The seasons change gradually in Ireland. Unless you note the date, you may not even notice that one season has passed into the next. Not so in Montreal. The weather is more extreme, and the seasons quite distinct from each other. According to the calendar autumn (or Fall) arrived here the other week. Sure enough, […]
Finding your tribe. It’s something you hear mentioned often, particularly when it comes to motherhood. Because ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, as the old saying goes. We all have our tribes, whether familial or otherwise. We get comfortable amongst them. The task of finding a new one is daunting, to say the […]
We return home to our apartment each day. And it is our home already, even if it’s only been for six weeks. Home is wherever our little family lives, as we tell our sons. It’s a fluid concept – not a concrete place. When we meet people we explain that we’re not on holidays here. […]
It’s somewhere between 8 and 9pm. For the second time in half an hour I unlatch my baby. His head lolls back, limbs flopping towards the ground. I carefully lower him to the bed. One. Two. Three… He grunts, kicks his legs out, rolls over and is crawling before his eyes are open. He’s like […]
There’s been an overall sense of frustration lately. So little gets done with two children to look after. Inevitably one (or both) of them will be out of sorts any time you try and do anything with them alongside. Making a phone call is an exercise in futility. I may just leave my phone to […]
There’s so much controversy over breastfeeding that a lot of attention in the media is focused on debating whether it’s breastfeeders or formula-feeders that are put under more pressure. The simplest answer is that both are under different kinds of pressure that they don’t want. The underlying issue we should be debating is enabling women […]
I know. It’s been a while. What the heck have we been doing? In short; house-hunting and parenting an emotionally-charged boy and a rambunctious baby in a child-unfriendly apartment. Then we kicked off a terrible run of luck and moved to a half-ready apartment with a meagre set of furniture. This whilst also dealing with […]
Almost six weeks have passed since we arrived in Canada as freshly minted immigrants. “What’s it like?”, people have asked – wondering about the reality of starting a new life in another country. I honestly don’t really know. We’re in transition. Neither here nor there. We’re unknotting Irish ties that have always bound us more […]
There we were, piled into a taxi van with two kids, four suitcases and several smaller items of luggage. Just after the taxi pulled away from the Arrivals hall I belatedly realised that we were missing something. The stroller we’d checked at the gate hadn’t appeared when we exited the plane. We assumed it had […]
There was little sleep the night before. Children and babies have an innate ability to know when there’s a tough day ahead and will do their utmost to ensure that you face it bleary-eyed with a sluggish mind. We rose early, but much later than planned. And we were off… running in circles trying to do […]
