Motherload

My daughter and I have agreed to give something up for Lent. I'm giving up extra sugar, she's giving up excessive time online, and limiting it to half an hour ( not including schoolwork time ( for terms and conditions read the small print )). It's as impossible to give up sugar completely as it is to stay off the internet now. Some form of sugar is in most everything we eat, whether it's processed or not, and since my girl was given an iPad by her school, there is literally no way she will be able to remain internet-free from now on. The techno tsunami has washed into our house. In the run up to Lent I was eating more and more sugary nonsense, in a bid to cope with stress, and my lack of time to write. Meanwhile she was always creeping off to her room to message friends, and spend extraordinary amounts of her time on apps entitled things like, 'Tropical Fish Bundle', 'Hollywood U: Rising Stars', 'Kim Kardashian: Hollywood' etc. She has al...

I was absolutely delighted to be asked to write a guest post for a blog I follow, on combining creativity and motherhood. The blog is called Studio Mothers : enjoy! The Sugar Log

This weekend I was put on trial. My daughter, aghast that the biscuits had been finished, demanded to know who had scoffed the lot. It was me. I had made a lovely cup of coffee and had leant against the sink, gloriously inhaling Hob Nobs one after the other, until they were all gone. I'd consumed about six, without really thinking about it, and enjoying every single one. I'd had a momentary pang of guilt, remembering that my daughter and I had purchased said biscuits together the previous day. But it hadn't been enough to prevent me polishing them all off. My daughter thought for a moment, whisked upstairs, and came back down with a white woollen shawl draped across the top of her head, long woolly flaps hanging down each side, and wielding a hair brush gavel. She was my judge. She asked for witnesses. There were none. She demanded evidence. No biscuits in cupboard, empty wrapping in bin. She extorted a confession. I shamefacedly gave her one. She sentenced me to tw...