Laura smith squish to condish10/20/2023 ![]() But I’m learning to be less controlling.’Ī friend dragged me out on a walk to the canal in east London, and as we came on to the footpath Russell was standing there, like he’d organised it. So when Russell said he’d never looked after both children for 24 hours, it was simply because I was never out of the house for that long. The first time I ever spent a night apart from the girls was in December. ‘What he meant, I think, is that he calls me 100% the boss, because it took me a long time to relax into motherhood and I found it hard to let others in. ‘Russell’s always been completely hands on,’ she sighs. respects and cares for their safety too much.’ He’ll be like, “Take a deep breath, remember she’s only three.”’įrom the way Laura talks, it’s obvious Russell, 44, is an extremely involved dad, despite last year’s outcry when he told an interviewer Laura did all the ‘practical parenting’ and he had never spent 24 hours alone with his daughters, because ‘Laura. It’s Russell who’s very good at pulling me out of it when the girls have both been crying all morning. Doesn’t she ever just want to plonk the girls in front of the iPad and pour a large glass of wine? I hope it will make life easier for parents who are finding it all a bit overwhelming,’ says Laura, who also illustrated the book.įor someone like me, who’d rather clean the washing machine with my tongue than be creative with small children, crafty mums like Laura – whose Instagram is packed with shots of the girls in homemade Easter bunny ears – can be a tad intimidating. ‘First I thought, “It’d be crazy to release the book now,” but doing crafts with basic ingredients is so relevant now. It’s perfect for parents wondering how to pass yet another day with bored kids. Yet isolation has also – to her surprise – coincided with the publication of her first book, The Joy Journal For Magical Everyday Play, a compilation of 50 family activities from crafting ‘nature wands’ from sticks and wool to making homemade glue from cornflour. ‘Week one I was almost excitable, week two was the peak of emotion and I cried all the time, now it feels like, “OK, we’re going to be doing this for a while so we have to take everything at the slowest pace.”’ Since then, like us, Laura’s experienced a range of emotions from being quarantined. Getting back to our two dogs, two cats and chickens was such a relief.’ If we could have worn hazmat suits, we would have. Fortunately, they managed to make it on to one of the last flights out. ‘There was a moment when we thought, “We’re not going to be able to come back, we’re in Australia indefinitely.” The fear of being trapped so far from home was enormous,’ says Laura, 32. The family was then holidaying in a remote seaside town when they learned that both Australia and the UK were about to close their borders. But when they moved on to Australia, he was forced to cancel several gigs as the number of coronavirus cases grew. Since Christmas, they and their two daughters – Mabel, three, and Peggy, one – had been first in the US for comedian-turned-self- help-guru Russell’s Recovery Tour. Laura Brand and her husband Russell only just made it back to their Oxfordshire home in time for lockdown.
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