While getting on with my work early this afternoon, the community midwife arrived at our door to measure, weigh, and inspect my granddaughter. It would appear there is a lot of paperwork involved in bringing a person officially into existence, and making sure they are happy and healthy. I caught bits and pieces of the…

It’s been remarkably quiet in the house over the last few days. The reality? Newborn babies often do no more than nurse, and sleep. My daughter seems to be coping well, but not without eyes all around her of course. We’re trying not to be too involved. It’s a difficult balance. We’re trying not to…

My eldest daughter arrived home from Japan this evening – a bucket-list trip she has been saving towards for several years. Given her struggles with anxiety, I’m so proud of her for making the trip, and proving to herself that she can stand on her own two feet and “do all the things”. We promised…

One minute you’re calling that girl you met and asking if she might to go out for a drink. The next minute you’re standing at the front of a church together. A minute after that you’re chasing little ones around the house. A minute or two later they’ve left school, and have their first jobs.…

The problem I vaguely alluded to this weekend has returned to bite us in the ass once more. Days of chaos and mayhem have delivered us back to the place we started. Is suppose there’s a perverse humour to it, when you think about it. I hope you’ll forgive me for being deliberately vague. I…

After a relatively peaceful week at home, everything was thrown into disarray last night. I’m not going to write anything about it here, because it’s not my story to tell – but it will be me picking up the pieces. It always is. Forgive me if I’m being deliberately vague. I’m just getting a bit…

After spending a night in a hotel near Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris last night, my eldest daughter boarded a plane to Amsterdam first thing this morning, then finally boarded a hopefully more reliable Boeing 787 to Osaka mid-afternoon. I say hopefully, because this one was only two hours late, instead of cancelled entirely.…

While emptying my head into the shiny new bullet journal a few minutes ago, it struck me that I haven’t written in the blog today – and I really should, because I would scarcely believe the chaos and mayhem currently surrounding me in years to come unless I write it down. My youngest daughter still…

I’m not sure I’ve really written about something rather siesmic that’s going on in our family at the moment. I’m about to become a grandfather. My youngest daughter is very, very pregnant. We’re talking days or hours away from “all systems go”. We wondered if we would make it to the end of Friday without…

The universe sometimes exhibits a wonderful sense of humor. The night before last the temperature dropped to well below zero (celcius, for my American friends). Well below freezing point. So of course the central heating in our house chose to stop working. By mid-morning a heating engineer had paid us a visit, and found the…