This morning, as we were getting ready for school, I caught a glimpse of Elizabeth and it made my heart stop. She looked so grown up that I had to double take and make sure that I had not missed a couple of years of life. I don’t know if it was because she was wearing a grey cardigan rather than a red one, but something about her looked older and it made me realise she is older. All of my kids are older, as too are Andrew and I. Within seconds I had experienced a pang of sadness, an overwhelming pride and a shot of joy as I carrying on watching her getting ready and making decisions. I enjoy finding these emotions in the mundane tasks of life, which are getting easier as the kids get older.
We are back in the full swing of the school routine, though not with the vigour we sometimes have. Waking up time has crept more towards 7.30 and even sometimes more towards 8! I don’t think our family quite adjusted to the clock change this time round. We all seem tired and we all want to stay in bed. Rebekah is the exception in the waking up part as she sometimes leaves the house just before 8 to meet her friends. This morning she had to say goodbye whilst I was still upstairs waking up! I could say we need a holiday, but we have just had that!
The holidays were good. We had a really nice time in France and I don’t think the kids really understand how much time we spend together as a family because we have always done that. It was lovely to get back to basics and it was lovely to come home and spend a week with ben. The weather wasn’t fantastic, this is a rainy April, but we made entertainment for ourselves.
This next half term is 7 weeks long and that extra week will be a killer! Adam has his SATS and I have the realisation that another school year is almost done. Elizabeth has her SATS too, but she shouldn’t even know she has done them so that is not stressful in the slightest. This really will be a half term about Adam as he begins his journey to secondary school.
We also had conference weekend and i was shattered after our drive back from France. It was good though and we got to hear most of it in-between kids shouting bingo and asking for more sweets.
we have lots of sweets over Easter…so so many. The eggs still keep coming though and I think we might need to rethink our snacks in this house. It feels like a never ending stream of chocolate or sweets of some kind! The problem is that the chocolate is here…people give that to us. Fruit needs to be bought and then it goes ever so quickly. If chocolate was healthy we would be fine. However in the truck load quantities the kids eat it in it is not and we need to have a think about that.
Actually, something funny about conference was the talk about family counsels. Rebekah was in awe of the thought of this and asked if we could hold family counsels…I was laughing as I explained that is exactly what we do when we are chatting on the settee about things or around the table. So a nice easy one for us in that we only need to name what we already do.