Here we are again - nearing the end of the school holiday... Do you know that the kids get almost three weeks off at Christmas nowadays? 3 WEEKS?! Yep. Apparently nowadays kids break up from school before Christmas and don't go back until the middle of January. I'm pretty sure that when we were kids back in the 80s (showing our age there.. eek!), we went immediately back to school after New Year's Day. Luckily, we now live thirty years in the future and we can work from home

What a morning. Tom’s been away working in London for the last couple of days which means that the boys’ good behaviour benchmark has gone downwards. Apparently the wrath of one dad is less of a threat than the wrath of two. So, we’ve had low-level irritating squabbles a-plenty this morning; poking each other’s ribs, violent cushion fights that are on the wrong side of the fun/fight border and farting in faces including one very potent one from Richard right into my mouth whe

Once a month, the marvellous people at the Board Game Blogger’s Club send our family a new game to play and review. This month, it’s the turn of landscape building game Carcassonne. So, first things first. How do you pronounce Carcassonne? We each had a guess, ranging from “Car-crash-ownie” from Lyall, “Car-sass-son” from Dad, a kind of tongue out “Carr-rraaa-raara” from Richard and a very admirable (even if I do say so myself) “Cceer-casss-on” in a splendid French accent fro

It’s four weeks into the seven week long (long being the key word there) Summer school holiday. As I’ve probably mentioned before, holiday clubs are an enormous rip-off, not to mention that the boys would cause an actual mutiny against the unwitting supervisors. So, we decided a home-holiday would be better, with me (Daddy) working on freelance projects in the dining room while the boys play/squabble/kick a ball out on the village green under my occasional supervision. Natura