General

Poem by Anthony Browne!

Written by bayard on Wednesday 20 January 2010

The Fightfort

Written by Gerard on Thursday 26 November 2009

We went out for Lisa's birthday on Saturday night and had a nice, boisterous, drunken time. Lisa's mum stayed in our house with the kids while we stayed overnight in her house. A brilliant arrangement and we didn't have to be home too early.

The end of the night is actually the most memorable. We initially wanted to get kebabs from a South Belfast kebaberie, but our taxi arrived and offered to take us to a chippie in Andersonstown. We all hopped into the cab and Wooftie and I went in to order.

How my Primary School teacher stopped me from smoking

Written by Gerard on Tuesday 17 November 2009

Seamus was a substitute teacher who taught our class in the last year of primary school. We kind of called him Seamus behind his back because he lived just down the road from us, and that's what the parents called him.

I remember we'd been doing some lessons about the dangers of smoking. It was the usual stuff - rancid, rotting lungs that had been damaged by years of smoke filling them. Do you remember those specimens? The little microscopic bits of lung that were blackened and corroded? Yuck.

But one morning Seamus took the anti-smoking campaign to an entirely new level - he strutted into the classroom and produced a packet of cigarettes. Making quite a display of the next part, he took a cigarette out of the pack and lit it up. The constant background noise of the classroom died away as everybody realised the teacher was smoking in the class!

Me? A parenting hero? Little moi?

Written by Gerard on Monday 9 February 2009

I got a nice email this afternoon from Amy over at Earnest Parenting to tell me I made her radar of parenting heroes with my last blog post about being the eldest child.

As I said to Amy when I responded to her, it's an ill-deserved award, considering how sporadically I post here, but I'm thankful anyway. It's a great idea what she's doing, so go and check out her blog and the other bloggers on her Heroes list.

Family Of Five becoming a much larger family!

Written by Familytastic Staff on Tuesday 9 September 2008

If you've been a long-time Family Of Five subscriber, you'll have noticed some changes in the RSS feed and on the site recently.

First - we've changed the name (and the domain) to familytastic.com. The reason for this is that we wanted to reach out to other parents and bloggers. We wanted to create a community of mums and dads and a place where we could share experiences and advice and the ups and downs of parenthood and family life.

A little design update...

Written by Gerard on Wednesday 11 June 2008

I spent a little bit of time tidying up the design redesigning this blog last night. The old design had never completely satisfied me, and I wanted to move toward something a bit prettier. Hopefully this hits the spot.

The design you see is the culmination of me avidly reading a site called PSDTuts, which gives some of the most detailed and inspiring Photoshop tutorials I've ever read. Feeling confident, I went over to SXC and downloaded a couple of stock images and began to play around with them.

I decided to reuse the logo image of the family of stick figures, but I converted them from black to white and gave them a funky rainbow-coloured outline, which I quite like. I then put them in the grassy meadow you see above and added a tree in the background and a tranquil turqouise sky, complete with fluffy clouds.

Widgets

The biggest challenge I came across while building this design was widgetizing the sidebars. The previous design must have been ancient! Anyway, I came across this helpful tutorial that sped up the process of making the sidebar widget compatible.

I probably have a little bit of work still to do to make the CSS a little tidier and maybe need to pay attention to lists and blockquotes - other XHTML elements that I'm leaving to the rendering graces of the individual browser. I may actually release this as my first ever WordPress theme as a result.

Finally, I decided to save a copy of the old blog design for posterity. Here it is.

Why Count In English When Spanish Is Easier!

Written by Lisa on Wednesday 13 September 2006

Rachel started primary School this week. The sight of her in her 'big girls' uniform, walking into the classroom for the first time almost reduced me to tears. Worse was Jakes reaction to the situation, he wouldn't talk to me the whole way home and spent the  rest of the morning asking "Can we go get Rachel now?"

Typical of Rachel, she settled brilliantly and her only problem with the whole primary school thing is that her teacher asked her not to count in spanish.

Hitting, Smacking and Physical Violence...How Do I Discourage It In My Children?

Written by Lisa on Wednesday 19 July 2006

Over the last few weeks I have felt as though I am banging my head off a brick wall. Jake has always been more free with his hands than Rachel, but over the last six months or so, I have noticed that he rarely hits, kicks or pushes anymore.

When Gender Becomes An Issue

Written by Lisa on Sunday 9 July 2006

Up until recently there was very little differentiation in our home between the toys Rachel played with, and the toys that Jake chose.

If Rachel wanted to play with Barbies or My Little Ponies, then Jake was happy to join in. But in the last few weeks our wee boy has started to emerge. It all started with a Batman figure that my sister bought for him last month, and from then we have seen his interest in boys toys grow and grow.

Dads Prefer The Simple Things On Fathers Day

Written by Lisa on Wednesday 21 June 2006

I just came across a great post on the Digito Society blog, that references a study carried out to determine what dads like to receive on fathers day.

One third of fathers said that their number one gift preference would be a greeting card, and 14% would like a home cooked meal.

Thank God for that! Gerard has nothing to complain about then. He received not one but two cards. One store bought, one the children made themselves. His breakfast in bed was home cooked, it may have only been fruit and porridge, but it still counts.

In lieu of a huge gift, I would like instead to publicly (and belatedly)thank my husband for being the best dad I know. I appreciate you so much, our kids are going to grow up to be better people because you are so active in their life. One day they will realise how lucky they are!