Posts in category: Personal

Things feel like they’re back to being all up in the air again at the moment.

The Welsh Government announced at the end of last week that children in the foundation phase will be able to go back into schools after the half term holiday.

So that means that Nerys will be able to go back, but Rhys will still be at home with us.

I’ve spent the weekend trying not to think about it too much, because until I know the school’s plan for getting the children back in I really don’t know what we’ll do.

My gut instinct is that I would prefer to keep Nerys at home with Rhys for a while longer.  I’m just not sure how safe it is for her to go back in, to be mixing with all the other children in her class again, and for me to be mixing with the other parents at drop off and pick up.  With the best will in the world it is so hard to maintain social distancing at the school gates.

While we wait for news from the school I’m just trying to find things to do each day to keep my thoughts ‘in the moment’ instead of running riot with what-ifs, trying to predict what next term holds.

On Friday afternoon we popped down to the beach for a bit of sea air and it was the perfect thing to help clear my head.

We timed it just right to avoid the rain and also to get to the beach at high tide, so we could stroll along the tide line looking for interesting stones and shells, and watch the waves come gently rolling in.

I love coming down to the beach here, any time of day, any time of the year, but it is always that bit nicer when we can make it for high tide.

Swansea bay actually has the second highest tidal range in the world, so when the tide is out, it is OUT.  So if we want to be able to hear the water, which is one of my favourite things about being at the beach, we need to try and get the timings right for high tide!

Luckily it worked out perfectly last Friday and it was just what we needed after a long week of school work at home.

We tried to make more of an effort last week to have breaks during the day to get out for a run around outside, or play something away from a computer screen, and the children seemed happier for it, so we’ll try and carry that on this week.

What do you do with your children at the moment to break up the day, or do you find you just tend to plough through the school work and then do something fun later on the day?

I am feeling pretty pleased with myself.  I remembered to take these photos of Nerys having her hair dried last week, carrying on a tradition that I unintentionally started back in 2017.

At the end of January that year I took some photos of Nerys having her hair dried and then, completely by chance, took almost identical photos at the end of January the next year.

And so the tradition started and I’m so pleased to have carried it on for another year!

In some of the photos I took in 2018 Nerys was belting out ‘Let it go’ from Frozen, and then the year after that she was singing ‘This is me’ from the greatest showman.  I love having this little record, not just of how she’s changed each year, but of the songs that are almost like the soundtrack to her life at the time.

Last year she wasn’t singing in the photos, but I wrote that if she was it would’ve been ‘Into the unknown’ from Frozen 2.

And this year, the soundtrack to her life is basically all the songs from the Descendants films.  We’ve all seen the films so many times now, the songs are almost always playing on a loop in my head and at any given time any one of us might burst into a rendition of ‘Night falls’ or ‘Ways to be wicked’.

I have to be honest, of all the songs that could be stuck in my head thanks to the children, I’m quite happy for it to be these ones, they’re all pretty catchy!  I also can’t believe it’s only been a year since we were in the ‘Frozen 2’ phase, that feels like so much longer ago!

That’s one of the things I love so much about doing these posts; having these little markers of how time is passing, how the children are growing and the different phases they go through.

Nerys was so young when I started taking these photos of her, I can’t quite get over how much she’s changed since then.  Here are some of the photos from the last 4 years – look at her little face in the first one!

Now, what are the bets that I can keep this going another year, and will Nerys have finally had her hair cut by then?!

Is it just me or did January feel like an incredibly long month?

Christmas and New Year’s eve already feel like they were so long ago, it’s hard to believe that they were really only a month ago.

And the thing is, I can’t even really think of what we’ve done to fill those long, long weeks of January.  It feels like we had rainy day after rainy day, mainly consumed with school work and work work and the occasional bit of baking.

We’re still trying really hard to just do the one food shop a week, instead of popping into the local little Tescos for top up shops during the week.  Which means we’re making our white rolls most weeks when the bread runs out.  I’m seeing it as a good skill for the children to learn while they’re at home with us for all this extra time!

There were a few dry days in January when we managed to get out for a walk, grabbing our opportunities between live lessons and work meetings.  Last week was almost constant mist and rain, but it broke long enough on Friday for us to head out for a wander around Singleton Park and take a quick few family photos.

I’ve been reminded again during this lockdown how lucky we are to have different places within walking distance of the house that we can go to.

Over the past month we’ve been able to walk different routes through Singleton Park, circuits of the lake in Brynmill park (sometimes stopping to feed the ducks), and all the way down to the beach to run from the incoming tide and try to skim stones on the water.

Having different options for where we can go (even when we’ve been to all of them hundreds of times before) does help the monotony of lockdown feel slightly less monotonous.

The children have been managing school at home really well so far this year, and they’re both really enjoying the live lessons they get with their teachers each day.  I’m not sure how long we’ll need to keep doing it all for though.

The welsh government announced on Friday that they’re hopeful that some children will be able to go back to school after the half term holiday.  From what I’ve read it’s likely that the children in foundation phase will go back first, so that’ll mean that Nerys could go back in to school but Rhys would still be at home with us for a while longer.

What I hadn’t read until just now though is that attendance won’t be mandatory in these early stages of the children going back in, which is quite nice to know.  I still don’t know how I feel about the children being back in school, so it’s a relief to know we can keep both of them at home for longer if we want to.

How do you feel about your children going back in to school?

I’ve lived in Swansea for 20 years now and there are so many things that I love about being here.

We have gorgeous beaches, plenty of parks and open green spaces, and Joe’s ice cream.  I also love that I already feel that a lot of my history is here.  It’s the place I went to Uni.  The place I met my best friend.  The place I met and married my husband and where our children were both born.

There is one thing that I would change about Swansea though – the fact that we hardly ever get snow.

My social media feeds yesterday were absolutely jam-packed with photos of snow.  Beautiful Narnia-esque scenes and fun-filled pictures of families out building snowmen and making snow angels.  It was so lovely to see so many people out having such a great time, but it did make me a little bit jealous!

When I got up yesterday morning there was the lightest covering of snow in the flower pots in the back garden, so we’d clearly had a bit of snow overnight, but there was nothing at all on the ground and nothing more forecast.

So you can imagine the excitement yesterday afternoon when Steve told us all to quickly look out the window to see perfect, big snowflakes falling from the sky.

The children quickly grabbed their shoes and chucked their coats on over their pjs and ran outside to dance around in the falling snow.

You can’t even really tell in these photos, but it really was coming down!

I think it snowed for about 45 minutes in the end, and it didn’t even try to stick, but it was enough.  It was enough excitement and fun to make it a moment from this winter that we’ll remember for all the right reasons.

Did you have any snow where you are this weekend?

Nerys turned to me on our walk yesterday, and told me she was a bit sad.

When I asked why she said it was because of all the things they’ve not been able to do at school this year.  There’ve been no school trips.  No class photos.  No assemblies.  She misses the days back in year 1 when the 3 classes across the year group would all have their doors open and they would all mix together throughout the school day.

She even misses going to the dinner hall to eat her lunch with everyone.

She has friends that she’s been close with since Rising 3s who are now in a different class to her, which means she’s barely seen them this year.  When they were at school they would sometimes see each other at play time, but had to chat from a distance, staying in their bubble’s allocated area of the playground.  And now, obviously, she doesn’t see them at all.

She seems to be coping with everything so well, and so does Rhys, that it’s easy to assume they’re fine.  So I’m relieved she opened up to me about this.  It meant we could talk about how rubbish it all is.  How it’s ok to miss things, to feel sad about all these things everyone is missing out on.

It also meant that we could talk about how wonderfully special they’ll all feel when we’re able to do them again.

We talked about how amazing it will be when the classes can mix again at school.  How special it will feel to have playdates at her friends’ houses.  How exciting it’ll be when we can go to Bluestone on holiday again.

She seemed happy again by the end of the conversation, but I’m acutely aware that this isn’t the end of it.  Thinking about how great things will be in the future doesn’t take away the sadness of not being able to do them now really, does it.  Especially not when you’re six and you miss your friends and your teachers and your family members that you’ve not seen in a long time.

I’m not really sure what the answer is, when I can’t fix everything.  I think for now the answer just needs to be hugs, and extra time reading together and watching Descendants on repeat together.  And probably chocolate.

Sitting down to write this got me thinking about how long I’ve been doing these siblings project posts for.

So I’ve spent the last 15 minutes looking back through my archives to see when I started.  Turns out that I’ve somehow managed to stick with this since January 2017.  I’m quite proud to be honest, that I’ve been taking photos of my children together every month for the last 4 years, capturing the little details of their relationship as they grow up together.

What’s really tickled me though, is how little has really changed over those 4 years.

There are parts of the second siblings post I wrote, back in February 2017, that I could well have written yesterday.  They’re still good friends, and still enjoy playing together and spending time together – up to a point, when they then need to just back off a bit and have some time by themselves.

They’re spending a lot more time together at the moment than they normally would, with the school being closed and not really being able to go anywhere or do anything.  I think they’re quite enjoying being that bit more involved in what the other is doing for school work each day, offering advice and suggestions that are sometimes welcomed and other times not particularly appreciated!

And when the school work is done for the day they’re happy to stay together; to play Roblox together, to head out with me for a walk in the park, or just to rush outside to scoot together in our carpark.  On days when we all need to get out of the house, to burn off some energy, but don’t want to actually have to go anywhere these scoots are the perfect compromise.

And they give me a chance to take some photos of the children together in nice, natural daylight.

I think Rhys and Nerys have both naturally started to lean on each other more over the last year, as they’ve been able to see their friends less and less with school closures and social distancing in place.

They’re so lucky to have each other through all this, to have someone to talk to and to play with.  And when they do fall out, which they generally do at one point or another each day, it doesn’t take too long and too much space from each other before they’re back to being friends again.

I’m not sure how much of this time they’ll remember when they’re older, but I hope they remember that they were together through it, that they sat side by side with printed worksheets from school during the first lockdown.  How much fun they had last summer working their way through our bucket list together.  The way they listened in on each other’s live lessons with school during this latest lockdown.  How they did it all together.

Here we go.  The first full week of home learning of the new year.

We did three days of it last week and it was ok.  Not amazing but not disastrous.  So I’m taking that as a win and hoping for much of the same this week.

It’s been interesting seeing posts from different parents around the UK and hearing how different things seem to be in terms of the amount of work that’s being provided for children to tackle at home.

Some seem to be really full-on, with a lot of live, online lessons and full days of work to get through.  While others seem much more hands-off, with worksheets and so on being sent out for children to get on with.

Our school has found a nice balance I think.

The children both have a live online lesson with their teacher each day, which lasts about 45 minutes.  It’s long enough for them to properly cover the work, but not too long that the children start to get too fidgety.

And luckily both Rhys and Nerys seem to enjoy them.

Nerys decided to dress as Hermione from Harry Potter for one of her lessons last week which her Harry-Potter-loving teacher appreciated.  Nerys thought it was hilarious when he commented on how he’s still waiting for his letter from Hogwarts to arrive.

Rhys generally needs a bit more convincing to get dressed at all for his lessons, and I think he’s loving the fact that some days he can get away with doing his school work in his PJ trousers and whatever top he decides to grab from upstairs.

Along with their live lessons and the piece of work associated with those, the children also generally have 2 other pieces of work to do each day.

It is a juggle when they both need my input, and I’m still trying to work out the best way to fit my own work in each day without getting stressed and feeling pulled in 3 different directions.  But I think we’ll be ok.

I think the key thing for me is to just accept that some days not everything will be done, and try and get myself focused so that when I do have a bit of time to work I can just crack on with it.  I do find that hard though, to be honest.  Dipping in and out of tasks leaves me feeling quite overwhelmed, I’m much happier when I have longer to get into something, especially when it requires a fair bit of concentration.

All things considered though, if that’s the worst of my problems at the moment then we’re doing ok.

The children have adapted pretty well to doing school work at home again.  They seem to be enjoying their live lessons, with the chance to see their teachers and some of their friends each day that way.

They’re also both pretty willing learners which is something I’m incredibly grateful for.  We have a few small battles now and then, but generally once I remind them that the quicker they just get on and do the work, the sooner they can finish and do what they want, they just get on with it.

I just hope it lasts.

The Welsh government have announced that schools will be closed until at least the end of the month, and most likely until half term unless cases start to drop dramatically before then.  So we’ve got a fair while of home learning to go, and I have a feeling this initial enthusiasm from the children may well wear off before long!