February is my least favourite month of the year. 2020 represents five years since my Dad died and one year since the fire in our kitchen happened. I try and stay positive about it, but honestly, all the challenging stuff in our lives seems to happen in February! This year has been no different: our…
Every year starts off in the very best of ways as we celebrate Lola’s birthday at the beginning of January. This year she turned ten and I’m still finding it hard to believe that my littlest baby is now in double digits. I think maybe that’s why I’ve taken so long to write her birthday…
January has felt like a looooong old month. Illness; readjusting back to the routine of school life after the Christmas holidays; and grey, damp, chilly days have meant that we’ve not done anything very exciting. Instead our weekends have been spent mostly at home in the warm – snuggled up under blankets reading, doing piles…
Somehow we’re almost at the end of January. In some respects it really has felt like the longest month ever; the grey, damp days dragging out into infinity with the end seemingly never in sight. In other ways though, it feels like it’s gone quite fast and I can’t believe the first chapter of the…
2020 feels like a bit of a special year, like an important shift of some kind is going to happen. I can’t really explain the feeling I have about it, I just know that it’s there and that it’s insistent. I try and listen to these kinds of gut feelings – the ones that won’t…
2020. The end of a decade and the start of a brand new one. It feels…different somehow. I remember being sixteen years old at the turn of the millennium and all the hype and excitement and trepidation around that – the start of a new year, a new decade, a new century AND a new…
Four years ago, on the 1st January 2016, I spontaneously decided to start a Happy Jar. The idea was loosely based on the concept of a ‘gratitude jar’ that I’d seen in a meme online a few weeks beforehand. It seemed like a fun activity for the girls and I to do together and I…
In 2017 I took a leaf out of Suzanne from Inside Outside and Beyond’s blog pages and started tracking my year in numbers, measuring the year according to all the things that are important to me and which I value the most: family time; love and connection; travel; creativity; helping others and personal challenges/growth. I…
At the start of December, amidst the chaos of moving house, we celebrated Ella’s birthday and somehow my firstborn is now a teenager. Thirteen! And only a few inches off being the same height as me! I can’t believe it. It honestly doesn’t feel like thirteen years ago that she entered the world, launched me…
What a month! We celebrated Ella turning thirteen at the beginning of December, finally moved house (woohoo!) and then both Mimi and Ella succumbed to the epidemic of flu going around their school. It completely wiped them out one week after the other in the lead up to the end of term and they each…