The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton was one of the first chapter books EldestGirl and I read together. I had loved it as a child, and remember playing for hours, imagining I had my own slippery slip to slide down a giant tree. Unfortunately, my parents lived in a new-build in the Midlands, so … [Read more…]
Wednesdays are my least favourite day. EldestGirl has a music class across town after school. The unpredictable traffic means that we tend to get in the car as soon as we’ve walked back from school and everyone has been to the toilet. If the traffic is OK we’re usually about 15 minutes early. I use … [Read more…]
“Look at this!” I exclaimed to TheBloke™ “We have a super-woke six year-old!” Whilst clearing out the playroom (a Sisyphean task that makes me want to hunt down the manufacturer of Happy Meals and insert a Pokemon where the sun doesn’t shine), I stumbled across a poster EldestGirl had made. Very often she sequesters herself … [Read more…]
We are trying potty training again. YoungestGirl is totally ready for it, but whilst her elder sister is eager to please and generally mindful of authority, YoungestGirl prefers… waiting until we’re not watching and pooing behind the curtain. We made an abortive attempt over the summer. “Perfect,” we thought. “Hot summer weather, running around in … [Read more…]
Every night we read a chapter or two of a book to EldestGirl. Her taste in fiction moved really swiftly from picture books to really quite complicated chapter books. She did baulk at The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe being read to her. I think it was just a bit too involved in terms of … [Read more…]
EldestGirl turned six this week, a fact which I find utterly astonishing. In some ways it seems merely weeks ago that she was from my womb quite-timely-thank-you-very-much-if-not-rather-on-the-late-side ripped. I looked at her appraisingly as I helped her brush her teeth on her birthday morning. I stroked her hair and said, “I can’t believe you’re six!” … [Read more…]
YoungestGirl had been to nursery before. But she had taken the summer off, and today, she started properly at her new nursery, which is based at EldestGirl’s school. Where EldestGirl is largely self-contained, YoungestGirl is – ahem – expressive with her emotions. She cried every day we took her to her old nursery (and then … [Read more…]
The extra inset days from EldestGirl’s school seemed like a gift at the time. “Let’s use the extra week to take the cherubs on a holiday we could only normally do in term-time!” we squealed excitedly, before booking a Butlin’s break, because, frankly, we’d forgotten the bad bits from last year. This time EldestGirl and … [Read more…]
About a year ago, a few months before she turned five, EldestGirl started to prefer chapter books to picture books. She was still reading picture books by herself, but at bedtime when we read to her, she liked to be read chapter books. Over the last twelve months we have raced through so many I … [Read more…]
Readers, we are in week 693 of the school summer holidays and we are all still alive. I attribute this amazing success to my brilliant invention of the Summer Holiday Imbibing Task (SHIT). Basically, children are dicks. You know they’re dicks. I know they’re dicks. Being with them 24 hours a day, 7 days a … [Read more…]
