Are you ‘courting’? ‘Going steady,’ as they said on Happy Days? Or my favourite early-twentieth-century ‘walking out together’? Yay! Enjoy it! What a very pleasant time of life, whatever you call it. The best piece of advice I have for you – just on the off-chance that you are in the market for some, and […]
At the risk of cheating in this series by pretty much stealing everyone else’s magic word… here’s the next instalment. Six words you should say today, from Rachel Macy Stafford in the Huffington Post: Very rarely does one sentence have immediate impact on me. Very rarely does one sentence change the way I interact with […]
Do you care about self-care? If you had the marvellous good fortune to host a goose who laid a golden egg for you daily, would you lovingly feed her the best worms in the garden, massage her little wings, make sure her bed was comfy (though not plumped with goose-down…) and generally cherish her? Or […]
A million years or several months ago I started a ‘series’ (of one item so far…) on Magic Words, the brilliant and amazing phrases we use with kids that are particularly excellent at getting something or other across. I have notes of a dozen Magic Words I want to write up, but to get the […]
Sadness and little children are a funny mix. Literally, I guess. You can’t spend a day with a toddler without cracking a few smiles, so even on a hard day, having a small comedian in the house means the black cloud sits alongside some sunbursts. Or maybe it’s like a two-lane road, where you can […]
If you had a six-year-old child, and institutional schooling had never existed, how would you go about preparing them for adult life? In the next few posts on unschooling, I want to tease out a few different issues and discuss them separately. Today it’s the different social experiences schooled and unschooled (or homeschooled) kids have. […]
I had a nightmare recently, where my husband and I were both sent to prison – separate prisons. I don’t remember what we were convicted of or whether we’d done it. I just remember the horror of realising that our punishment was the break-up of our family. How appalling. I did a criminology paper at […]
Poor wee boy. SBJ has vomited in the car several times in the last month. We all had a nasty tummy bug at one point, but now it seems that was a red herring and he actually just gets carsick. Not only on long trips, either, and not only on windy roads. My husband and […]
Is it fair to say we all want our kids to have better, healthier, happier feelings about their bodies than we have about ours? How can we avoid passing on our own insecurities? Alex linked recently to this bawl-inducing letter Kasey Edwards writes to her mother in ‘Passing on Body Hatred,’ excerpted from […]
‘All I ever needed to know I learned in the mental hospital,’ says Glennon Doyle Melton, from the Momastery blog, in her recent TEDx Talk. It’s sort of Glennon 101, an introduction to the big themes of her mission to live in the open, be a shameless truth-teller, and help everyone else to feel ok […]