Phyl's Blog

Another little souvenir I'd have liked to have brought back from Amsterdam was a pair of boots. These caught my eye in a shop window and...

Playmobil and Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum have got together and come up with an adorable way of making art accessible to the tinier among...

Where do we stand today, mum? How close are we to knowing whether we'll need to leave? That's what I was asked this morning o...

Léon comes across as a laid-back, happy boy. He can run a little bit on nervous energy, but in general things don't seem to get him down...

Thomas has decided to challenge the kids with this month's chores chart. Apparently it's the typeface his German grandparents were t...

I meant to blog a link to this when she came back at the beginning of July, but we left for Italy then and I never got round to it... Im...

It's only Wednesday today. It feels like three weeks on Friday... It started at the beginning of last week. Charlotte casually asked m...

I think this is my favourite photo from this year's holiday. Amaia had been given a rather old photo so she could take photos and s...

It's been a long time since any of our kids crawled into our bed during the night, probably 5 years or more. Friday night, something ups...

As I mentioned in the passing last week when I was discussing Lots's exam result, there has been a change in our financial circumstance...

Every family has its own made-up words. For instance, we Buchanans all call a digger a jalt . This came from an encounter I had at three wi...

I went (once again) to Italy on holiday. Thomas's family lives there so it is our most common destination. As always, straight off the p...

I swear you hear the oddest things at times. There I was yesterday sitting on a bench in Princes st. A middle-aged woman with a strong north...

My table is getting a bit old and done, but buying a new one is a bit beyond my means. On holiday in Italy, several cafés we went into had v...

I'm just catching up on some things I meant to post in the summer... This year we went over to visit Thomas's parents in Tuscany. ...

From '79 to '85 I went to Eastwood High School. Times were a tad less exotic than today and our annual school trip at the end o...

When Charlotte scored her six A grade Highers (English, Maths, Chemistry, History, Spanish and French), I asked her how she wanted to celebr...

We went 'back to school' yesterday so I dragged the kids out for the obligatory official photoshoot. I had simply intended to write...

When I was a child in the early 70s, growing up in the rather posh Glaswegian suburb of Newton Mearns, we called any carbonated soft drink l...

Anna and Amaia were lying in bed lasting night singing along to Lady Gaga's Paprazzi  together. Suddenly Amaia stopped and asked ...