A journal of ordinary days
The Family Blog
One parent writing down motherhood, homeschooling and the small weekday hours we keep forgetting to keep.
214 posts · since 2019
How this started
A notebook that got out of hand
I began writing these entries in a lined notebook the winter our eldest was ten months old, because the days were long and I could already feel them going. The notebook filled. Then another. Somewhere around the fourth I moved it here, mostly so my sister could read it from two hundred miles away.
There are two children now, and a house we bought in nine days that is further out of town than either of us meant. We homeschool at the kitchen table, badly on Tuesdays, well enough the rest of the week. Most mornings I write for twenty minutes before anyone else is up. That is the whole method.
What you will find here
Weekday hours, mostly. What actually gets eaten. The half hour between homework and supper that I have stopped trying to organise. Slow trips with one bag and low expectations. Six years of lessons at a table that is also where we peel potatoes.
What you will not find is advice. I am not qualified to give any and I have changed my mind about most of it twice. There is nothing to buy, no course, no printable planner. If something here is useful to you, that is a happy accident rather than the point.
Write it down while it is still warm. You will not remember the morning, only that there was one.
Names have been kept, faces have not. The children are old enough now to have opinions about being written about, so anything that is properly theirs stays in the paper notebook where it started.
Why it exists
Written to remember, not to impress
The children will not remember these years the way we do, and neither will we, which is rather the point. The blog is the family record kept in public: no advice, nothing for sale, and the failures left in.
Around the table
The people in these pages
One of us writes, the rest of us mostly get written about.
Elin Marsh
Writes the blog
Started in a lined notebook the winter the eldest was ten months old, and never quite stopped.
Sophie Hale
First reader
The sister two hundred miles away the blog was moved online for. Still reads every entry first.
Tom Marsh
Keeps the house standing
Stirs the porridge, fixes the gutters, and only reads the blog when he suspects he is in it.
June Marsh
Sends the recipes
Grandmother and chief supplier of recipe cards by post. Roughly half the food entries are hers.
How the days go
Six years at the same table
There is no editorial calendar and no niche, only the same twenty minutes each morning before the house wakes. Some weeks that makes three entries, some weeks none, and after six years the gaps tell their own story.
The Sunday letter
One short email at the end of each week. What got written, what got eaten, and a photograph that did not make it onto the blog.
Join the Sunday letter
Read the archive
Six years of ordinary days, sorted by season. Start anywhere; the entries are short and nothing needs to be read in order.
Start reading →
Say hello
Notes from readers get answered slowly but gladly, usually once the children are asleep. Tell me about your week.