Blast from the past.

This weekend Maddy and Fran went up to my parents on Friday morning; Amelie stayed behind due to the fact that she has now gone on a long awaited vacation at The Portico and the transfering of children on Sunday was going to be too complicated otherwise. Can’t quite believe my 4 year old has had the nerve to go that far away without any other family members though if she is going to be happy anywhere, she’ll be happy there 🙂 It has been MUCH anticipated!

This meant we had just the smaller two at home and therefore had yet more time to reflect on the fact that it appears to be Fran who makes all the mess and noise 😆 and also just how different we are as parents now to when we only had the big two in days gone by.

Somethings are quite different anyway, which affects the overall difference i suppose; the age gap is wider, the children themselves are far lower maintenance than the little Fran and Maddy were and by the time Maddy was 2 we were very close to having Amelie and Fran was still only 3. But it isn’t so much the children that are different as us. When we just had 2, we were very much still parents and children, 2 slightly different entities. I was regularly completely worn out by the end of the day in a way i pretty much never am now, i often felt i was just a one-woman entertainer/slave who got very little back from the experience and i think that Max and i felt we had very little time or energy left for each other beyond being parents. The children went to bed at 7 (and were ready to) and we reclaimed our grown-up time, the children ate separately to us, slept more separately and did stuff that we laid on for them as children (crafts, films, toys, whatever).

These days things are very different; this weekend we ate all our meals as a 4 (very odd getting out less cutlery) and dinner times were fun, family occasions as they’ve become in the last couple of years thanks to considerable effort by Max to make it so. We had conversations even with Joey, which is a change in itself because Fran and Maddy were still pretty much non-verbal at 3-4 so it just wasn’t the same. We’ve watched films together, crafted together, they stayed up late playing and pottering about until they were ready for bed. I didn’t feel like i was “at home with the two little ones” this weekend, i was just here with my family, 4 people in a house. That is what has changed the most as we’ve grown as a family (mentally and actually) – we’ve become co-habiting people who love each other and enjoy each other. Felt nice.

Amelie and i got loads of nice time together, hama-ing and talking. Fascinating to have more time to listen to what goes on in her head too.

“Mummy… are we real, or just pretend? Well, i think we are real, but maybe we are just in a pantomine and don’t know… but i can’t see the people… hmmmm… well maybe we are in a film. then we wouldn’t see them AND we wouldn’t know we were just in a film either.”

Very deep.

Managed a bike-ride on Saturday, which me and my fat cells are missing badly and overall gave myself two much needed evenings off – which i spent doing beads!

Yesterday i transfered Amelie to Alison via a stop-off at Claire’s, drove up to my parents to collect the big two, came home and packed 60 parcels which was a fraction of the total really, most of which need tomorrows stock delivery. Fretting slightly now as December is so far quieter than November was. I sincerely hope people haven’t spent already or i’m not going to have as nice an end to the month as i thought i was!