It always takes me a couple of weeks to get going in January. I prefer to start it slowly, easing gently into the new year like it’s a cold swimming pool rather than divebombing into the water with a big splash. This year has been no different and as a consequence January simultaneously feels like…
For seven years now I’ve been tracking my year in numbers – measuring the year according to all the things that are *actually* important to me (as opposed to all the things we’re told by the media and society to measure ourselves by). These metrics are the elements that I value the most in life:…
December felt like a bit of a slog and I seemed to have misplaced my sparkle for most of it. We had unseasonably mild weather and therefore a LOT of rain for the time of year (apart from a random snow day right at the start of the month), which probably didn’t help. In between…
November has been a bit of a strange month – it seemed like the longest month in the world and at the same time I feel like I blinked and suddenly Spotify Wrapped is out and it’s less than three weeks until Christmas. Ella came down with covid mid-month, which I guess was almost inevitable…
October felt long. And busy. And beautiful. And challenging. All at once. I caught Covid for the second time and I was pretty poorly with it, although it didn’t flatten me like when I had it for the first time at the start of January so I was able to mostly keep functioning. There’s been…
September is usually my favourite month of the year. This time it felt both infinitely long and as if it passed by in the blink of an eye – it’s been full-on in so many ways. The summer sunshine we’d been hopefully waiting for all throughout July and August finally decided to show up during…
In direct contrast to the crazy busy-ness that was July, August has felt long and slow, even though we have done a fair number of things. It’s seemed like a month of being held in limbo: waiting for Ella’s GCSE results; waiting to hear back about various job applications she’s submitted; waiting for the summer…
July was busy. There is no other word for it – it was simply full-on with work plus all of the end-of-term things happening at school (reward trips, prom, vaccinations, teacher strike days and more). We did a lot of travelling around the UK this month too, with visits to Brighton, Southampton, Cornwall and London. …
It has been all about exams this month. After half term finished it was straight back into the second half of Ella’s GCSEs, which were immediately followed by Mimi’s Year 10 Mocks – the first time she’s experienced formal exams and understood what the whole process is like. They both coped admirably well and are…
May was such a busy and intense month. It was jam-packed full of good things, especially during the first two weeks – there was something happening almost every single day. The big news is that I turned 40 years old (!) this month so there were several mini-celebrations connected to that: two birthday surprises that…