It feels like a lovely and proper winter’s late afternoon as I sit on my veranda with a cup of freshly grated ginger tea and my laptop, taking in the natural sound of the outdoors as opposed to my kids screaming and arguing. I’ve been locked up with them for a month.
When you have to spend your time at home, you explore the old games and DVDs you haven’t used in years. And there, suddenly, forgotten at the back of the shelves, you stumble upon an old DVD box of the Inspector Morse. The iconic TV series from the 1990s has aged in places, but there’s a timeless quality to John Thaw’s interpretation of Morse. Morse on paper sounds harsh, grumpy, and like an unbearable know-it-all. But Thaw has given the eternal bachelor a touching grace. And while you laugh at the fashion or the desperate attempts that Morse makes to chat up women, there’s something inspiring about his life. And, perhaps, just for a moment, you can turn to Inspector E. Morse for tips on how to make your lifestyle feel a little sophisticated. After all, Morse is a man of taste. So what can we learn from him?
So here we are, smack bang in the middle of a pandemic and many of us on lockdown. There’s fear and panic in the air and uncertainty that has us all freaked out. Schools have closed as I’m sure everything else will too at some point in the very near future. And so, many of us have found ourselves at home with the kids more than we’re used to, some of us are homeschooling, others are trying to work from home and all of us just want to make it until bedtime. With the help of my readers and social media I’ve put together a quick post on how to keep the kids busy so you can get some shit done, reminders to take care of ourselves and things to do as a family.
Thinking of having another child? I get asked this question a lot but more than that, I get asked what it’s like having three kids. There are lots of positive reasons to grow your family from giving your firstborn a playmate to extending your legacy. In some regards, the more children you have, the easier it becomes because you’ve already had practice. There are however some challenges to expect every time you add a new child to the family. Here are just some of those challenges and how you can prepare for them.
Motor learning results in the ability to perform a skill as a result of practice or experience. In adulthood, we think nothing of picking up a coin we’ve dropped on the ground, tying our shoelaces or writing with a pen, but all of these are learned skills which were built early on in life. Helping your children build their fine motor skills will give them more independence and perform important everyday tasks throughout their life, from writing to dressing themselves, feeding themselves and anything that involves hand movement. Here are some ideas for going about it.