Starting with Al's big one. Which I'm probably not meant to mention. So let's just keep it at 'The beginning of June was marked by Al's birthday' and say no more. A number of events followed, many of which will never be in the public domain, because Al fell off her chair whilst making a speech and it wouldn't be appropriate to publicise this, or post career-limiting videos.

But Hatty's birthday - her seventh - fell at the end of the month, so family celebration of the two milestones rolled together into last Sunday. The usual 'lots of food and drink and all round our house' kind of affair that seems to have become the done thing, with us - again - breaking the record for the number of people we crammed into the front room. Twenty-seven. There seems to be no limit to this annual event's aspirations.

And Tuesday was Hatty's actual birthday, so we made her wait until I got home from work to open her presents. In years gone by, shrieks and screams would have peaked over Barbie and Ken. Nowadays, they're held back for expensive - and impressive - chunks of technology. Good: Ken looks a right slime, if you ask me.

Which left the schoolfriend's celebration. Or schoolgirlfriends, to be more accurate, since seven year-old girls unerringly conclude that their 14 favourite classmates are all the girls and the boys are at the bottom of the list, which fails to secure them an invite.

So... fourteen bundles of energetic screamshriek for two hours, bouncing the crap out of themselves on trampolines and giggling their way through tea in falsetto. I think it would have been much funnier to try this the other way round but it's not allowed, apparently.

July will be a normal month in our house.

I've bored the pants off people about my Office and Stationery fetishes in the past. From wittering on about multi-monitor setups to generalised 'I could run a FTSE 250 company from my attic' crap. But I don't see that's a reason to stop.  Not least because I've realised I was missing something...

Pictures help me think. And I've never found a technology approach to pictures that can better grabbing a pen and drawing. Even better, grabbing a dry-wipe marker and drawing on a big canvas. So... I bought a whiteboard. And have been using it all week... should have done it years ago.

But... Abby is jealous. And my thinking turned to the value of a whiteboard in her bedroom, how much easier it would be to explain things to her, how it might help her focus on the ludicrously competitive entrance tests she's going to have to take in September if she's to stand a chance of getting into one of Sutton's ludicrously oversubscribed grammar schools. So I bought one for her too.

But hers is bigger. Much bigger. And now... I'm jealous!

... I find myself thinking that this small island is punching above its weight on the sporting front.

The clamp (to the table) is a little tripod doobrey that I've had for ages. But the clamp (for the iPhone) comes with a little tripod thing in it's own right, which takes a standard tripod screw. No more wobbly video of the kids being cute - £6!

That's what I thought at school, which is why I dropped it - along with miserable geography - at the age of 14.  But my kids think history's brilliant - and the Horrible Histories crew have an awful lot to do with that.

Not just a children's programme either. Those of us of a certain age get treated to musical references which fly straight over the kids' heads. I burst out laughing when I came across this, their particular take on 'miserable history'. A bloody triumph.