Independence daze – Part II


family & parenting

The daze of title, is of course mine. It has been a week for striking out. And now I have to tell you something bad. Something very, very scampy indeed. Did you read the brilliant My Naughty Little Sister books when you were little, secretly worshipping the nameless anti-heroine and her accomplice Bad Harry? Here’s […]

14th June 2011

Instant faded snap shots


family & parenting

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 […]

24th April 2011

The reality of imaginary babies


family & parenting

Walking down the high street earlier this week I got a surprise and glorious peek at a friend’s teeny tiny baby. A proper few day old newborn which made my Newborn seem enormous and his brother positively freakish. Very cute he was too, her lad, scrunched up and cross-eyed and basking in his parents’ blissed […]

14th April 2011

Reading too much into things…


family & parenting

Have you read Not A Box? I became briefly evangelical about this book after Spider-boy was born. It became my present of choice for new babies that I know I will love and their parents. The cover is so stylish it feels branded by Muji, and the illustrations are a design-chic delight. Like many of […]

29th March 2011

Either that tea towel goes or I do…


depression, hope

When Spider-boy was little he didn’t smile a lot. I used to think, in the dead of night, it was my fault for not smiling enough when he was tiny, a dread fear that I’d broken him by crying too much on my maternity leave. I’ve been persuaded he just had a bit of ‘tude, […]

15th March 2011

Ticks and Crosses


family & parenting

What I love most about motherhood is thinking back to me pre-mum days and remembering the things I said I would never do. I like pausing, just for a moment, to revel in what a bloody good mother I was before I had kids, sighing at my maternal genius and then thumping back to reality, […]

6th March 2011

BIG (GREEN) LOVE!


words

I posted a couple of weeks ago about libraries, and my fearful sense of a future without them. Especially without them in remote or unpopular places. I’m still shuddering. I fear this may look funny, but the bookworm in me has been drawn out of the earth again, as my local book store has started […]

26th February 2011

Lucky Stars


depression, hope

I realise I’ve posted a good bit about remembering – remembering the good and remembering the bad. I saw my Mum this week and she told me that memories faze and fade, and that everyone with larger families, or older children, has melded memories and has forgotten much of the minutiae of early family life. […]

20th February 2011

Moving Images


depression

I love American Beauty. I remember seeing it with my then boyfriend, now husband and, knowing it would be a shoe in for best picture, planning an Oscar party. We transformed our flat with apple juice in sample pots in the fridge, scarlet (paper) petals in the sink and obscure home-made videos playing on our […]

8th February 2011

Today we went to the library…


family & parenting, words

So today we went to the library. I shivered at a future that might have been. It is the first place I lost my son. And it taught me a lesson, in parenting as watchfulness and our duty to concentrate on what our children are doing. He was two and escaped the safe paddock and […]

5th February 2011