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The adventure of family train travel
One of the regular long-distance journeys that we’ve done on the train since selling our car is the trip to and from Plymouth in Devon to stay with family. By regular, I mean twice a year, although it would’ve been more without the pandemic. Potted history of our transport to/from Devon Tom grew up near/in…
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Work-life balance: starting a new chapter as a family
It’s another long period of time since I last wrote a blog post. Well, actually, I posted recently with photos of two year’s worth of birthday cakes, but I mean this blog has generally been very neglected since we emerged from pandemic restrictions. I have been posting on social media with smaller snippets of how…
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Birthday cakes – 2021-2022
It’s been a while since I blogged about birthday cakes! In fact we’ve had 8 birthdays since then, so here are all the cakes that the children all asked for… Andrew’s 10th birthday He has always been into science and maths. He’d been learning some complicated chemistry with my parents online over lockdowns, and his…
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A year on: life without owning a car
It’s pretty much a year since I wrote a blog post explaining how we were about to sell our car which had broken down and needed a very expensive repair. We were about to embark on a year’s trial of not owning a car, to see how we fared before making any decisions about future…
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Applying for school places out of normal age group: school 3 changed their mind
In my last blog post about the twins starting school in Reception at compulsory school age, I referred to the decision from school 3, St Francis C of E Primary and Nursery School, who had decided to not support our request for admission out of normal age group. At that point I was in the…
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Applying for school places out of normal age group: school 2 says yes, school 3 says no
The last time I blogged about our journey of applying for school places out of normal age group for our summerborn twins was in March. At that point I had confirmation from our first choice school that they would support us in our request for them to start reception at compulsory school age (5 years). Schools…
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Applying for school places out of normal age group: a farce in several acts
Back in July last year I blogged about the response I got from our first choice of school for the twins – it was a clear and simple “yes” from the head teacher that the school would support our request for the twins to start school in reception at age 5 (compulsory school age, CSA).…
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Lockdown again
I wrote a blog post back in May about our experience of the first UK lockdown that started in March last year. Overall we coped alright – some things were harder but some things were easier for us, so overall we came out of it feeling fairly resilient. It’s safe to say though that we…
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Is now our time to say goodbye to car ownership?
Back in February I wrote a blog post just after we’d bought our electric longtail cargo bike, known to us as Mike. That purchase was a key point in our journey towards the possibility of not owning a car. In that blog post I asked the question whether we could go car free, although it’s probably…
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Birthday cakes – 2020
Well what a weird year of birthdays that was! Andrew had a normal birthday in January, but the twins’ and Joel’s birthdays later in the year were in the first lockdown and with other tight restrictions on what we could do. Andrew’s 9th birthday He wanted a plain vanilla cake, with vanilla buttercream icing and…