My Blog
My musings about the world, self publishing, living abroad, and my author career.
Child friendly
If you'd asked me before we moved I would have said the UK was a child-friendly place. But it's nothing compared to what I've experienced here! For example, shopping. Taking a small child shopping is often fraught with cries, whines, complaints, grumps, sulks etc. And...
Becoming home
Home is an elusive concept; what makes a place your home isn't something I could easily explain. We've been living here for nearly three months now, but last week we all went to the notary and bought our house. A big step, but as we're already living in it and have...
Settling in
So, it's three weeks since we arrived and we're starting to fell like we're getting sorted and finding our way about. Here's a brief summary of what we've been doing: - nearly all the boxes are unpacked - bedrooms and bathrooms are pretty much sorted, and we have a...
Children’s stories
Thinking about our move I'm realising that so many of our cultural references are related to the stories we learnt as children; whether that's from books, films, TV or anywhere else. Which has made me think about what this move means for our children and the future...
Houses
One of the big challenges when moving is to find somewhere to live at the other end. Even more so when you're moving abroad, so have to figure out a completely different system. However, we seem to have managed it remarkably easily. We had planned while we were over...
Water torture
Having children really helps you get to know yourself, especially toddlers when they start to develop their own ideas and want independence. Recently I'm realising quite how impatient I can be. Walking home from nursery is a real battle with myself at the moment. We...
Second time round
Well, the first baby was such a shock to the system - it was difficult to do anything else other than look after him. But with the second one you realise how easy it is to look after a newborn as they don't really do anything: it's the toddler that's hard work! After...
In other news – we’re moving!
As well as a new baby we are also planning to move to Amsterdam in the summer as my husband has got a job there. He was offered the job on my last day at work before Christmas, and he told them he'd take it on the morning I went into hospital to be induced. Talk about...