Abi & Izzy - the next 5 years

Well, for us it was a perfect Christmas, but for the vast majority of families it was all very subdued. After much promise that Christmas would remain sacrosanct, a new variant of Covid (apparently more virulent and terrorising much of the SE) emerged and the government capitulated and we went from a 5 day reprieve where 3 families could meet together indoors, to 2 families allowed to meet for 1 day. Bah humbug. This was followed by a massive upscale of counties tipping into Tier 4 restrictions, basically a lockdown in all but words, including Hampshire because we border a county already in Tier 4... ridiculous. So we are now back to only being able to leave the house for work, education of exercise, with most secondary school kids expecting to do at least the first week of school from home in the new term.  If you had looked forward this time last year and predicted that we would end the year with the vast majority of the country confined to their houses for all but essential trips ou

OMG what a weekend! We have gone in a few short weeks from debating whether to put our house onto the market, to putting it on and wondering whether we'd get interest, to having viewings where everyone seemed interested, to having an offer for the full asking price on less than 2 weeks! We accepted the offer on Friday from a couple looking to move closer to their family for various reasons. they loved it and made it clear they would make an offer before they left the house so it was a good omen.  Of course this meant that we needed to make a decision on what to do next. The people buying ours would prefer a short exchange and long completion so we have time, and it would fit with school, but of course no-one in this family has that sort of patience!  Glenn and I booked to see 4 houses on Saturday, leaving the girls at home to look after themselves, but more importantly the dogs - Abi sending me regular updates to prove everything was ok!  Having had a long chat on the way down we d

Is it Christmas yet? I feel like there are just not enough hours in the day, but maybe this isn't helped by the fact that the kids are now off school, work is busy and (of yes, small matter) we are trying to keep the house tidy for viewings. Having had a nail biting weekend initially of launching late on the Friday evening and hearing nothing, we then got notice of 3 people wanting to view - 2 on Saturday morning and a further one today (Tuesday). I can safely say that having people come to look at your house on a Saturday morning at 9:30am is too early. Glenn and Izzy had actually left much earlier for a motorbiking course, leaving Abi and I to rush around the house making sure it was clean, while the dogs did their level best to undo out good work. Having turned a corner on the house training over the least couple of weeks and having very few accidents (and certainly no messes in the house), I went upstairs to clean the bathrooms only to hear her barking. I went downstairs to fin

Getting so big! We have officially made it through a Thursday without going into hospital - hooray!! While Abi is still knocking back antibiotics like they are going out of fashion, it does at least feel like we have made progress forward. She has been feeling good all week and made it back to school on Friday after a month of disrupted attendance. She probably could have gone back a day earlier but I didn't want to rush her after all the false starts, and she was still so tired in the morning that I didn't have the heart to dig her out of bed when she could easily do the bulk of her school work at home. She's also been enjoying the peace and comfort of home after so many days stuck in a busy hospital. Either way she had a good day, it's been a good weekend and, apart from a few tunny rumblings which I think are more to do with too much chocolate ice cream than colitis, she is looking a million times better than this time a month ago (when we were just bringing her home

A very tired post walk puppy! What can I say? After feeling so jubilant that Abi was out of hospital for the third time and home again, we've had another bumpy week with her being readmitted yet again with another infection. What a rough ride she has had - it's been a difficult month for us all. This time round she'd had a good run of things, having been out of hospital for over a week and seemingly doing well. She went to school on Monday and I genuinely thought we had turned a corner. When she came home she was tired but happy and went to bed as normal on Monday night. By tuesdya morning she wasn't feeling great having not slept well so I made the decision to keep her off school to get some rest, By Tuesday evening she was experiencing bouts of pain and I started to get suspicious. She went to bed and then woke me around midnight to say she was having nightmares and couldn't sleep. I got into bed with  her and it was immediately apparent she was hotter than she sh

It's official - Abi had a sulk this afternoon which means things are back to normal - woo hoo! Who knew we would be so pleased to see our daughter lying on her bed grumping? It's been a tough couple of weeks but we are definitely now through the worst and looking forward again.  In other news, it was also Abi's birthday yesterday - our baby is 14! Goodness me, where has the time gone? It feels like only a few years ago we were bringing her into the world, and now she is 14! The one thing you don't want as a run up to your birthday is a spell in hospital, coupled with lockdown. It's fair to say the day itself came around quickly and I'd barely had time to plan properly for celebrations. Luckily coronavirus has put paid to doing anything anyway so we needn't have worried. Abi desperately wanted a new pair of flash wellies for her birthday so I managed to order these online, and then it was a case of make do for the rest - a new duvet set and some smellies - re

On the mend! Did I say that I was glad to see the back of last week? Well, it turned out there was more to come. After coming home and having a good weekend where it felt like Abi was making a solid recovery, she started to go downhill on Tuesday. At first we thought maybe it was just because she was moving around a bit more, but I could see that this was a different pain. Instead of the pain around her wounds, Abi was getting a pain which was coming in waves and radiating out from her stomach across her whole torso. It started relatively benignly, but was clearly getting worse and so on Wednesday I phoned the doctor who attributed it to the normal aftermath of surgery. By Wednesday evening when it came on she was freezing and grimacing and no amount of Calpol was taking the edge of it. I'd been sleeping in with her since she came home - the pain was definitely worse in the middle of the night - and so we went to bed on Wednesday hoping it would ease. Abi woke at 1:30am (not unusua

What a week this has been - one I definitely glad to see the back of. It started as normal - work and back to school for the girls after the half term break. The drama started on Wednesday evening when Abi came home from school complaining of tummy ache. She blamed it on the school dinner, saying it hadn't agreed with her and made her feel rubbish. Very unusually for Abi, she took herself off to bed without tea and when I checked on her about 9pm she was fast asleep so I thought nothing of it. The next morning I walked Bertie as usual about 6:30am and came home to find her still in bed. I took Betty around the garden for her morning snuffle and turned to see Abi hobbling down the path, hunched over and very pale. I took one look and phoned the GP, to be told they would ring back "at some point in the morning" - I didn't think it could wait. I called 111 and explained that she had pain across her abdomen which had now moved to the lower right hand side and they confirm

Ugh, and so it starts again - lockdown #2. After promising us that it would not happen and that it would be devastating for the country, the scientists won the argument and BoJo has given in. What this pandemic has shown us if nothing else is that there are an awful lot of every anxious people out there who would prefer to lock themselves away and hide from potential danger whatever the cost, rather than undertake a personal risk assessment and decide for themselves whether its safe to go out. At least this time the schools remain open and we can but hope that continues to be the case.  This time we are at least a little more prepared, even if the weather is dire and it feels all a bit apocalyptic out there with Storm Aiden (or whatever this one is called) raging. I've stocked up on some new jigsaws (last time they sold out pretty quickly) and we have some new games. The most recent one is called Genius Squares and its gone down so well with the family I've had to buy a second

Bertie gets the short straw on the beds again I'm wondering whether I should start a new blog given the kids are generally off doing their own thing now and normally hate for me to take a photo of them, so it gets harder and harder to write about their antics. The dogs on the other hand love being with me, never complain if I take a photo and with Betty having settled in, there is never a dull moment.  She has become a fully blown member of the family very quickly - accepted by all, even if she has no clue yet about house training and we seem to spend a lot of the day wiping up puddles. How she can go 8 hours over night without a mishap when it seems 8 minutes is a push during the day I do not know. She does understand that when we take her outside (about every 30 mins at the moment, plus when she wakes up and when she has just eaten), its time to pee, but that doesn't stop her from coming in and doing it again. I guess it takes a bit more time for her to realise that doing thi

It's Sunday again - where do the weeks go? This weekend we have mainly been ,making the most of the autumnal weather and doing the things we love. Abi has been at Angie's and has come home tired but happy after having pretty much the run of the yard to herself all weekend. Today she was left to get on with stables and sorting the horses out while Angie left for Cornwall and Claire was not sue until lunchtime. I have said a number of times that the responsibility she has there is quite something and she responds to it brilliantly. It definitely feels like a better set up for her at the moment to go there every other weekend and have all the advantages of a proper yard and decent horses rather than trying to make it work locally.  Izzy has been off with Glenn today motorbiking again. As much as Abi is loving her horses, Izzy is loving her motorbiking. He as booked her in for a days coaching in half term and she cant wait. Today she was making friends with a couple of people at th

Oh we have a new baby in the house and don't we know it. Our world has suddenly spun back into toilet training and nap times, and after one night of our new baby coming home we are already feeling the sleep deprivation!  Betty arrived yesterday after what seemed like the longest wait (and an even longer drive) and already the whole family is in love with her. She is the sweetest little thing and, true to Boxer form, wants to spend all her time with us. Of course while this is lovey, it did make for a bit of a horror show last night.  We had discussed what we should do in respect of sleeping and in the end I decided that the best thing to do would be to pop her in her crate next to Bertie's bed and see how we got on. This didn't get off to the best start as she had already managed to get her jaws stuck around her metal crate (goodness knows how but she did it twice and yelped madly), so we brought out the travel crate instead which is softer and so looked the better option.

This weekend it has mainly rained, and when I say rained, I mean RAINED. We have had about a months worth of rain in 3 days and it has definitely felt like it. Poor Bertie has had wet walk after wet walk (not that he cares) and we have been through any number of towels trying to dry him off afterwards. At least we don't have Betty yet as I imagine she wouldn't be best pleased with all this wet stuff falling from above! The realisation of impending puppy has been dawning on me this weekend as I have been going about my business and thinking "will I be able to easily do this with a puppy?" The reality is of course that once we are past the first few weeks it will be fine, and we only have a couple of weeks until half term when the girls will be around to (possibly) help more, but in the meantime I am a little bit worried / resigned to damp patches everywhere, and not just as a result of the rain. I think I will just have to make sure she is with me - cue shorter confere

Uh Oh, this weekend I have mostly been breaking the law... unintentionally of course! Given the new 'Rule of Six' announced by the government I have been realising first hand that it's actually quite difficult to adhere to, even if you are trying to be good. I went to a friend's house yesterday and when I arrived there were 6 of us in the house. Then her husband came home with a friend and suddenly we were 8 and it was illegal. Then her mum turned up and we were 9 - even worse! I have also acknowledged that if I was in anyway infectious, I will have done a good job this weekend of being a super spreader given the number of people I've seen. The irony of that of course, is that seeing lots of people is completely legal, seeing relatively few people together is not. Today was a chance to catch up with Amanda, Alex and the boys for a few hours of walk & talk in the autumnal (chilly) sunshine. The plan was to meet at Lacock Abbey but Amanda decided at the last momen

As we stare down the barrel of a second national lockdown I'm not ashamed to report that I'm feeling pretty angry about the whole thing. So much for 'world beating test and trace' systems and the ability to get super granular with the way in which we respond to coronavirus. I get the fact that nationally we are seeing rates of infection and (apparently) hospital numbers rising, but the data says that in our neck of the woods we have 3(3!) cases per 100,000 people and so I cannot see why we should have to lockdown in the same way that Bolton needs to when their rates are at 190! The average for England is 16 so surely we aren't at a point where we need to take the same approach everywhere? Part of the reason I'm ranting so much is that after 2 weeks back at school I'm finally getting my Izzy back again. She has thrived with the social interactions school gives her and (although she complains about it) has loved being back. Instead of the morose, withdrawn gir

It's Monday again and you can tell how things are going from the fact that I didn't get a chance to write the blog yesterday and I daren't look at my diary this week - every time I do I have minor palpitations and worry about how its all going to fit in. It will, it always does, but even so. You would think with the current trend for working from home there would be more time, I'm not sure where it all goes. Admittedly I get up a bit later in the morning, but only by half an hour, and I walk Bertie for longer, but again only by about 20 mins - so where does the time go? I used to squeeze in the best part of 3 hours commuting a day - what has happened to that time?? I do have more time to walk, and more time to spend with the kids. If only they wanted to spend some time with me! Oh well, I'm sure it will pass and things will calm down again... ha ha. Back to school has gone well and, despite some of the Covid annoyances which we hope will get ironed out as things set