It’s a hobby, not a business.

Who we are

I’m Anna. I spent eleven years as a copy editor on magazines, which is the whole explanation for why the sentences here are tidier than the house is. I left the job when our second was born, and now I do about two days a week of freelance editing from the kitchen table, mostly while somebody is asking me for a snack.

Tom is a carpenter. He writes the Things We Keep posts, which are about fixing and making, and which he writes with two fingers and considerable reluctance. There are fewer of them for that reason.

We have two children, six and three, and a fourteen-year-old dog called Bramble who is sick on roundabouts. We live in a small town rather than a city, which shapes most of what’s here: there are seasons in it, and a garden, and a lot of driving to see grandparents.

How it started

It was a private file. I kept a running document of things that worked — the order we do bedtime in, the soup, which service station has the good toilets — because I had discovered that I could solve the same problem three times in a year and not recognise it the third time.

It went public in 2024 because friends kept asking me to send them the recipes, and sending the same email eleven times is its own kind of admin. That’s the entire origin story. There was no plan and there still isn’t one.

What’s in it, and what isn’t

Entries are short and dated, the way a diary is. They are written in the first person because one person wrote them, and they say when something didn’t work, because most of what we try doesn’t. A routine that lasted nine days and collapsed is more useful to read about than one that’s been photographed nicely.

What you won’t find here:

• Advice. I don’t know your children, your house, or your week. This is a record of what one family did.
• Stock photography. Every picture is ours, taken on a phone, and you can usually see something in the background that should have been put away.
• Listicles, rankings, or “15 hacks”. If a thing takes 600 words, it gets 600 words.
• The children’s full names, their school, or anything either of them would mind reading at fifteen. That last one is the test I apply, and it has stopped several posts.

How this is paid for

Nothing here is sponsored and there are no affiliate links. When we name a shop, a brand or a tool, it is because we own the thing and use it. Nobody has paid us, sent us anything free, or seen a post before it went up.

The site is paid for by an optional £3-a-month newsletter and a printed yearbook we make once a year. Both are voluntary; everything on the site stays free and unlocked.

The yearbook is a printed collection of the year’s best entries, made once a year mostly because I wanted one for our own shelf. Buying it is optional and nothing on the site is behind it. If any of this ever changes — if someone offers us money and we take it — it will be written at the top of this page with a date on it, not quietly edited in.

Comments

Comments are open and every one is read and approved by hand, by me, usually late and usually on a phone. I remove anything unkind about the children, anything selling something, and anything that starts “great post! check out my”. Disagreement is fine — I’m wrong regularly and the corrections have improved several entries.

The fastest route is email: anna@thefamilynotes.com. I answer most of them, eventually.

Where we get things from

Almost everything here is our own experience and there is nothing to cite for it. Where an entry touches something with a proper answer — a health question, an allergy, a medicine, screens — it carries a “where we checked” block at the foot linking to the NHS, GOV.UK or the relevant charity, and the entry defers to them rather than to us. Those links are checked when they go in. If you find a dead one, tell me.

Corrections

When an entry is wrong, it gets fixed and the fix is noted in the entry with a date. Nothing gets silently rewritten. Old habit from the magazine.