On tidying up


family & parenting, hope, patient

I am messy. I always have been. I don’t know that I ever really learned how to tidy up in a way that made sense to me, learned how to declutter, downsize, re-order, prioritise. I have a big inbox. I have a floor-drobe and now I have kids, a house heaving with stuff. We’ve tidied […]

17th February 2019

The best bit…


family & parenting

Now I’ve been parenting for 9 years, I know there are only three rules or pieces of advice that are worth anything. Two of them I have written about before: Buy a coat with a hood. Not for them, for you. You will never, ever, ever be able to handle an umbrella and a buggy, […]

7th November 2016

WYSIWYG


family & parenting

This post is a bit late, I’ve missed the rush of blogs and features on SATS and school reports and the start of the holidays. It has been in the air though – exam and test results and that dreaded social impetus which is the humble brag.

27th July 2014

In Memoriam – Part II


family & parenting

My 6 year old son is more sentimental about the past than his Great Grandmother who was born in 1920. And yet… he combines this nostalgia (for when he was a small boy, that day when I let him have 3 polos, the time he found a stick in the park, the birthday party three […]

25th May 2014

Home Coming


depression, family & parenting

In Belfast airport this evening, on the return leg of a work trip, I was confronted with my son’s first love. Sophie The Giraffe! There she was, a tiny statue version of herself, dancing on a music box in a tourist shop. A last minute gift for a busy parent like me to grab at; […]

28th November 2013

Pot(ty) Luck


family & parenting, incontinence

I loathe the phrase ‘quality time’. Possibly because I can’t work out what it means. And I am both suspicious and indignant about things when I don’t know what they mean (and everyone else seems to). I’m told my husband and I should have more of it. And I should feel guilty for not spending […]

16th September 2013

Don’t Touch


family & parenting

My favourite parenting nightmare is when a simple conversation with a toddler is revealed later to have a different, often diametrically opposite meaning to each participant. Or indeed when many conversations appear to have been at cross purposes. Such as in February when we realised the toddler thought that the word for the ladder on […]

9th May 2013