Week 10

Oh man oh man…I am having a few ‘off’ weeks when it comes to the habits I’ve been trying to build. Again, a bad week for posting and again, a bad week for exercise. Let’s see what actually happened that caused such a wagon-falling-off…

In-Laws and Weddings

Towards the tail-end of last weekend we had the in-laws staying with us. Not a great excuse for anything, but there were some pretty good and pretty serious conversations that needed to happen and me tapping away on my laptop would have disturbed them. Instead, my wife managed to get some great time with her dad and the kids got to play with their grandparents.

So we bid farewell to them on Wednesday…and then drove for 4 hours up to Scotland on the Friday for a wedding!

The journey up was everything you imagine a car journey with 3 young children could be (in a bad way) - delays, screaming, crying, falling out…we got there but said that it’s probably not realistic for us to go to Scotland any more. Certainly not for a weekend.

Then the wedding - I love a Scottish wedding. The pipes and kilts and ceilidh are all fantastic, and this one was no different. Even better, we decided to take all the children and ultimately to let them stay until the end. This was debated, but as my wife said: “We can’t drag them all the way up here and then send them home to bed when it starts getting interesting”

So we didn’t, and they had a wonderful time and were well behaved and got to experience so many new and different things that the whole thing seemed like the best idea ever. My four-year old daughter fell asleep in the car on the way back in her dress clutching onto a glow stick. A perfect picture of the night we’d had.

The drive back on Sunday…seamless. The baby cried, we changed his nappy, and the slept. The four-year old slept. The six-year old read for about 3 hours. No traffic. Sunshine. We should do this more often.

Building Work

We got scaffolding put up on the first day of the Easter holidays and it finally came down last week. We’ve had our roof mended, a chimney mended, another uncapped, the whole house washed and then painted, the fascias fixed, the gutters cleaned, the roofs scrubbed…

The general idea was, “let’s make the house look like a decent house from the outside”. It was a lot of work but we’ve been meaning to do it for 3 years so it’s good to finally have that out of the way. Next, however, is a whole bunch more work.

The garden is full of stuff we should throw away, the house needs decorating inside, there’s…well, honestly, I could work for the next year and still not get our house all the way sorted. Bit-by-bit, I suppose. Bit-by-bit.

No Gym, No Blogging

Over the Easter holidays I had something of an excuse (the general exhaustion caused by childcare). Now, I have nothing. I didn’t go to the gym this week because I’d gotten out of the habit, we had visitors, and I was putting my efforts towards my PhD.

Poor excuses, and next week I’m getting back to it.

I also didn’t blog anything because I was writing to my supervisors, or otherwise working on things. Let’s say this week I’ll comment on the book I just finished listening to (The Anxious Generation) and the general idea I’m fleshing out with one of my supervisors.

Conclusion

Next post will be the halfway point of my parental leave. I think I’ve probably done a crazy amount of ‘stuff’ - I certainly don’t feel like I’m sitting on oodles of time. It’s interesting…maybe this is what retirement is like? People who retire always say that they don’t know how they ever found the time for work. I get that. Let’s see if we can bring in the halfway point with a bit more focus!