On 1st January last year we started a Happy Jar. We’d tried before in years gone by and never really made it past more than a couple of weeks before forgetting all about it, but this time I was absolutely determined to keep it going for the whole year. And so, as the months sped past, any time any…
Twenty sixteen has been a tough year for many. It’s also been an awesome year for many. To be fair, I think most years are both tough and awesome one way or another, with a whole lot of ordinary, mediocre stuff in between. It would be a very rare thing to come across someone who had…
The husband working in the industry he does means that Christmas Eve is one of the busiest days/evenings of the year for him and so he always works a super-long day – starting in the morning, spending most of the day on his feet and not getting home until the early hours of Christmas Day. It means it’s…
Earlier on this week, Ella, my eldest daughter, turned ten years old. TEN! I can’t believe I’ve been a Mum for a decade. As clichéd as it probably sounds, it really does feel like only yesterday that I gazed down in awe at the tiny ET look-a-like blinking up at me just moments after making…
Towards the end of my epic year spent travelling in Australia in 2013, the guy I had been travelling with and I went our separate ways. A couple moved into the shared dorm-room in Sydney that we’d been living in at the time. Their names were Tamarin and Pete, and they were just at the beginning of their travelling adventure. We did…
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…
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…