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NYC Countdown!

Only 3 more sleeps till New York - woo hoo! Not sure any of us will have our minds on the job at hand over the next few days, although its fair to say that I'm probably the most excited out of all of us. The weather forecast looks fabulous, the plans are set, we've had contact from the company who we've booked accommodation with (Glenn's biggest fear is that we have booked through a sham company and we'll be on the streets) - surely anything else can be dealt with?

In the spirit of summer being almost around the corner we have made the most of the weather here as well this weekend and on Sat night it was on with the fire pit and out with the marshmallows. The kids are now experts at marshmallow toasting and can get 4 or 5 'peels' out of one marshmallow before they're done. I can't stand them myself so opted for a glass of wine instead. It was warm and light enough to sit outside and read until gone 8pm which is brilliant. I'm determined this year not to blink and find it's September without hardly making enough use of the garden - far too easy to do it seems. After the fire died down we headed inside and found ourselves glued to Eurovision in a "I'll just watch one more but it's so bad I can't tear myself away". The girls loved the camped up madness of it all and  probably would have sat through the voting as well - luckily the performances didn't finish until gone 10pm so we had a good reason to say no and put them to bed at this point... I can see this becoming a thing...maybe just for the girls in the house though!

This weekend we have also been making use of the body shop car that I was gifted while my Range Rover is being repaired following it's scrape with Liz's wall. Much as Glenn has been bemused to hear it, I've loved having a smaller car to nip in and out of town in. It's a 1.0l Fiesta and it's got everything you need for a small car and would be a much more sensible second car for us. Given my car spends most of it's life on the drive or in the station car park at risk of being scraped and scratched, a little car would be much better. Having mentioned this to Glenn thinking it would fall on deaf ears he admitted that much as he loves (properly loves mind you) his car, he does appreciate that there's a lot of money tied up in a car that also does very few miles. So by some miracle he then suggested that we should look into swapping it out for something smaller. You could have knocked me down with a feather! Obviously this doesn't mean we are in the same place. I'm thinking 1.0l, 5 door fiesta, he's thinking 1.6l 3 door ST... Some work to do yet then for it actually to be the sensible choice!

Most of the weekend has been blissfully argument free but it couldn't last and this evening we'd almost made it to bedtime when Glenn shouted at Abi for not listening (he'd told her to get in the shower 3 times without her moving) and she burst into tears. At the same time Izzy burst into tears over the fact that the hearts she was sewing for Kerrie had gone wrong and the calm disintegrated. I found myself in the normal position - placating everyone and trying to work out who to sort first - the never ending job of a mother really. I managed to calm a sobbing Abi (we are at the stage that when it goes wrong she thinks the world is against her and nobody, but NOBODY loves her...) and talked her into saying sorry to Glenn who was supposed to respond like an adult and also apologise. That took 2 attempts and me frantically gesticulating over Abi's head at him - if we can't say sorry when needed how can we ever teach them to do the same?!? Big hugs all round and all was well again. For the moment. We are definitely in the suburbs of pre-teen angst - deep joy. Let's hope there is at least a short breather between Abi disappearing into that particular hole and Izzy following her - I'd like to keep at least one ray of sunshine for as long as possible.


 
 

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