My eleven year old 'C' LOVES to cook and experiment in the kitchen and I'm trying to encourage this as much as possible as feeding the family should be a family affair! Food is important in our household and the more involved people are in the cooking process, the more they love to eat it. One advantage of screen-time is when C finds simple cooking videos - apparently no one follows recipes any more - and states he's making dinner. Bring it!

We're all running on this never ending treadmill juggling so many balls but this is life and it's not going to stop (besides the odd pandemic of course!). Life will continue to deliver those super high highs and those mind blowing lows. It's what being human means. How do you cope? You have to stop. What do you do when you stop? Look for small ways to give yourself an edge without reinventing the wheel. Little actions over time equal very big changes.

So my partner has never been a book reader! Look he's probably read 8-10 books in the 25 years we've been together, but I don't consider that a reader! I have 4-8 books on the go at any one time (that's another story) so I consider myself a reader (see how I got my whole family to read just a little bit more here). So as we co-parent our tween and teen, I get rather frustrated when I find an amazing Earth-shattering book that is life-changing from a parenting perspective and I can't get him to read it. But, no more banging my head against a wall. I've crashed through it and found a solution!!