In Memoriam – Part II


family & parenting

My 6 year old son is more sentimental about the past than his Great Grandmother who was born in 1920. And yet… he combines this nostalgia (for when he was a small boy, that day when I let him have 3 polos, the time he found a stick in the park, the birthday party three […]

25th May 2014

Wobble


family & parenting

Eldest child has his first wobbly tooth. This is the sort of thing which makes me feel unimaginably old, but also so very young and green and quick. It unites the child me and the grown up me, sheds light on the foolish me of my twenties when I was clear I’d leave a twenty […]

9th April 2013

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

No windows to see our London…


family & parenting

So as Spider-boy’s first day of school approaches I have a lot planned. In my usual overdrive I am very keen to have some fun with him, to enjoy our last hurrah of Mummy and Spider-boy time. We hatched a plan: to go riding on an open-topped bus tour of London. It’s hard to tell […]

18th September 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

First Person


family & parenting

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 […]

19th July 2011

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

Good News


family & parenting

Here’s some good news. With background. When I was 7 months pregnant with Spider-boy, a colleague and friend took me to the side. She had her first son in his pram and she wanted to give me a warning. She said that though lots of people would tell me that giving birth was the happiest […]

10th June 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