"This week is crazy," I said to my husband. "It'll calm down next week," he said, and I nodded. "Who are you kidding," said the little voice inside my head. "You've been saying it'll calm down next week since 2007, and it still hasn't." This is true. I've even blogged about it before I think (here) and I've ...
"We'll fit loads in over the next few weeks," I'd said to the kids two weekends ago, not wanting to say what I really meant, which was, "There are only twelve more days left of summer holidays, let's make the most of it." Because I didn't want them on the countdown that I was already ...
Last week I wrote about the books my kids loved this year - 28 recommendations from my kids to yours - so this week I thought I'd post about the books I loved in 2018. There are lots of "best books" newspaper articles and blog posts at the moment, and at first I thought about trying ...
When I was about thirteen, I remember reading Flowers in the Attic and realising pretty quickly that it was a good thing my parents didn't know what it was about. I'd been stopped from reading Judy Blume's Forever a few years ago, and had learned to be more careful about revealing my reading choices. It's ...
On Monday morning, when I called the kids for school, they had many questions. Here are just some of them: "Is it Saturday, can I watch TV? Okay, well even though it's Monday, can I watch TV because it's still kind of Christmas?" "It's still the middle of the night, right? It's sooooo dark, it can't be ...
"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 ...
I own a book monster. I take her to library, she gets out ten books, and two days later, she's read them all. I usually find her roaming around the house at night, picking up newspapers and magazines, desperate for something to read until she can get her next library fix. (Which is why she ...