Practising driving with a learner

Something that I hate to encounter in the car is a right hand turn at a crossroads without a filter light.  If there is one on my route I'll do my best to take a detour to avoid it. The reason? I encountered one for the first time when I went out practising with my Mum as a learner. I didn't realise that I had to wait for a gap in the oncoming traffic - I just headed straight over. Luckily my mistake was anticipated by the approaching car, and no disaster occurred!

Similarly I always get anxious waiting to come out of a T-junction on a slope. As a learner on a very quiet housing estate I once stalled the car before I could pull out, and the car waiting behind beeped at me. I'm positive that the (male, obviously) driver didn't give it a second thought after he had sped off, but it has never left me!

So whenever I see learner drivers out and about I am always very patient. I don't mind crawling along behind them, I always give them plenty of space, and I'm always poised to take evasive action if necessary. 

My son started driving lessons a couple of months ago, and this week I decided that I was finally ready to take him out in our own car for a practice. I remember how enormously helpful it was when I was approaching my test and my Mum took me out every evening to the next town so that I could practice on the test routes.

I won't lie, it has been quite terrifying.  We have a lot of roundabouts near us, and I hate that moment of waiting for him to make his decision and pull out successfully! But overall he's doing really well, and he's had no problems picking up the manual driving of the car. He changes gears smoothly, he's confident in traffic, his road position is perfect, and now that we've been out a few times I'm feeling much less scared. But I think we both feel a sense of relief when we return home unscathed!

He's not going to be ready for his test for a good few months yet, but I'm really pleased with how well he's getting on so far. I just need to make sure I keep my nerve and take him out to practice whenever we can!

Halloween activities for older children and teenagers

This is a collaborative post

I've always enjoyed having fun at Halloween with my children, but now that they are older we've sadly moved beyond Halloween toilet roll tube crafts and dressing up in sweet costumes for trick or treating. It doesn't mean that they are too old for the fun though, there are still plenty of crafts and activities that are more suited to older children. Here are some of my favourites!

Carving pumpkins

This is the classic Halloween activity, and is definitely one of our favourite Halloween traditions. I'm not the best at carving pumpkins myself, and I tend to stick with a simple grinning face. But there are loads of pumpkin carving templates available, and if you can trust your teenager with a sharp knife then they may enjoy attempting something a bit more complicated.

Photo credit Andy Holmes via Unsplash

Doing some Halloween themed baking 

My favourite Halloween bake was these Halloween iced gingerbread biscuits. They are so simple to make, and with some clever icing you can make all sorts of different designs. Even if you don't have any specific Halloween cookie cutters you can still improvise with what you have - I used gingerbread men cutters for mummies and Easter egg cutters for skulls! You can also make really simple Halloween cupcakes with some edible eye decorations and a selection of icing in vibrant colours. 

Making Halloween decorations

The children might have grown out of toddler Halloween crafts, but you can still get them involved in decorating the house for Halloween. Just bear in mind that as they get older their imagination might turn towards more realistic and gruesome ideas! You could think about a theme for the whole house, including window displays, lighting and garden decorations. I also love the idea of repurposing some of their toys into Halloween decorations, like old dolls and stuffed animals. Then on the night itself they can dress up to help hand out sweets to the younger visitors.

Photo credit Jen Theodore via Unsplash

Painting ceramic decorations

My children have always enjoyed pottery painting, and there are some lovely kits available, either classic Halloween designs or maybe something a bit more grown up like a decorative pumpkin or sugar skull. I find that the kits don't always contain the best paints, so we usually use our own acrylic paints and take the time to mix the correct colours and let the layers dry in between coats for a nicer finish. 

Taking photos at a pumpkin patch

They might be a bit old now to pose prettily next to an aesthetic pumpkin display, but if your teenager enjoys taking photographs then they might still enjoy a visit to the local pumpkin patch. It's a fun family day out and they can take some photos to share with friends on social media.

Photo credit Marius Ciocirlan via Unsplash

Having a scary Halloween adventure

If your teenager doesn't scare too easily then they might enjoy something a bit more adventurous like a Halloween themed escape room or horror maze. In the UK these are becoming much more common, and although they are a little too terrifying for me I can imagine that plenty of teens would love them, especially if they can visit with their friends rather than their boring parents!

Have fun celebrating Halloween with your older children!

Being a stay at home mum to older children

From time to time I meet new people, usually connected to my husband's work, and of course they always ask me what I "do". When the children were very small it was easy to say that I stayed at home to look after them, but now that they are older and firmly established at secondary school I'm starting to feel a bit more self-conscious about it.

I do some work here and there but not enough to make much of a contribution to the household finances, and so it's my husband's job that supports us. He works very hard and he often travels for work so I'm the one that looks after the children and the home. It suits us both well, but I can't help feeling that it's a bit indulgent to be able to be at home all day when there are plenty of parents both managing to work full time even with much younger children. 

But I do seem to keep busy. My husband often does the morning school run and I will usually exercise then, but if he's away it can be mid-morning before I've finished a run or swim and had a shower. I usually spend most of the morning doing housework, which is all down to me, along with general life admin - there always seem to be e-mails from the school to read and take in, trips to be paid for, tradesmen to contact and so on.

Then after making lunch for us both I might sit down to write some blog posts before going out to do the school run, and this is also my chance for some hobby time because after school it's full on with making dinner, packed lunches and helping with homework. Putting the children to bed takes longer now than it did when they were little because it's my time to catch up with them both for a chat, and once that's done I'm usually ready to head to bed myself with a book!

Photo credit Annie Spratt via Unsplash

I'm the default parent, the one that is there for an ill child, the ones that makes the dinner for everyone and tidies up, the one that knows what is going on with school and the one that checks everything is sorted out. I know that I don't need to justify our set-up, and I also know that I'm very lucky to be in this position. I wish that I found it easier to acknowledge it to other people!

I'm glad I didn't have a smartphone as a teenager

As my children get older and become more and more attached to their phones it makes me so glad that I didn't have one when I was a teenager! I do talk to the children (a lot!) about sensible smartphone use, switching it off to concentrate on a longer task, no phones before bed and so on, and to be fair they are both very good about it. But it feels as though so much of their life is spent online these days, from homework to socialising to entertainment.

If I had owned a smartphone back then I would never have been able to sit down to my homework with a phone pinging away. Even if it was on silent or in the other room I would be thinking about it and worrying that I was missing out.

While constant access to a search engine with all the answers is brilliant, it makes the children more lazy. I was helping Mia with some science homework, which was questions based on a chapter in the text book. She was doing the homework by googling rather than reading back through the pages, and although she always found the correct answer I can't help but feel that the information isn't retained in the same way.  

The phone makes it so easy to procrastinate because a quick scroll is much easier on the brain than really thinking about something. I would have found it so easy to just grab my phone if something in my homework wasn't making sense, rather than working through it. I definitely would have found it difficult to get to things like music practice when I had easier entertainment on offer.

There's also the social aspect of the phone, and seeing what everyone else is up to at every moment. It must be so easy to feel left out if you are seeing pictures of your friends all out together and you've not been invited. Fortunately my children don't use social media yet, but they do use WhatsApp which has status updates similar to Instagram, and it has caused us issues with "games" like tagging your favourite friends.

Photo credit Bruce Mars via Unsplash

Out and about, I'm always dodging teenagers that are walking along with a phone in front of their face. The other morning I nearly hit a boy in the car, he walked right out in front of me while looking at his phone. Luckily I was driving slowly and was easily able to stop. What will they be like when they start driving if they can't put their phones down for any length of time?

I know that I'm sounding like a judgy old lady, but I actually find it really scary to think about what addictive apps like TikTok are doing to children's brains and attention spans (and of course my own too, I struggle with my own scrolling issues!) Maybe I need to lighten up a bit and just accept that this is how the world is now!