AoifeOCarroll's Blog

Christmas is all about families, so if your family is not the perfect parental-unit-plus-kids kind, you may be wishing you could go to bed and wake up mid-January (in the Bahamas). Whether you are afraid that your former partner will let the kids down or the kids will be miserable without the two of you together, trust me, there are ways to make the event enjoyable for everyone: 1. Can’t agree...

This is not one of those laments for the days when we were lucky to get an orange in the toe of our solitary sock on Christmas morning. I’m all for celebrating Christmas in a spirit of abundance and magic, and I think children should be at the heart of it. I love the build-up to the end of December—the decorations appearing in shop windows, the sparkle in the air, the sentimental adverts. But...

I grew up in the 1980s, when we walked home from school unaccompanied, played outdoors until dark, and bought sweets shaped like cigarettes with the coins elderly neighbours pushed into our eager hands. We played in building sites and fields pocked with cow pats, cycling adults’ bikes with no brakes and riding go-karts our fathers cobbled together from parts lying around. We climbed trees, went...

I turned 44 last week, an event that the middle child tells me would have elevated me to the status of goddess (or at least shaman) in some prehistoric tribes. Nowadays, we’re not so impressed by such milestones, and, if the ads on TV are any guideline, we should be jumping into oceans, laughing carelessly, and flirting wantonly at twice my age. That said, there are some eye-openers about...

Just four years ago, software ninjas James Whelton and Bill Liao got together in Cork and came up with a simple but brilliant concept called CoderDojo . Since then, the movement has gone viral with the establishment of more than 740 Dojos across the world and our Saturdays have been transformed. CoderDojo is an entirely voluntary movement, involving 30,000 regular participants, one of whom is my...

One of the big things about going back to school after the summer holidays is rediscovering all the characters you had forgotten for the previous couple of months. Like head lice. I was reminded of those perennial fixtures of the childhood scalp during a discussion of the subject on Marian Finucane’s radio show, which revealed many obscure facts about head lice that I had been quite happy not...

I’ve been crying quite a lot lately. Given the weather we’ve been having, that’s probably quite understandable, but I don’t think it’s just because it’s cold enough to bring hot-water bottles to bed. And please don’t mention the menopause or the perimenopause, or anything with the word ‘pause’ in the title: I’m way, way too young for that… No, the primary reason for my recent...

Hold your thumb and forefinger so that they are almost touching: that’s how close I came to grabbing my coat, wellies, and the children’s trust fund (i.e. the jar of loose change and hair bobbles on the kitchen windowsill) and walking out the front door. What I would do after my exit I had not planned, but based on my state of my mind at the time, it might very well have involved wearing a...

Ah, the summer… From the grim reaches of November, when the days last just long enough to show you how insufferably bleak it is out there before plunging into howling darkness, July waves at you from a sunny distance. You fantasise about the smell of cut grass and warm skin, days spent outside with rosy-cheeked children laughing and splashing into the sun-kissed evenings. You count down the days...

At the end of the summer, the Leaving Certer turns 18; that magical age when the adult world lets you in. Once September 1st arrives, it will be legal for him to vote, marry, play exceptionally violent games, and drink alcohol. It's a scary prospect. I am not naïve enough to believe he has not been experimenting with alcohol already (indeed, I would be very surprised if he hadn't), but...