Last night we went on a secondary school open evening. The boy is in year 6 now. Somehow he has changed from a small boy looking belligerently at us to an almost secondary school aged boy who still manages to look belligerently at us. Time passes for us all.

The opening even was interesting. It was full of portents and omens for a start. As we sat down for the heads speech, the music department and choir did a rendition of Shine on You Crazy Diamond from Wish You Were Here, my favourite album. They even did a pretty good job of it too. Auspicious indeed.

Going round all the departments, it was clear that while the fabric of the building didn’t seem fundamentally any newer than the school I left in 1993 (that’s 24 years ago now), the overall approach certainly was. My class at Broxbourne School was so ill behaved, we never progressed past the recorder in 3 years of music lessons and the opportunities afforded us in basic education don’t seem as expansive as they do today for our kids, even in a climate of swingeing cuts and austerity. View Full Post

This school summer holiday is a bit of a landmark one in the ‘Cool household. The littlest is finishing reception and moving into year 1 and the eldest is finishing year 5 and will be starting his last year of primary school. Terrifying.

It’s also the first year that we’ll have faced the summer holidays as two full time working parents. Of course when we booked our summer holidays back last autumn, this wasn’t the case, I was working full time while my wife was on a 22 hour a week part time contract. This was loaded into two very long days, with a couple of hours on Friday morning as a top up as necessary. It meant that between us, a few days of annual leave and some grand parent involvement covered most of last years summer holidays. This year is decidedly different though. View Full Post

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SMA Baby Club asked me to share my imperfectly perfect Fathers Day and I’m only too happy to do so. With three kid (10, 8 and 5), I get plenty of opportunity to “father”, and plenty of experiences of being on the receiving end of children!

I’m always the one up with the birds. It usually either involves me going to work early, or getting up (twice a week) to corral the three kids into the school run. My weekend lie ins are ruined by taking our eldest to extra lessons on a Saturday morning and dragging all three of the little darlings to their swimming lessons on a Sunday.

The sort of breakfast I’d like for Fathers Day

I never get a lie in, so once a year I have this idealised notion that the morning that Father’s Day dawns, I’ll get to have a nice lie in and and wake up naturally as the sunlight finds its way through the chinks in the curtain and plays gently over my face, the motes of dust dancing in the light. As I stretch and wake up from a long restful slumber, my angelic children present me with a freshly made cup of tea and a still warm bacon sandwich (buttered bread, with sauce, two thirds ketchup, one third brown sauce).

As I sit there munching on bacon sarnies, the kids line up respectfully to tell me how great I am and present me with home made presents and cards they’ve crafted with all the love and care that a doting child can manage. View Full Post

It is an unremarked upon truth of modern life that one of the most important tools in parenting children is actually a  smartphone. And I don’t just mean for those parenting fails of reading twitter when you’re supposed to be watching the class play or Facebooking during sports day, but the important stuff around organising after school activities, play dates, catching that cute photo moment or emailing the school to say a night of projectile vomiting means the eldest won’t be in today.

Blackberry sent me a Blackberry Keyone, their new Android smartphone with all the goodness of Blackberry, including a physical keyboard, to roadtest and I thought it would be an ideal experiment to see if it could replace my existing phone and better it in everything that I use it for. First impressions were good; the leather back was classy, the keyboard harked back to the days when I could type properly on my phone without the predictive text getting overly confused. It’s not the thinnest phone around, instead it bucks the obsession with thin in favour of a focus on usability and longevity which is unusual but nice to see.

With an Android Wear 2.0 smart watch, the Huawei W1, and a Xiaomi smartband bluetoothed to my phone, along with a pair of BT Creative wireless headphones, I’ve got plenty going on when it comes to notifications and battery drain, so seeing how the Blackberry Keyone holds up to it’s claim of all day+ battery life will be interesting. View Full Post

Last week I managed to have one conversation than spanned two Twitter DM accounts, text message, AND Facebook messenger. It was confusing and exhausting and not my fault. Now I’m sitting at my desk at work, fielding passive aggressive emails from my 8 year old about her older brother who tricked her in to turning the PS4 off and then jumped on it himself when she left the room. I’m messaging him through the PSN (Playstation Network) chat facility, using my PS4 account via a web browser and telling him to turn it off. I can tell he hasn’t as it is still showing him as online and the tricksy little sod hasn’t worked out how to appear offline yet. I imagine at his end he keeps on getting irritating pop ups that are slightly spoiling his game.

Fingers crossed. View Full Post

The bank holiday weekend saw us busier than I can remember us being over a three day period. It certainly wasn’t a holiday as we worked our way through a fairly major reorganisation of our garage conversion.

When we had the garage converted about 7(?) years ago, we had it made in to three rooms- a play room which lead to a utility room, on to the old extension on the back of the garage which was our library. This didn’t really work as the library, right at the end of the house, became a dumping ground for stuff that didn’t have a home, and the playroom, effectively a corridor, wasn’t the most conducive place for kids to play.

So with a bit of jigging around, we now have an end room that’s better as a play/games room, and our library in the “corridor”. Not that it being a corridor is an issue, because I happen to think it looks pretty good:

It’s amazing what five and a half IKEA Billy bookcases can do for a room. To be honest they were a bit of an indulgence as we had some in the old room but they were in a couple of instances about 14 years old and were getting a bit tatty. One or two of the shelves were excessively bowed from having triple stacked books on them, so I felt it was time to replace them. Fair thee well trusted Billys! It was interesting to see how the design has changed over the years. That is actually a lie, it’s not that interesting.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the kids wrecking everything- I took plenty of pictures before they trashed it all…

Despite my best efforts we didn’t manage to go swimming today. We did everything right, got up, dressed, put the swimming kit in the bag and go in the car and drove to the local school where the kids have their Sunday lessons.

Unfortunately our best intentions were just that; intentions. It turns out that the lessons don’t start until next week, something I hadn’t checked because I knew that they started this week and why did I need to check?

This is symptomatic of me really. I wish I was more organised and better clued in. I know exactly where last term bill is, it’s in my sock drawer on the right hand side, just next to my bow-tie (clip on, my tie up one got borrowed by my brother about ten years ago and I’ve not seen it since).

On it’s own this wouldn’t have been too bad but coupled with the fact we spent ages looking for number one son’s mobile phone, only to find it in my rucksack, where he put it for safe keeping when we went to Wrest Park last weekend.

I give up.

Sometimes you just have to put your hands up and say yes, I am bloody hopeless. There’s nothing else for it unfortunately.