It was 10am on a Tuesday in the depths of November, and as the rain poured down for what felt like the 27th day in a row (but was probably only the fifth), I found myself in my GP’s office, in floods of tears.
I’d gone in for a follow-up on a chest infection, but as I sat across her desk and she asked kindly, “So, how are you?”, the floodgates I didn’t even know had been carefully shored up burst open and all the overwhelm of the previous months erupted – unstoppable. I cried and cried.
Of course – as unexpected...
Six.
It’s such a little word. My first baby turned six.
On her fifth birthday I remember looking at my hand, five fingers spread out in front of my eyes, and thinking, “A whole handful of years have gone by since she got here. I only have one more hand before her childhood is almost over.” I had a helpless feeling of time slipping through those five fingers, my powerlessness to stop it almost overwhelming.
A year later, I know something I didn’t know then.
I see mums on social media posting pictures of their sleeping babies with captions like “Please don’t ever grow...
Hey Mama,
Not too long ago I had an epiphany – and it has changed the way I do motherhood.
This is no exaggeration. It has changed the way I spend time with my children, it has changed the dynamic in our household, it has changed the way I react in difficult situations, and it has given me more confidence to turn things around when they’re not going my way – which as a stay-at-home-mum, let’s be honest, is several times a day.
Like when the witching hour rolls around and the girls won’t eat their dinner and they’re fighting and one is...
It’s about now that I start to feel my resolve wavering.
Weeks away from another international move, we’ve reached the stage that I now think of as the special kind of purgatory that lies between decision and action. The days that stretch ahead where boxes are not yet packed and normal service is expected to continue – snacks to be prepared, playdates made, yoghurt wiped from the walls, toys pulled out and packed away again, dinner served, stories read, little foreheads kissed goodnight – all while my mind races on ahead of me. All while my head tells me that to...
We didn’t come here for ever.
We didn’t mean to stay much longer than a year. We never intended to make the Bahamas our home; we didn’t mean to fall in love with it, and we could never have predicted that from the first moment we got that white white coral sand in our shoes it would feel like it had always been there.
But that was what happened.
Two years ago next month we arrived on this island with our belongings in 10 boxes and – as with so many leaps of faith in life – found that the risk had been...
Oh, potty training, my old foe… So we meet again.
As with all things parenting, I thought that with my second baby I’d have a handle on how to approach potty training. After all – I’ve done it before. Pretty well actually! Or is that just in my memory, which has done what memories do in the years since, and smoothed over all the rough bits, leaving just a shiny, two-dimensional, shall we say preferential picture of the way things were? Because this is how I remember our potty training journey the last time round:
When my eldest was 2 years and...
Clever old Kate has given birth to her littlest prince this morning, on St George’s Day. And for me (as I suspect for many), all hope of productivity for the day went out of the window the moment I saw the news alert pop up on my phone. All day I’ve had Sky News Live on in the background as the world held its collective breath, waiting for the royal couple to emerge from the Lindo Wing to introduce their tiny bundle to the bank of cameras and news reporters waiting outside those famous doors.
Why is it that these moments...
