General

[[wysiwyg_imageupload:8:]]So what'd you get for Christmas? I got an iPhone 4. And though I'd been hinting heavily to Lisa about getting one, I honestly didn't expect to receive one!

What was really funny was that Lisa gave me a decoy present first - a Bluray player. The box was clearly too big to be an iPhone. I flirted with the idea that it might be...gasp...an iPad, but the parcel was too heavy.

Tonight we go to bed with the smell of sawdust in our lungs.

After almost eight years in our house, we've had some new wardrobes fitted in our bedroom. They're called Sliderobes. I mention that because I'm not sure if that's a common name all over the world.

When we first moved in, it was a new build house and we had a lot of furnishing to do. So we spent a lot of money on a lot of cheap self-assembly furniture. It looked okay at the time, but over the years a lot of it has started to look rickety. 

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.