Kept since 2024 · a small town in the north of England
I’m Anna. This is the notebook that lives in our kitchen drawer, typed up: routines that stuck, meals we’ve made forty times, the long drive to my parents’, and a fair amount that didn’t work. It isn’t advice. It’s a record — kept for our two, and for whoever else finds it useful.
Notes from one ordinary family, kept for the next one.
Not a notebook
Things we print out
A chore chart, a packing list, a recipe card. Only the ones stuck to our own fridge.
We tried a laminated star chart, a shared app, and a rota with everyone’s initials on it. The thing that worked is a piece of paper with four jobs on it, and it took us three years and about £40 of failed systems to get there.
My mum has said “don’t get me anything” every year since about 2011. For a decade I treated that as a politeness to be worked around, and bought her nice versions of things she already owned, and she thanked me properly every time.
It is not a good recipe. It is a repeatable one — four things we always have, one pan, and a texture that survives being reheated on a Tuesday by a man who is not paying attention.
Three of those fixes were wrong and one of them was wrong in a way that took a year to show up. What I should have done on the first evening, written down so I stop doing it.
Sheets we actually use.
There is no point making a beautiful planner nobody fills in. Everything here has been on our fridge or in the glovebox for at least a month, and prints on one side of A4.
Not a business, not a brand, not a stepping stone to a book. Anna works part-time and writes this in the evenings when there is an evening.
No affiliate links, no gifted anything, no roundups of products we haven’t owned for a year. If we name a thing, we bought it.
Taken on a phone, usually badly, usually with something in the background that should have been tidied away first.
Half of what we try doesn’t last a fortnight. Those bits stay in — they’re the useful half.
The monthly letter
What we cooked, what broke, where we drove, and the bits that never made it into a proper entry. Free, and it stays free.
A quiet, personal blog kept like a family notebook. Anna and Tom write down what they are figuring out as they go — routines that stuck, meals that got repeated, trips that went sideways, and the small rituals the kids will remember. Not advice, not a brand. Just a record.