geez max, Many of us have been reading your books and following your blog for longer than Fin has been alive!

NationStates is a few years older than her... has it been that long?

I was stunned with this picture. Has it been 5 years already? As a grandmother of 5 young humans I should be prepared for this sort of thing. I never am. Bless her heart - she looks so intent.

So it begins. From now on your lives will be ruled by school holidays, homework, sports carnivals, sleep overs, birthday parties, Parent Teacher nights and report cards. You are now, and for years to come will be, an unpaid cab driver for your kids.

Then they become teenagers and you wonder why your passengers have suddenly become so surly.

Gosh, I guess time flies even if you're not having fun (although Fin is only fun, right?)

She's getting so big!

Sheesh, Max, we're old.

Finally, you have reached level 15:

www.maxbarry.com/2007/02/22/news.html

Has it gone as you expected it would?

Don't ask me, I'm still wondering how the hell mine can be turning ten this summer!

Goodness, I remember posting on your post from August 2005 and it's hard to believe that time has flown by so fast already.

As pointed out, NationStates is a few years older and I still remember playing that on a regular basis back in the day.

Crazy, and congratulations :-)

I know how you feel Max. We are 8 weeks in to our first school term and every morning my little human stands at his classroom door calling out "see you in a bit Mum" over and over again until I have disappeared behind the bushy screen of wattle trees. I wonder how I will cope when my "big boy" realises it's just not "cool" anymore. Ouch, I can already feel my heart breaking :(

Since you said "we" and "do," I thought by "this" you meant... yeah...

Watch out, Preps are being "accessed" by Access Ministries during classes in Victorian schools. Sure you can opt out...if you know it's going on. My 5 year old came home saying a new teacher came to school and told them god made everything. No warning from the school that this was going to happen. Make your you know what your kids are being taught.

Yep, fine teachers some schools have. I remember my eighth grade teacher insisting that an apostrophe s after an inanimate object is bad grammar because an inanimate object can't own anything. She literally said, "A rock can't go to a store and buy anything, so it can't own anything." I said what about things that inalienably belong to the rock? Such as its weight, color, things like that? What about other things? Microsoft's stock prices? Can I give my inanimate object something? A baseball's holder? Yeah, from that point on she took off points on my writing papers whenever I wrote inanimate object + 's.