's rambling house, Lucy discovers a trunk full of memories...her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were all Brown Owls: capable, no-nonsense matriarchs who were the leading lights of the Girl Guide movement. They spent their spare time preparing the next generation for their roles as wives and mothers with a mixture of campfire songs, sew-on badges and reef knots. But could the old values and frontier spirit now hold the key to help Lucy make the changes she needs in her life?

Dive into a summer of surprises . . . Jenny loves to house-sit: looking after a stranger's perfect home and pretending to be someone else - just for a bit. Her latest booking is a beautiful rambling country house owned by the glamorous Lewis family. Freed of teaching duties for the summer, Jenny plans to do nothing more challenging than walk the family's badly behaved dog and laze by the pool. Her idyll is disrupted by skeletons in the Lewis closet. Stumbling across hidden messages and passionate secrets, Jenny finds herself exposing far more than just home truths. She uncovers a seductive second chance: to open herself up to love again and to finally live life on her own terms.

Unleash your inner expert! "Mother and Baby Expert's Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy, Birth and Early Parenthood" will empower you with both emotional and practical advice on raising happy families. Divided into EXPECTING, PREPARING, DELIVERING, NURTURING, ADJUSTING, GROWING, and LIVING chapters, it covers everything from pre-conceptions and sex, through money saving and healthy living tips, to growing baby love & care and success at school. Don't have your baby without it! Avoid many pitfalls that many first time mothers face unnecessary - learn how to: curb overspending tackle birth fears enjoy shorter labour monitor your weight gain master breastfeeding become a pro poo detector resolve crying reasons teach your baby to self-soothe evade sleep problems defuse toddler tantrums keep them safe and healthy enjoy each moment as they come support, teach and mentor your children accomplish a balanced family life and work Discover how to achieve work/life balance to be there for your child, to love and support them to become happy and contented little independent person, ready to conquer the world. So go on, unleash your inner expert and enjoy the journey, and make the best decisions you can along the way.

If making the school lunches, doing the Jaysus homework and dodging the guards because of your long-overdue NCT is sending you over the edge, you are not alone. DirtBirds are here to help, with their guide to just about anything that can send a woman reaching for the bottle well before cocktail hour. Discover survival strategies for: When stress wrecks your face When kids wreck your head How to love your body even when nobody else does How to deal with a 'Yummy Mummy' when you meet one When marriage drives you over the edge How to manage your moola Surviving dry January - an alternative approach And much more! With advice ranging from the slightly unorthodox to the barely legal - along with case studies, cocktail recipes & questionnaires - there's hardly a situation in life that DirtBirds' wisdom won't change for the better!

For every mum who has trodden on one plastic brick too many, or looked at her phone instead of lovingly recording her little one's every moment, or poured a large wine because it's four o'clock on Friday. If you've ever shared a post from the Unmumsy Mum or giggled at Hurrah for Gin, this book is for you. Amy Crane is in crisis. Six months after the birth of her baby, Amy still looks pregnant and can't remember the last time she had a wax, or an orgasm. Motherhood is stirring up disturbing questions about her own childhood. And she suspects her boyfriend is cheating. Enter Alice, yummy mummy superior, on a mission to transform Amy's body, and love life. As Amy swaps breast pads for Botox and climbs out of a vortex of self-doubt, her libido awakens from its long nap and things get rather more complicated ... A wonderfully well-written, funny and sharp novel about the trials of playing hip happy families and the contradictions at the heart of modern motherhood.