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Re-entry 2022: back to not-school

Going away for six weeks - the entire summer - cuts the year into before and after. A lot like summer holidays do for schoolkids. After all that time (plus the week in Germany) I was positively craving our routine again - weeks that looked similar to one another, regular activities, home life. 

One of the first things we did, this year, is to have the kids official 'not-school' portraits done! We love how they turned out - each child got to choose an item to represent them on the photo. N(8) chose a book she had written and illustrated, whereas D(6) picked a Lego invention he had come up with, a trimaran:




It actually took us a number of weeks to shape our routine this side of summer. Partly to blame was that I lost my main client, whom I was working for all day on Thursdays; because of that work, Thursday was usually the kids' day with the grandparents. For a few weeks, I had no replacement work on the horizon, and we played with various schedules for the week, but eventually I got a call to work every Wednesday and Thursday at the local college: on-site, rather than online. This is brilliant news as it provides much needed money at this time of rising costs and economic turmoil, but it does require quite a bit of organising! 

Thankfully, my in-laws are ever ready to jump in to help. They really are an amazing support to have - I count myself so blessed. So as I have to leave the house to start work at 9am, they come up here to stay with the kids at the house until it's time for gymnastics - giving them lunch I make sure to have ready - and then taking them there and to their house afterwards. Then they stay there overnight and through Thursday, and I pick them up right after work so N can make it to football at 6pm. She's talented and loving it! Unfortunately they don't seem to have a space for D at the moment but hopefully he'll get into that eventually too.

We've also been talking about taking up Karate together, there's a local class where adults and kids train together and we're trying it for the first time on Tuesday... and that's alongside our regular activities which we've picked up again after the summer, lego club and the home ed co-operative we all enjoy so much.


The Big News: Welcome home, Cody!

We were all devastated when Fred so suddenly died while we were away. We honoured his memory by giving another hound in need a home... and that is Cody from Ireland. He's 15 months old and was found a stray, then put in kennels: so ours was the first house he'd ever been in. Predicably, this meant toilet training was of the essence; but he's also had to learn that not everything is OK for chewing. He's an incredibly smart dog, and less than two weeks after his arrival he had the toilet training down. He has of course taken to being in a house like a fish to water - after all, their natural habitat is the human bed! - and it is obvious how much he enjoys life now. He's known hard times, and now we're showing him what a good life looks like. Of course there are things he has yet to learn - he's an exuberant pup still, and his recall is... patchy. But we're here for it. He is a joy to be around.

The day Mr. picked him up from Heathrow




Since Cody's arrival we've been lucky that the weather so far has been wonderful, so there's been a lot of nature walks! And we celebrated N's birthday by going to a trampolining place with lots of her friends - weeks later, she's still talking about it! And her main present was a bicycle. Of course D got one as well: can't have one kid with and the other without a bike!






The Happy Birthday Girl with the cake of her choice!



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