Disclosure: This is a paid collaboration with Very. We may only be a week or two into the summer holidays but I already have one eye on when the kids go back to school. Not because I’m mean, but simply that there’s so much to prepare! Fortunately, the Very school bus turned up outside our …
Disclosure: I received a copy of each Solve It! book to review and keep. The summer holidays are almost upon us and with them comes the age-old challenge of keeping kids entertained. Particularly if you’re travelling anywhere and keen to keep the calls of “Are we nearly there yet?” to an absolute minimum. I’m a …
I broke a mirror the other day. Not by looking in it, before you ask. No, this smashing experience was thanks to our old front door. Which currently resides just to the side of our new front door in the hallway while we wait for it to be taken away. It was one of those …
Somehow or other, oldest is nearing the end of his first year at secondary school. He’s done amazingly well and we’re really proud of him. He and I are quite similar, so I can’t help but compare his experiences with my own at that age. Happily, he hasn’t experienced some of the things I did …
Somehow or other, I’ve got back into old video games lately. And when I say old, I really mean it. Some of them are around 30 years of age. I’m not quite sure how this happened or, indeed, what this says about me on a psychological level, but I’m loving it. They say nostalgia isn’t …
Youngest is six now so we’re well and truly beyond the baby years. She and her brothers – who are 10 and almost 12 respectively – are all pretty independent. So you’d think that the evidence of the early days is in short supply. But you’d be wrong! It struck me recently that there are …
Spring has sprung and it seems like the weather is becoming a little more settled. So it’s an ideal time to make the most of it and go for a nice family walk. Yeah, about that… Because parenting is often a matter of balancing expectations and reality. And, in this instance, it’s always my own …
I’m really proud that my kids are so unassuming. We’ve always lived within our means – which were meagre when I was a full-time blogger – and they seem to have learned from that. They don’t take much for granted and have never been particularly materialistic. Long may this continue. There’s a strange flipside, however. …
We went on our first proper family day trip in two years at the weekend. We’ve had the odd afternoon out locally, of course, but this was the first time we’d been on a full day out since before the pandemic. As the nine-year-old is about to become the ten-year-old and nobody has had a …
A few weeks ago, we had parents’ evenings for all three kids. And they all got glowing reviews from their teachers, which was nice. It seems that my belief that all of them are geniuses may not be completely unfounded. But then something else happened. A few days later, they spent the night at my …