It’s halfway through October and we are well and truly into Autumn now. I’ve said it so many times recently but I’m going to say it again anyway – I don’t know where the time is going. I blink and it feels like whole weeks have disappeared without me realising. I’ve been meaning to write…
“We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated out of our souls. Churched out. Spanked out. Washed out and…
As a child, I wasn’t really all that adventurous. I preferred reading books, drawing and writing stories to going off into the wilderness exploring. My Mum and Stepdad and I would go out for walks on a Sunday (the deer park on Stanmore Common was my favourite), or head to a garden centre, but that…
September is my most favourite month of the year. And yet somehow today is already the first of October and I feel like I’ve quite literally blinked and missed it. I treat September as my New Year, far more than I do January. I don’t do Spring-cleaning. Instead I have what I call ‘Autumn clear-outs’. I…
Confession: I found these summer holidays hard. I felt like I’d been at my most shoutiest for a long time. The littlest one tentatively asked me on one particularly bad day: “Mummy, why are you so angry today?”. Cue instant guilt and feeling like I’d been punched in the stomach. I hadn’t been angry had I? …
Over the summer holidays my girls have been going to a kids yoga class called ‘Yoga Warriors’ at Sky Blue Yoga Kids in Stafford. I am so impressed that I wanted to give it a big shout-out here because more people need to know about it. Claire is a fantastic teacher – she always has a…
A couple of weeks ago my best friend and her husband came to stay with us for the weekend. It had been over a year since we last saw them and we’d been trying to arrange it for months and months and months. They live three hours away in Southampton, she is very close to completing her PhD and her husband…
It’s the same every summer… we get towards the end of the school year absolutely on our knees with exhaustion. The girls have been working hard since September, none of us ever seem to fully recharge at the weekends and we’re all craving slower, less structured days. I’ve been feeling a little bit under the weather for a couple…
I’ve mentioned before that all three of our girls are voracious readers, especially Ella. We visit our local library most Saturdays, where she’ll choose an average of ten books to take out (her record is fourteen!) and the other two will choose four or five each. As soon as we’re home they dive into them and I…
Having three children means that our house is constantly noisy. Giggles and laughter, bickering and shouting, the TV, impromptu Sunday morning kitchen discos… it’s rarely quiet. (I tried to upload a video that the husband took of me dancing with the girls but it refused to load. Probably a good thing!) And then when the girls…