My brother and his wife welcomed their beautiful baby girl Grace this week, the latest addition to our expanding gang. I’ve looked up to my brother for as long as I can remember, so – being a few months further into being a parent – it’s nice to be the one able to offer him

I’ll cut to the chase: I’ve been struggling to string a basic spoken sentence together lately, never mind a semi coherent blog. (“Can you pass me the thingy on top of the thingy?” My hand waving in the direction of nothing in particular. Blank stare from Tom. “YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!”.) Like many, I

On Tuesday I was sitting bare foot in the kitchen with a sleeping babe on my lap staring at the six of my toes that retain a patch of the red nail varnish applied three weeks before she was born (that’s 19 weeks ago folks!). I was convinced our baby would arrive early, and naively

There’s nothing that shows the passing of time quite like a baby. In the past 15 weeks – the entirety of Ruby’s life – she has almost doubled her birth weight. In the past seven weeks since life radically changed for us in the UK, she has grown a mini mullet, started smiling, watching things

In last week’s Big Issue (which I’m well chuffed to be getting delivered) the editor wrote that “we’re all philosophers now”. He’s correct. We’re all living through something exceptional and we’ve each got a new perspective on, well, everything really. So this post is a bit sentimental, because I am a bit sentimental, and because

A cliché that has never been more accurate than in these days of lockdown and new parenting… Picture this (although not in too much detail): Sunday night, 10.30pm, baby asleep, husband winding down for bed, me: marigolds on, all clothes except underwear off, mop in one hand, bathroom cleaner and sponge in the other. It’s

I was reminded of this sentiment by Jennie in our ante natal group chat a couple of months ago, probably as we all asked each other why the wee bairns might not have been sleeping or why they wouldn’t stop feeding or why they screamed for no obvious reason. The fact is that it does

As Florence sang/ Thomas Fuller wrote (depending on how high brow you are). It turns out things needed to get worse, before they got even worse, before *touches wood* they started to get better. Tom is still resting, resting, resting (and dusting off his FIFA skills) as we continue to wait for his lungs to

It’s hard to believe it’s only 18 months since I took a wedding vow to be a more patient nurse when Tom is sick. Fast forward to this week and the combination of him contracting Covid19 and us having an eight week old baby has seen me almost break that very solemn vow fifty times