Age Appropriate


family & parenting

I’ve written before about Spider-boy’s attachments and obsessions when it comes to TV, notably his hearty love for Fireman Sam and later Gigglebiz, which have now also been consigned to the scrap yard for all things too babyish. He is now, with typical four-year-old full immersion, hooked on Horrible Histories and Deadly 60. I think […]

21st May 2012

Comic Timing


family & parenting

Last week, in a mad dash to get to school on time (among many other pretentious goals I’ve set myself I’m now grappling with the task of being a new person, an ‘on time’ person, when it comes to school), we got our timings wrong. So wrong that we arrived to the unpopulated playground. I […]

4th October 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

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

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