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 […]
The week before Christmas an old friend of mine got me and Thathusband in to the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery. A rare proper grown-up night out, with drinks and canapés and time to read the descriptions by the paintings, for once, ha ha, to see the writing on the wall. And, […]
Spider-boy has just turned four. FOUR. Well done him – eating all that time, straddling two decades already, forging ahead and becoming him and him and then him again. Squeezing off see-through skins like a never ending edemame bean, perfect moulds of him shedded day by day to reveal brighter, firmer, more solid seed kernels […]
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 […]