Abi & Izzy - the next 5 years

Izzy's birthday has finally come around - it feel like it takes forever to get here every year. Instead of the big joint disco she was due to have with one of her friends, she had the pleasure of our company.... again. Despite not having a party, and not getting some great big shower of gifts, was incredibly pleased with all she did get and said on more than one occasion "I feel very loved" - that's worth more than any present. It's the 5th weekend of lockdown and we did our best to make it special for her. She came down to balloons and presents, I completely let go and allowed the two of them to eat chocolate birthday cake (purchased from M&S I'm ashamed to say) for breakfast, and we had take away pizza from our local pub for tea. In between we did what we've done every weekend for the last month - walked, played in the garden and made the most of time together as a family - something we are all (well, me and the kids) enjoying immensely. There

Someone is definitely loving lockdown It's clear I'm going to have to deviate from how I've been titling these posts as it's likely to become a tad monotonous the way things are going. This week will mark the end of a month in lockdown and I think we are all going a bit stir crazy. Thank goodness the weather has turned back to sunshine as the 2 days of rain we had at the back end of the week were truly miserable for me. It was not so much the fact that I couldn't get out (of course I did), but that the kids morphed straight into fair weather slugs and took to their beds for the entire day, coming to life only when we were thinking about bedtime. I ended up posting on FB about it - I wasn't seeking inspiration as to how to motivate them (other people's ideas on this never seem to go down well), but instead I was looking for some sort of reassurance that even if it weren't for lockdown this might be completely normal for a teenager / pre-teen on a rain

We are living a surreal existence at the moment. In the outside world, deaths from Coronavirus in the UK alone topped 10,000 today and BoJo has just been released from a week in ICU, apparently in a much worse state than anyone was prepared to let on. Worldwide more than 112,000 people have died and most of Europe (and elsewhere) is experiencing some kind of lockdown. Shops and schools remain closed, there are stories daily about PPE and critical drug shortages, even though we've stood up whole hospitals in less than 10 days. We clap for the NHS every Thursday evening but we have no idea what the exit strategy is, or when it might come. Staying at home is saving lives, but it's hard not to be worrying about how we can balance this with saving livelihoods. This will be the next task and by far the harder one to tackle. So that's the outside world. In our little bubble however, where I've been in the car once in the last 3 weeks (I went to Boots last week and vowed I

20 degrees but we can still have a fire! So we come to the end of week 2 of lockdown and its fair to say there have been ups and downs. on the one hand, we've all been hugely grateful for the fact that we are hardly slumming it - with an enormous garden and plenty of open spaces around us that are sparsely used, we have been able to walk Bertie and get out for exercise safe in the knowledge that we will be able to maintain a good 2m+ of distance between us and anyone else we might meet. I've been taking Bertie for a long walk at 6:15am every weekday morning and if we are (un)lucky we might meet 1 or 2 other walkers who have ventured out at that time. Given we walk in pretty big open spaces even then it will usually be someone in the distance. Glenn has been doing his normal long bike rides (no change there of course) and again, we see relatively few people given where we live - lucky us. Unfortunately it seems there are a fair few idiots who have not yet sussed that the o