It was the skirt I noticed first. Deep in the trenches of my own ripple blanket, the tiny little girl across the room, wearing the most adorable crocheted ripple skirt, grabbed my attention immediately. Like the Very Cool And Normal person that I am, I introduced myself and then skipped the small talk and went straight into gushing about the […]
It’s a cruel irony of adulthood, that you get to the weekend desperate for a sleep-in, and your stupid body clock wakes you up at the same time anyway. The only saving grace is the lack of immediate plans, allowing us to sit silently, staring out the back door at the rising sun, sucking down the elixir of life that […]
Tapping away on my iPad after dinner, Pencil in hand, I was making progress, working away on my animation, when Bear leaned over. “Whatcha doing?”. Pausing, I pulled up my work to date, explained the guidelines and the way I was creating the progression of each frame. “EACH frame? You know there’s like tools that will do that for you […]
I’ve been sharing in this space, since June 2008. Our eldest child, nicknamed Bear on the blog, was not yet two. He was an only child, though his little brother was only a few months from being born. We spent our days playing trains and painting and baking and going for walks to the park and mothers group and bible […]
Sometimes, I wonder if it’s really worth the effort to get kids doing chores. I know it’s a good thing, it is teaching them valuable life skills, it is forming them up into functional, capable adults…but man oh man, I could really do without the constant moaning and whining and reminding and bickering and…like, could we just do it with […]
When you are six, the phrase “loved to pieces” is not just a figurative expression. When you are six, and the one you love best is a small stuffed duck that has been in the family as long as you have, the pieces that you have loved into oblivion start to outnumber the pieces left to continue being loved. And […]
…the more they stay the same. This past birthday season, we have seen a new era in this parenting gig – teenagerhood. We’ve also had “the baby” turn six and move from preschool at the end of last year, to part-time homeschool, to officially being registered and a big-school boy (does it count as big school when you don’t have […]
We have been quite lucky with our children. Only one hospital stay. No surgeries. One broken arm and one greenstick fracture (which, to be honest, is a much higher success rate than we ever though possible, given the inverse relationship between a certain small boy’s fearlessness and co-ordination…). Overall, not a bad hit rate for over a decade with four […]
One would think, when one no longer has children at mainstream school, one would be free of bookweek costume madness. One would be wrong. It seemed like a good idea when we RSVPed to our homeschool group’s bookweek event. The three big kids were reasonably easy to kit out – one went as Willy Wonka in a recycled costume, one […]
It is probably somewhat unsurprising to anyone, that my kids love craft & creating almost as much as I do. Multiple times a day, I get asked if they can do craft. We build handwork into our homeschool days. There are always multiple projects on the go at once, with their desks and the school table and the lounge room […]
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