Our holiday is over and we are back in the whirl, and the occasional birdsong floating through the sunny afternoon quiet, of our city home. Spider-boy is back at nursery and Thathusband is back at work. So follows the post-mortems. And some questions. Are family holidays always strained? Do we remember them as more fun […]
I’ve always been competitive. It is called the human race, after all. But blow me, can parenting be tough on the defensive. Draw your short swords. Pull on your helmet and sandals. It is all about combat round here. The better he can speak the more Spider-boy fights with us – wrestling with meanings and […]
I often think that what I love most about children is their brutality. A searingly honest take on life, unsullied by any social expectations. My little sisters used to cry and protest when our mother sang them (tuneless but enthusiastic) lullabies. Last weekend I saw my best friend’s glorious meringues dismissed as ‘disgusting’ by her […]
Newborn goes gaga for his first taste of fruit as we celebrate Mr Thatwoman’s 34th birthday with friends, Eton Mess and 34 (count ’em) kisses a piece from Spider-boy. Birthdays bring out the best in Spider-boy. He spends the day asking what it was like when Mr Thatwoman was ‘only 33’ and getting frustrated that […]
I found Spider-boy at the weekend. I found him, on Saturday, in a shop in Kew Gardens. The wonderful, intoxicating Kew Gardens. He was playing with a giraffe toy and looking at a display of plastic animals with the uncomplicated concentration of a small child perfectly and properly absorbed in a game of his own […]
Parenting is a lot about storytelling. Already there are family stories kicking around our house. They are a messy, good-natured, gleeful mix of ours and other people’s; assorted anecdote scraps ready to be sewn into one brilliant mismatched quilt of funny things toddlers/grandmas/parents/teachers et al have said and done. The beauty of babies, the naivete […]
Above is an ‘instagram’ photo. A snap my husband took (and made?) with his i-phone app which allows you to play with the saturation of your digital photos, and give them a particular dated look. Smarter media analysts and philosophers of the everyday than I can debate how this speaks to a current oxymoron obsession […]
I realise I was quite down on Spring earlier this week, when I wrote that I understood why there were so many suicides in these months of hope and burgeoning. And perhaps a bit over-serious too. I’m wont to be over-serious when I’m searching for the sunshine. I had started a post a few […]
I spent half an hour tonight attempting to ‘Madmen myself‘; that is, to create an avatar based on the hit US show. I don’t like photographs of myself as a rule, not because I am picky but because I am decidedly un-pic-y, ie not very photogenic at all. Great, I thought, I can use the […]
I’ve read some great blogs about parenting instinct recently. Instincts at birth, instincts regarding sleep, feeding, education. Today I tried a very brief experiment – to avoid the instinct to NO. By the instinct to NO I mean that temptation on a Saturday morning to embrace any request from a whiny toddler with a negative, […]