1066 All Stars

The Monkeys Went In Two By Two...

It is a strange mixture of feelings sending your children off to school.

On one hand, they are embarking on a wonderful new adventure. They will make friends, learn about the world, discover themselves and their interests. It is exciting and in many ways the best time of their lives.

On the other, they are my little babies and they are growing up far too fast.

Unlike with nurs...

Who are you calling a dummy?

One of the difficulties of parenting is that everyone has an opinion and more people than you would like are happy to share it with you.

Advice can be helpful of course, but when it strays from ‘this is what I did, you might find it useful’ to ‘unless you do this you are wrong’ it can not only leave you feeling confused but also make you feel inadequate.

Some parents will tell...

What About Me?

One of the most difficult things about becoming a parent is that you cease to be the most important person in your life.

My youth was hardly misspent but I did like to indulge in videogames, watch films, watch football and maybe even sneak in a beer or two occasionally.

With my twins approaching 4, I find that these activities have gradually fallen by the wayside. My PS3 sits under the TV gathering dust; the Xbox ...

Oh The Guilt

One of the most difficult aspects of mental illness, especially the flavour of depression and anxiety that my mind appears to favour, is the loss of perspective and difficulty in making decisions.

This manifests itself daily in all sorts of scenarios; from work, to shopping, videogames to money matters. And of course, parenting.

Every decision taken is agonising, and is then agonised over. This helps to feed the anxiety...

Anger Management

Becoming a parent is a magical time. For us, it started with the stress of not knowing if we could have children, to the discomfort of IVF to the joy of the positive test followed by waiting and waiting (and waiting) for 9 months to pass, only for our little darlings to arrive early.

And those first few weeks too are like living in a dream world. After all the stress and worry of bringing them into the world, after the mad dash pa...

Bringing up a child is hard. Bringing up twins is even harder.

But what about bringing up twins plus a third child whilst battling mental illness? That is tougher still.

There are lots of reference materials out there for parents, including many books on bringing up multiples. But many of these are, understandably, geared more towards mums. But us dad's are an important part of our children's lives too and many of us don't have a clue what we are doing.