How To Beat The Daylight Savings Impact – For Parents of Small Kids

daylight savings - clocks - office mum

A few years ago, I was at a party the day after the clocks went back, chatting to a friend of a friend. She was bemoaning the fact that her child had woken up even earlier than usual that morning. "He usually wakes at 6.30," she said, "But this morning because of the clocks changing, ...

What I Don’t Miss About Life Before Kids

Clock - Office Mum

What do you miss about life before kids? That was the question in an online discussion I read recently. Sleep. Free-time. Me-time. Money. Nights out. Lying-in. Tea that's not gone cold. Peeing alone. Not in any kind of "I wish I never had kids because I miss that hot tea so much" way. Just a list of things that we sometimes miss - if we're ...

Censoring kids’ reading (or not) and running a book clinic

Reading - Office Mum

"And then the sixteen-year-old found out she was pregnant too, and she wanted to run away with her boyfriend!" This was the sentence that left me speechless last year, when my then seven-year-old was recounting the plot of the book she was reading. It was a Jacqueline Wilson book that we'd picked up second-hand at the ...

Goodbye Couch

I don

Long, long ago, when we first moved from the heady heights of our 4th floor apartment  in Dublin 2 to a rather more serious semi-detached house in Swords, we discovered the joys of flooring and dishwashers and spending Saturday afternoons looking at bathroom tiles. We were  catapulted from city centre easy living to adulting hard, long before adulting ...