When the school number flashes up Our newly rehomed Dalmatian had gone into the vet that morning to be castrated, bless him (all went well). I’d dropped him off and realised I had a small window to get the food shopping done, so I did. I’d just got home and was halfway through unpacking when […]
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It isn’t attitude, it’s anxiety I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember Kevin and Perry – Harry Enfield comedy sketches, back in the nineties. Kevin turns thirteen and transforms mid-sentence from a perfectly pleasant child into a stomping, grunting, door-slamming creature whose only line is that everything is SO UNFAIR. Perry is his
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Nobody’s dressed and it’s almost midday As I write this it’s almost midday. Nobody’s dressed. I’ve been up since before 6.30am. So far I’ve half cleaned the house, walked a puppy, done training with a puppy, played referee amid full scale sibling warfare, searched puppy poo for Lego figures and cleaned up sick. There’s wet
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Some days it isn’t just the shouting I’ve had a lot of families reaching out to me over the past week, and I think a lot of you are finding the summer holidays very intense. I completely understand that, because it’s pretty full on here too. Not in the way it was years ago, but
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When capacity runs out It’s the end of term, and I’ve been thinking a lot about capacity. Why is it that, just when so many of our children are already running on empty, the summer term becomes the busiest time of the year? The routine changes almost daily. Sports days. School plays. Visitors. Special activities.
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Coping is not the same as thriving This week, one of my children needed collecting early from school. Not refusing. Not in crisis. Just overwhelmed, and unable to keep going for one more afternoon. So I found myself juggling a school collection with trying to work, while managing a whining puppy and hoping the neighbours
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The thing we don’t say out loud about the school holidays It’s the half term holiday in the UK, and this can look very different in families like ours. I know there’ll be parents reading this who have spent the last few days barely leaving the house. Because everywhere is too busy. Too loud. Too
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When did you last have something to look forward to? I want to tell you something that took me a long time to admit out loud. There was a period, not that long ago, when I stopped looking forward to things. Not dramatically. Not all at once. It crept up on me so quietly that
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When going back to school doesn’t feel safe For many of us, we’re coming to the end of half term. If, like me, you have a child who is registered at school and attending in some way, you might already be feeling that familiar dread creeping in – the build up to trying to get
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The reality of always being switched on I’ve been thinking a lot this week about hypervigilance. About what it does to us as parents when we are always switched on. From the outside, it can sometimes look like our children are “not listening”, or that we’re too soft, or that we’ve somehow lost control. I
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