My Blog
My musings about the world, self publishing, living abroad, and my author career.
B
B is for beterschap and badkamer Beterschap means get better soon - literally it's betterness. I quite like the idea of wishing people beterness. I asked the children if they had any suggestions for Dutch words I should write about. Rocket boy insisted that I included...
A
A is for Appel Standard alphabet learning isn't it! But there's also aardappel - literally earth apple, or potato; and sinasappel - orange, though I'm not sure what sinaas means.
My bullet journal
The middle of last year I started a bullet journal, and now I don't know how I lived without it! I use it as a planner, to-do-list, scheduler, habit tracker, and to keep track of what I've done. You can buy special dotted notebooks to use as a bullet journal, but I...
Voting in The Netherlands
Earlier this week were the elections for local Councils here in The Netherlands. A few weeks before the day we get a long list of all the candidates. These are split by party, and ordered by each party. So we had a list of 210 candidates across 10 parties for 31...
A-Z blog challenge
This year I'm going to take part in the A-Z blog challenge. So for every day in April (except Sundays) I will be posting something related to each letter of the alphabet. And each post will be able one (of more) Dutch words that start with that letter. These will be a...
Judo to teach social skills
At the school my children go to one of the local judo schools come in to give lessons. And I think they do the same in a number of schools in the area. With the emphasis on teaching the children social skills. Judo has at its core the idea of respect for each other...
My first time on the touchline
Last week was a football tournament between a number of local schools. In about November rocket boy came home from school with a letter asking if he wanted to sign up for this. But it didn't really explain how it worked or when it would be. I guess they assumed that...
NT2 – Amsterdam Mamas post
My post on doing the NT2 exams is now published on the Amsterdam Mamas website.
playing knikkers
When rocket boy first started school I wondered why there were a series of small depressions across the school playground, along the edge of the buildings. The answer is that they're for playing marbles (or knikkers in Dutch - I couldn't resist the title!). Starry boy...
Meghan & Jamie’s Love Letters from Trail Makers
For the last month I've been receiving daily emails about living a creative life, These were organised by Meghan Genge and Jamie Ridler and they called this series "Love Leters from Trail Makers". This was 32 messages from different women who work in creative fields....
Writing letters
Rocket boy is now starting to learn how to do joined-up writing. He's so excited about it, and does the hooks and flicks on the top and bottom of each letter with such care. I have to be careful not to tell him the right way to do it, as I know that not all the...
I’m a curly girl
In the middle of last year I decided that I really had to do something about my hair. It was getting really dry and frizzy and I never bothered to do very much with it. I realised that I had never really learnt about how to look after it. Wash, condition and go was my...