• Let’s rename Margate to marGREAT
• Holiday tips for a super-chill holiday:
  • Have fish and chips more than once in 5days. Who cares.
  • Book a holiday house with heated floors.
  • Make use of charity shops for anything you forgot. Two bags of toy cars for £2 made a very happy 4-year-old.
  • Go to somewhere where all the best tourist hotspots are within walking distance of your house. and the house is walkable to the train station. Refuse to drive. Flatly refuse.
  • 2p machines.
  • Play boardgames with the whole family. Teach the kids draughts, learn to play backgammon with them. Let the 4 year old control their own destiny in monopoly. Teach them what the fun houses mean then watch them lose interest before anyone has enough properties to buy houses.
  • Buy ice cream when it’s freezing cold. Who cares.
• The eldest had trouble getting to sleep one evening this week. I posited that it could be because her battery level was high and hadn’t been drained enough in the day. So the next day I attached my garmin to her arm and she jogged 0.5km around the block. The day after , armed with the same reasoning, she jogged 2miles down the canal without prompting. We were all very surprised and supportive of this.
• And this is not me just trying to keep my Strava updated while I have shin splints…
• There are various odd jobs around our house that every now and again i get enough motivation to complete. This weekend I did a good lot of them; replacing a floorboard, capping a floor join, adding a toilet roll holder etc. While I do the jobs the littlest just tears the house apart. Playing with something, leaving it, opening another drawer, playing with what she finds. Leaving a river of toys in her wake. So we tidy up together, me putting tools back, her cramming pawpatrol cars into cupboards, each focused on our own style of tidying. Then i catch her lifting the cardboard temporary lid that covers a hole in our living room floorboards. She ponders, looking down into the abyss-of-no-return. Then quickly chucks a bouncy ball down, replaces the lid and walks off. I wonder how many toys are down there?