It’s a book full of pages of gorgeous illustrations and you choose where you’d like to go, where you would live, how you would travel, what family you would have, what you would wear and so on and so on. This is a book that can keep children engaged for ages, or which you can flip through pretty quickly. We tend to go through it and take turns choosing things on each page. Sometimes we’ll try to come up with something that’s not in the pictures (which is really quite hard, because it’s all there!). Sometimes we’ll go through being an alien or a monster, sometimes we’ll go through being royalty…

But I wanted to share something we’ve been doing recently which as proved (for the moment – these things don’t always stick) incredibly useful and rewarding. LaLa, who is now four, is in a bit of a boundary-pushing phase, particularly when out and about. Getting to school (playgroup/nursery for her, but we’re usually taking RoRo to school first) or to her two new activities (swimming and gymnastics) is often quite a struggle (more for me than for Chris, usually) with her deliberately doing things she knows she mustn’t do (opening and closing people’s gates, running off the other way, trying to bait dogs in people’s gardens, climbing where she’s not supposed to climb, standing rock hard still and refusing to bunch, even running across a road – though fair play to her on that one she did look really carefully and make sure it was safe before she did so). I’m trying to build up a bunch of strategies to cope with this, including trying to leave earlier, having sweets for bribes (sorry, rewards), talking in a calm monotone voice and repeating what I want to happen (this is what Chris tends to do, and it mostly works for him) and, of course, the old favourite… distraction.

Keeping the walk (wherever we’re going) fun is the main trick (is it a trick, really, though, or isn’t it just obvious?), while also keeping in mind safety and the need to be somewhere by a certain time. We’ve built up a little arsenal of games to play, including I Spy; Rock, Paper, Scissors; I Want in My Castle (a bit like My Grandmother Went To Paris, but with things you want to put in your castle – huge library, ballroom, big treehouse, stables…) and the simple, but quite effective for getting somewhere quickly, Tag. The other day, though, LaLa herself started playing You Choose. And we were essentially going through the book without it being there (obviously, you do need to be quite familiar with the book for this to work) – I think we did miss out some pages, but we went through most of them. The girls both know it well enough that they can remember almost every item on every page without the book there. I can even picture a lot of it, and my memory is hideous. The beauty of this one is that it can really last a good long time.

If you don’t have this book (we actually have two copies!), then you really, really need it – why not pop into your local children’s bookshop and pick up a copy?

What strategies do you use to keep your children happy and amused on walks to activities and school? I’d love to add few more games or tricks to my arsenal to keep myself from getting really, really frazzled and shouty!

Lizzie Velasquez – totally amazing woman

This woman has responded to bullying and negativity by turning it around and being positive and making something awesome of herself. Truly inspiring. Please do watch it!

She asks ‘What defines you?’ and this is something I often ask myself and I’m frankly never entirely sure. It feels sometimes as though there are just far too many things (or people, or roles) that define me, to the extent that I find myself getting a little lost.

Who am I? A mother. A wife. A sister. A daughter. A business woman. An artist. A writer. A left-wing vegetarian. A school governor.

What do I like? Laughter. Pretty things. Nice food. Wine. Travelling. Speaking other languages. Learning new things. Reading. Drawing and painting. Dancing. Chatting with friends. Playing board games. Walking in the countryside. Cuddles.

What do I believe in? That we should provide for and take care of those who can’t provide for themselves. That we should think of others and not just ourselves and our family. That we should be true to ourselves and stand up for our beliefs. That girls and boys can do everything and anything they want to, whether it’s pink or blue, has wheels or has fairy wings. That we are responsible for our own actions and must stand behind them. That we define our place in life – and in death. That no-one should be discriminated against for their gender, their race, their income, their parents’ job, their size – only for the words and their actions.

I don’t know. That’s an awful lot, isn’t it, and how much of that is actually me, rather than who I think I’m supposed to be or what I think I’m supposed to say?

Benefit Street

I haven’t watched it and I don’t think I’m likely to. I did read an article (sorry, can’t remember where and I didn’t actually share that one on Facebook, apparently) that said there had been a working family filmed initially who were entirely cut from the show, which suggests to me (bear in mind again that I haven’t watched it) that the main purpose of the show is to get people watching and shouting at the people on it what horrible people they are. Certainly seems to be having such an effect, as I am seeing far too many status updates (yeeshk, Facebook again!) bemoaning people on benefits and scroungers and so on.

I just wish people would stop demonising the poor and the needy. It’s sickening, frankly, that society has grown into one where the majority thinks predominantly of themselves. Where commentary on other people is not empathetic or sympathetic, but disgruntled, sarcastic and demeaning. If you’re going to pick on someone, at least pick on someone who has the funds and ability to fight back – bankers, maybe (though, you know, some of my best friends…), or large corporations who pay almost no tax and have hideous working conditions?

Let children play

Finally, there’s an interesting article in the Independent about letting children play. It does hark back to the ‘golden days’ of neighbourhood play and no after-school activities a bit which, while I also hark back to them (mine were in the 70s, not the 50s like the author of the article), I’m never sure if it’s possible to return to. But it also has some scientific basis to show how important play is. Which, yes, I know. Learning through play is an integral part of the early years curriculum. I’ve read blogs of people who try to do ‘free-range parenting’ (which is as close to that 70s childhood as you can get in the modern era and involves lots of tree-climbing and being allowed to play out in the neighbourhood relatively, or completely, unsupervised) and wondered about it – would need to move house, first of all, of course! And I’m thinking a lot of mine (and our) parenting style and whether or not there is one and whether or not we need to make some serious shifts in attitude. I don’t have any answers, by the way! This has made me think a bit and I’ll probably go on thinking about it and making little adjustments and changes where perhaps something bigger might be required. It’s surely better to be someone who thinks about these things and is aware of their own parenting faults, and quite possibly continues to have many, rather than sitting back and assuming that we’re just fine and whatever we say goes, though. Surely?

OK, that’ll do for now. Can’t promise to do this regularly – because my blogging promises are generally pretty rubbish – but maybe I’ll try to share here a bit more often and not just leave everything for Facebook to hoover up.

In the whole protecting the innocent (or guilty, in this case) thing and not telling tales about my children without their permission (you know it’s really hard to keep up any kind of parent blogging kudos without being to tell tales about your kids – funny ones, sad ones, cool ones… that’s what it’s all about, dammit), I can’t actually give you any real background here, but tonight we hit the lying problem (lying about doing something known to be unacceptable behaviour in this family) head on. The unacceptable behaviour was a problem (and it sometimes feels like there’s more and more of that at the moment), but the persistent (and really bad) lying about it was a bigger one. In my eyes at least. And it scared me. It scared the crap out of me that we had somehow failed to impart some important moral principles.

So, I went off and googled ‘How do you teach children morality?’ and now I feel even worse. The first article I read was a primer for attachment parenting and basically told me that we have completely failed (though we may have some time left with one of them) by letting other people look after our children and not providing them with a constant loving and connected life before sending them off to school. Crap. I have been sat in front of this computer for far too many hours when I should have been playing with, baking with, gardening with… Whatever. I wasn’t doing it. But then there was a paragraph where the reasoning went from a child watching someone hurt someone on TV to shooting their girlfriend when he grew up. Um. OK. (And, you know, I love loads about attachment parenting and took to lots of it myself. This is not me dissing attachment parenting – if I had the patience, time and money I would totally be an attachment parent.)

So I went off and read a few more. Some stuff about discipline and consequences. Some stuff about making rules and sticking to them. Lots of stuff about children not developing empathy until they’re around 7 or 8 and up until then, it can only be about rules and the Golden Rule (saw this in multiple articles) ‘Do to others what you have them do to you’ (pretty sure there’s a version of that in the bible (though I know there’s also the contradictory ‘Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’, which is one of the many reasons I didn’t go looking for any answers in religion).

But the other thing that threaded through most of them is the being a role model (especially in the pre-school years – crap, again!). I kind of always assume that we’re good role models for morality, but actually are we? I’m not so sure now. For a start our morality diverges in at least one point and quite possibly more (at least we have similar political leanings, but I know we’ve had heated debates about moral issues in the past – many years ago, now; we’re more likely to talk about how to get the homework done or whether InDesign can output epub files). We do talk about me being vegetarian a fair bit, but I have never really explained why. Except that I was born that way and don’t know any different – but I do actually have strong beliefs about the right and wrong of it and frankly I should be telling my children this, not to indoctrinate them or whatever, but to give them an insight into my moral compass.

On top of that, though, we frequently expect our children to behave differently to how we behave. We expect them to listen to us, but don’t always give them the courtesy of listening to them (usually for ‘good reasons’, such as needing to run out the door and not be late). We expect them to tidy up after themselves, when we leave things piling up because work is so busy we just don’t have time. We expect them to share with each other, when we have a large number of things in the house which are ‘for grown-ups only’. We expect them to calm themselves when sad or angry and not scream and shout and stomp, when both of us spend much of the day swearing at our computers and certainly have been known to shout. At least a couple of times a day, probably. And we can both stomp and sulk for England (or Scotland, or occasionally Wales).

Oh yeah. And we don’t always tell the truth. There are times when we suggest not mentioning something to someone because it might upset them. Times when we have told what we would consider white lies but in a child’s eyes they would just be lies. There are also many times when we make claims that our children believe not to be true (because they’ve read something different, heard it from a teacher, seen it on TV – or think they have, at least) and then they feel we are lying (there’s another distinction that needs to be made).

So it seems (duh! as my children would say) that we need to look inwardly a lot more before looking outward. We need to understand and talk about our own moral compasses. Maybe come up with some family morals that can integrate these. We need to make sure we understand what we expect from a moral child, before expecting our children to have any kind of innate moral ability. And then we need to make sure we are modelling moral behaviour. Consistently. Sounds hard. But I do hope I don’t go away and forget about this post and these thoughts again for another couple of years because, then it really might have been too late.

What about you? How do you teach your children morality? Have you managed to model moral behaviour right from the start? Does it just come naturally, or is it a very conscious effort? Do you have any other tips? (And if you want to tell me that it’s OK, that we haven’t completely screwed our children up already, that would be nice, too. Though obviously you shouldn’t lie about it.)

Very tired.

Up at 5. Shower. Packed Lunch. Hour’s work. Pancakes. Reading to child. Times tables testing. Spelling testing. School run. Nursery run. Magazine with pretty pictures. Bus to Cheltenham. Two Meetings. Two (Three?) birthday presents purchased. Magazine and lunch. Fun window shopping. Bus to Stroud. Nursery Run. Pit stop in park (mistake). Slightly late for after-school-club pick-up. Home. Collapse with cup of tea while Chris makes dinner. Eat dinner. Dance around living room with girls in guise of tidying up. Stories. Ten minutes on computer trying to persuade it to export a pattern. Run to Building Committee meeting. Sit making notes and doodling and occasionally (I hope) making useful contribution. Walk to shop. Buy wine. And milk. Come home. Watch two episodes of Breaking Bad (Wow! S3 finale and first episode of S4) while doing Design A Day and drinking wine.

Looking forward to ‘normal’ day tomorrow – no meetings in day or evening. But I am loving it.

Roasted goat’s cheese, courgette and tomatoes with fusilli

Ingredients

• 1 large handful of cherry tomatoes
• 1 courgette
• olive oil
• sea salt
• 1 round of goat’s cheese (preferably with a bit of rind – though do check it’s a veggie rind)
• 300 g of fusilli (or other) pasta
• water for boiling
• pepper for seasoning

Method

1. Turn the oven on.
2. Get out a baking dish.
3. Halve the tomatoes and place in the oven dish.
4. Cut the courgette into slices.
5. Mix together in the oven dish and drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt.
6. Cook for about 15 minutes while you sit and put your feet up, drink a bit of red wine and check your Facebook or Twitter timeline.
7. Cut up the goat’s cheese and add it to the vegetables and put them back in the oven until the pasta is ready.
8. Put some water on to boil.
9. Add the pasta to the boiling water.
10. When the pasta is ready, drain it and add the roasted vegetables to it.
11. Dish up and season with ground black pepper. And the rest of that wine you started earlier.

This made enough for me to take the rest to work for lunch the next day and it was really delicious cold, too.

I think the vegetables would also be delicious on their own without any pasta.

This is a really great quick meal for throwing together after work and feeling good about yourself for not just shoving a ready meal in the microwave or a pizza in the oven. Try it!

As of 5 October this blog’s name will mean what it was set up to mean. In other words, after a six-month foray into the world of offices and bus commutes, I shall be returning to freelance life and working from home again.

It was both a hard and an easy decision make. I have enjoyed my six months back in-house a lot. I loved having a defined role and having people listen to me and feel I had something to important to contribute. I loved that my 13 years of running a business was accepted and embraced as a benefit and not seen as wasted time. I loved going to meetings and making phone calls (two things I used to shy away from and avoid as much as possible). I loved the conversations, whether about work, last night’s TV, someone’s holiday disaster or the hairdresser from hell. I loved the cakes – though my waistline may not agree with that. I loved the lattes from the machine, but not the tea. I loved problem solving, fire fighting, quality assurance, briefing, supporting and pretty much all aspects of the job. I was looking forward to the potential of moving forward and upward in the next few years and maybe managing teams or commissioning projects. I loved that the commute gave me time to read and be a me away from everything and everyone else. I loved lunchtimes in the beautiful park. I loved the early morning walk to the bus (though not the evening walk from the bus) and the 10 minutes of drawing time while waiting for the bus to leave. I loved having paid holidays and a payslip.

But… the air conditioning and open plan office, with the added commute, did not sit well with my body. I was ill more in the last six months than I have been in six years. I didn’t have the time or the energy to exercise and so the walks to and from the bus at both ends were all I was getting. Amazingly, I haven’t put on any actual weight (quite probably thanks to Thinking Slimmer, months after I’ve listened to a slimpod, even), but I feel (and definitely am) a lot less fit and and my (aforementioned) waistline is definitely feeling wobblier.

But probably the biggest factor of all is the lack of flexibility in being in an office, especially in relation to being a parent. I missed Sports Day. I missed almost the whole of the summer holidays. I have done a total of two school pickups/drop-offs in the last six months (yes, 6 weeks of that was the summer holidays, but still). I feel a lot less engaged with their schooling and pre-schooling. As a parent governor, I need to visit the school a number of a times a year, and would need to book a day off to do that (aside from the fact that I also want to do so as a parent!) Christmas is coming up, with its sleighful of parties and carols and plays and fayres, all of which I would need to book time off to see. We looked into the possibility of changing my hours so I could do a pick-up or drop-off each week, but I would have had to either leave early or stay late three days a week which would mean not seeing the girls in the morning or missing dinner with them, neither of which would really work for me.

It probably would have been possible to make it work and I’m not going to completely rule it out for the future. Frankly, if I didn’t have the years of working for myself behind me, I probably would be looking out how to make it work. But the extra effort when I knew I had a way of working already that could allow me to do all of those things, meant it was fairly obvious what needed to happen. A lot of the aspects of the job I really enjoyed I can continue to do externally and I’ll be able to add a bit of a variety back in, which I have missed a little.

Most importantly, though, I’ll be able to walk the girls up the hill to school in the morning (some mornings – as before, we will share the school runs and other bits and pieces equally). I’ll be able to go to middle-of-the-day meetings or performances at school. I’ll be able to see my friends at school more. I’ll be able to pop into town for a coffee or to pick up some shopping. I’ll be able to do a couple of hours’ work in the morning and then spend a couple of hours in the day sitting in the park drawing. I’ll be able to take the dog for more walks. I’ll be able to find the time and energy to do my Zumba, or some other exercise. I’ll be able to cook regularly again. I’ll be able to keep on top of the washing pile (OK, that might be pushing it a bit).

Oh, yes, and I’ll be able to spend the day with my best friend. It’s pretty perfect, really, isn’t it?

I can put aside the meetings and the career progression possibilities for all of that (if indeed it counts as putting them aside). Because my priorities are at home, tucked up in bed, and thankfully I can still make a good living and get a lot of job satisfaction, while sticking close by them. I’m very lucky to have this option as I know many many parents would like something like this and can’t make it work. And, of course, there are plenty of parents out there who have found a balance they are happy with and that is wonderful. I think it has to be about what works for you and your family, whether or not it necessarily fits others’ views.

A little part of me hopes that I might also find the time, motivation and inclination to look after this blog a bit more. I’ve had some urges to get my political ranting boots out again and I’d also really like to get more recipes up. And books. So many lovely books to review – and maybe the time to get the girls to do some of their fabulous book videos. No promises, though. There’s also a chance I might just disappear into thin air and re-appear somewhere else on the internet. You never know.

We have always eaten our evening meals together as a family. Working from home until recently this was an easy and obvious thing to do, really, but I have arranged my hours now that I go out to work so that I am almost always home to have dinner with Chris and the girls.

Benefits of eating together as a family

There are lots of benefits to eating together as a family. Some parents feel that eating with their children would mean having to give up eating interesting and flavoursome food. But instead, what it means is having the wonderful opportunity of sharing interesting and flavoursome food with your children. It doesn’t guarantee they’ll like everything, or that they won’t go through the ‘Yuck!’ phase, but it will mean they will try more foods and be more interested in different foods.

Another benefit is language development, from a very early age. Ever since they were babies, the girls have sat with us. Before they were eating solids themselves, they would often sit on our laps watching us eat and listening to us talk about our days, or things we’d seen on the news or news from friends and family. Being a witness to, and then a part of, regular conversations is really, really important for children’s language development.

Now I work outside of the home, these meals are even more important to me, because they are the first time I get to hear about everyone’s days. The girls are often so keen to tell me about what they did at school or playgroup or nursery or Granny’s that they have to take turns to avoid fights. In fact, sometimes Chris is also desperate to talk about his day – and he also has to wait his turn! Now and then I might even get to tell them about something I did, like the time a dog ate my lunch!

Making sure you share healthy family meals

While we are not totally averse to quick and easy meals, like eggs, chips and beans, pizza or a fast pasta and jar of sauce, the majority of the time we eat, home cooked healthy family meals, which are jam-packed with nutrition – vitamins from fresh vegetables (often from the market), high-protein grains or pulses (current favourites are quinoa, buckwheat, barley and butter beans), and lots of flavours from spices and herbs in the right mix. Chris will often make some high-protein meat or fish dish, such as a stew or roast chicken, and the girls will often have some of each, but we’ll also frequently have a single vegetarian meal, that everyone enjoys.

It doesn’t need to take hours to prepare healthy family meals (though I do enjoy it when I have the time to spend a couple of hours preparing something really sumptuous, like the lasagne I made on my annual leave at the end of the summer holidays). Lots of stews and soups involve only 15 minutes’ preparation and then they cook for an hour or so while you get on with other things. I’m really looking forward to lots of delicious beany casseroles and chunky vegetable stews through the autumn and winter. In the summer, a salad can be thrown together in 10 minutes, and you can add cheese or boiled eggs for protein, or a handful of rinsed tinned beans or lentils. Cheesy pasta with added frozen peas takes about 15 minutes in total and is delicious and good for you (if a little heavy on the carbs and fat).

Do you eat family meals together? Do you only get to do it at weekends, because of working hours?

In association with SuperSavvyMe

Apologies, but this is an adminy non-post.

Hopefully, I will write something (and maybe even something interesting or funny or thought-provoking, but I can’t promise) while the girls are away for their second holiday of the summer later in the week.

Bye!

The wraps were consigned to the bin and now I am sat on the (late) bus with a rumbling grumbling tummy.

I love this early bus. The roads are really quiet and the bus is quite empty. It usually arrives ten minutes early, so I can nip in to the shop for a pastry. Today, I’m going to pick up some things for a picnic after school.

I tend to read on the bus (and often sleep, in fact), but I am feeling the call of the pen (well, the digital equivalent, anyway) and thought I might use the (rather neglected) blog to answer the call – for the moment at least.

I don’t know that I have anything much to say, though. My urge to rant about educational policy is still there, but I have to consider others before I put any of that out there. I don’t cook much any more, so recipes are rarer. The girls are more aware of the blog, so I can’t talk about any parenting issues, or even much about the parenting highs.

I could talk about the changes in my work-life balance since going back in-house (mostly better, but with some loss of flexibility issues). But, well, wouldn’t that be a bit dull?

I will, at least, have some book reviews soon. I’ve been reading quite a bit ob the bus, and would like to share some of those with you. And we’ve been sent a lot of lovely children’s books, that I’d like to at least round up, if not do full reviews or funky videos.

Who knows whether I’ll manage any of that, though. I may just go back to reading and sleeping on the bus.