They’re Learning


family & parenting

Life and movies don’t always collide. Although I suspect anyone who claims never to have imagined themselves in a pop video whilst rammed into the back of the family car on some endless sweaty holiday journey is probably lying. We’ve all done it, melted our world into a movie in our head, in my case […]

2nd August 2011

Shared (un) conciousness


family & parenting, words

This morning Spider-boy is indignant. Indignant, and confused, and beginning, I think, to get a bit upset. I’ve emerged downstairs after a catch-up lie in at 8.45 am. Both boys are in the playroom immersed in a reacreation of Cars 2 in which the smallest is crawling around, puking in the cracks in the floorboards, […]

24th July 2011

Are you looking at me?


family & parenting

The end of the world is on its way. Newborn has worked out his favourite thing in all the world. Beating Sophie, his brother and I on the list is standing. Standing and stamping (whilst clinging to a grown up finger) and being able, all of a sudden, to pick things up, stuff them in […]

1st June 2011

Glorious (four-eyed) birds


family & parenting

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 […]

17th April 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

IWD


feminism

International Women’s Day (tomorrow), as a cause is now 100 years old and still painfully relevant. IWD was started to campaign mostly for equal pay. According to figures from UN Women (the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women), and Annie Lennox if you follow her on Twitter, women perform 66 […]

7th 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

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