“Mummy’s always vomiting,” my three-year-old daughter told her preschool teacher merrily, “vomit, vomit, vomit, all day long”.  “Oh, is she now?” said her teacher, with a smile and a knowing glance in my direction. The teacher had surmised correctly; there was indeed a baby on the way. However, we didn’t want to tell the children…

Time is our most precious commodity. As we get older, the years pass by like days. Suddenly, it’s 2018 – which is strange, since just yesterday it was 2008, or 1998 or perhaps even 1968 – depending on how long you’ve been around. For us adults, time passes quickly, and we don’t change dramatically from…

“Tell me a story about when you were a boy.” That’s the unchanging instruction I have received from my eight-year-old boy at bedtime for weeks now. At first, I thought this was brought on by my father’s colourful stories of his childhood in Ballyvaughan, where fact and fiction intermingle fantastically. One recent story was about…

I believe that viruses are the most powerful non-human creatures on the planet. I’ve never had to take a day off work in order to recover from an attack by a bear, shark, lion or wolf. Only viruses have the power to so casually disrupt our lives. Any large, fang-toothed creature you might think of has…

One eccentric feature of parenthood is that your holiday dates are chosen for you by the Department of Education. Left to their own devices, few parents would spontaneously elect upon the dreary weeks of late October as the ideal season for a family holiday. Yet we must make the most of what we are given,…

Autumn brings a kind of pleasant melancholy. The warmth of summer recedes and the cold nights draw in. The trees, so recently full, lush and green, are now shedding crisp brown leaves for the children to wade through on their way to school, searching for conkers. Bright berries appear in the hedges and scatterings of…

  Our seven-year-old has been busy writing computer programmes. He has become fascinated with a piece of software that enables kids to control a digital cat with simple instructions, such as: walk five steps; say “meow”; turn 90 degrees, and so on. It’s good to see him understand so naturally the basic logic that underpins…

The summer holidays are gone too soon. Our freshly scrubbed children, in their brand-new oversized school jumpers, have been packed off back to school, proud to be elevated a year higher in the pecking order. Gone are the languorous days of summer, where time flows easy. The kids are happy to be back to school.…

After the Manchester terror attack, our screens had an endless loop of images of panic, followed by heartrending images of parents frantically searching for their children. Some will never see them again. Even though some of the children killed are a similar age to ours, our children have no idea the attack happened. We are…

We are on the cusp of summer. Tender leaves are unfurling on the trees, joyfully compelled by the spring sunshine. I let the children scamper happily ahead on the way to school. We prefer to take the long way, which is a path by the brook, filled with bluebells and birdsong. It is for this…