I seem to have bloggers block, that and a frantic nesting and knitting and ipad-ing habit 🙂 We’ve been busy though, and mostly happy, though I am finding it harder and harder to maintain any sort of sanity in the face of impending birth of baby. Still, with a maximum of 5 weeks to go now, as I have no plans to go beyond 39 weeks, I am trying, trying so, so hard, to keep sensible. In all, I think the hardest thing is accepting that it is inevitable that in 5 weeks time, Freddie’s bit of time will be over. Life will never be about living just without him any more. It will be about moving on, or it will be about a whole new piece of grief. And I’ve been realising that there is a possibility that in 5 weeks time the incredible stress of the last few years will begin to lift. In 5 weeks time we will have to learn to live with new emotions. In 5 weeks time we could be back in the depths of despair or the closest to happy and content we’ve been in the longest time, nearly 6 years.
Stockings included hairbrushes and hair bobbles. Fancy! 😉
Christmas was okay though really. Having the girls in the panto interfered a bit but also meant we saw my mum and then my dad. It was the first year of entertaining them separately, which was odd but we dealt with our myriad of issues by just having the main days home alone and just us 6.
The girls we fab, really happy with heaps of clothes, some dvds, a few crafty bits, jamas and one main present each. For Fran it was a Kindle which she loves, for Maddy a camera and tripod (and smurfs!), for Amelie a portable DVD player and for Josie it was still toys, mostly Strawberry Shortcake. Otherwise lots of much needed clothing and dancewear for Fran, leotards, ipod vouchers and the odd DS game and some lovely Lego kits. We opened squashy presents first, to get clothes out of the way but in fact, they happily spread presents over 2 whole days, not opening the Lego till the end of Boxing Day. I love that they are able to do that now.
Santa brought games and family DVDs.
Happy girl.
Very happy girl.
Delighted girl.
Completely ecstatic girl. With school and all her other commitments, her 60 book challenge fell by the wayside around 54ish. In the last week of the holidays though, she got to 60 books, finishing 2 hours before midnight on the 31st and earning herself a £10 Kindle voucher 😆
A guilty pleasure 😉
Food and drink and company being no big deal to us, we had a low key few days (beans for Xmas lunch!) and then back to the panto season. Fran had a relatively tough time there, as she got pretty thoroughly bullied by one of the older girls and very excluded. It sorted towards the end, but it wasn’t great. Amelie had an utter all though 🙂 But as an experience, I think they both learned a great deal from it.
That was all over in time for New Year, so then we disappeared into family films, knitting, drawing, playing and a HUGE house tidy, which I am going to add to my ‘proud of’ blog post later in the week 😉
Knitting and gaming. Forbidden Island has been a HUGE hit and they can play it without an adult, which is great.
Josie being a Mini Mummy.
I’ve upcycled 😉 a bit of furniture for the younger girls room into the bathroom, as I failed to find what I wanted for in there. It hasn’t had the pretties done yet, but we are getting close to having a completely decorated bathroom and it does now have a mirror.
Fran had some physics homework to do, so Max and she worked on that together, using his new multimeter to show her electricity being made from a hastily wind turbine.
The girls got some drawing books for Xmas too and so we’ve been trying them out. I’ll do a post about that too.
All in all, it’s been a good break finished off by a quick visit from the family I made the WWoofing Fimo model for, who graced us with the wandering presence for a night 🙂
I’ve been trying out making felted crocheted pots. More on that later too 🙂
