Posts in category: Personal

We have an 8 year old in the house.

The living room is full of scraps of wrapping paper and new toys and there’s half a Victoria sponge cake still to be eaten, after Nerys’ birthday at the weekend.

She spent all of the half term holiday in a state of anticipation, so excited that her birthday was coming up.

I took her to Cardiff on Friday to go to build-a-bear which she had been wanting to do for months.  She choose one of the birthday bears, with a strawberry scent, and dressed it in a purple t-shirt with a rainbow design on the front.  She also made it so when you squeeze the bear’s paw it sings a few lines from ‘get back up again’ from Trolls.

Back when she was in year one at school her teacher used to play that song every morning before doing the register, and you could hear the children singing along when you walked past the classroom and it made me smile every single time.  I just thought it was such a lovely way to start the day, and I love that Nerys then chose it for her bear too.

On her birthday we went out for tea cakes and milkshakes at a local cafe and then played at the park for a bit, before heading home and enjoying an afternoon of pass the parcel and lego-building.

She also humoured me and let me take our annual photo of her on her baby blanket.

She asked me how long we’ll keep doing these photos, and I said for as long as you’re happy to do them!

I just really love it as a little record of how she’s changed over the years, from this first picture wrapped in the blanket at one month old, to a smiling one-year-old, to the girl she is now.

At 8 years old she’s already taller than my shoulder and seems so grown up in so many ways.  She is funny, and kind, and thoughtful and still just really lovely company.

Oh, and if you read last week’s living arrows post where I so optimistically said that I hoped for a semi-normal, covid-free half term you might be wondering if we managed it.  Which of course we didn’t!

Steve was the final member of the family to catch the virus, and spent the whole week (including Nerys’ birthday) trying to keep away from the rest of us seeing as we’re still not entirely sure how likely it is to get re-infected at the moment.

This has to be it now though right?!  Please tell me we can maybe have a bit of time now without someone in the house having covid!

What a strange week last week was.

Nerys was home from school all week after testing positive for the coronavirus the Friday before.  She’s been feeling under the weather with it, but luckily it’s been mainly cold-like symptoms and she’s been ok with the occasional dose of Calpol.

She also coped really well with being stuck in the house all week, although she was really upset to miss out on a school trip in the middle of the week.  Her class only went out for an hour or two to the local mosque, but it was the first trip they’d been on for over 2 years so she had been looking forward to it so much.

I’m hoping that things will keep improving and that covid rates will keep going down and that she’ll have the chance to go on a few other little trips before the end of this school year.

I also did let her out of the house for a few minutes on Thursday to spin in the sunshine on the steps outside our house.

She was so happy to be out in the fresh air and sunshine, after being cooped up all week.

The difference in the weather between Thursday and Friday was incredible though.  By midday on Thursday we’d had the notice that all the schools in Swansea would be shut the next day, after the weather warning for storm Eunice changed from amber to red.

Nerys was hoping that there would be some online learning that she could join in with, after missing so much school.  But with it being so last minute the children who were in school were sent home with work packs instead.

So on Friday we did a few pages of some workbooks that we had in the house, while Rhys worked through the bits he’d been sent home with.

The wind really was quite wild where we are and quite a few trees came down in our local area, so I was really quite glad that the advice to stay safe at home was taken seriously and we didn’t have to venture out for the school run (and Steve didn’t have to go onto campus as the university was closed too).

I’m hoping that when the last of this storm has blown through we might have a few days of blue skies and sunshine for the half term holiday.

I’m also really keeping everything crossed that the rest of us have managed to avoid catching the coronavirus from Nerys and that we can maybe have a bit of semi-normality while they’re off school.

We’ve got a few things planned for the half term break, so please cross your fingers for us too that these things can all actually go ahead!

The last month has been a really rather quiet one for the children.

It feels like we’ve been the house of non-stop lurgy since Christmas, and we’re still not out of the woods yet.

After a few days of generally feeling under the weather, Nerys has now tested positive for Covid.  There’ve been a few cases in her class and in her friendship group recently, and it had been starting to feel like it was just a matter of time before she caught it.

She’s not been feeling too bad with it luckily and the rest of us are testing negative so far, so I really do hope we’ll all be well soon and 2022 can sort of restart for us!

So with that on top of lots of grey, soggy weather, we’ve really not done much at all over the last few weeks, other than a walk or two through the local park where I took this photo of the children.

Half term is just around the corner though and with a bit of luck we’ll all be feeling better by then and will be able to get out and do a few more fun things.

It’s Nerys’ birthday at the end of the month and one of the things she’s asked for is a teddy from Build-a-bear, so we’ll be heading for a day out in Cardiff at some point for that which she’s really excited about.

We’re also hoping to see my sister and her girls at some point in the holiday which is always really lovely.

Other than that I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a few dry days so we can have some walks on the beach and trips to the parks.

What have you got planned for the half term holidays?

Around this time every year since 2017 I’ve taken photos of Nerys in my bedroom, having her hair dried before bed.

It’s a tradition that I started by accident, after randomly taking very similar photos in 2017 and again at the same time of year in 2018.

And I really love that each year I somehow remember to take another set, to keep it going.  It’s just a really fun way for me to see how she’s changing from year to year.

The biggest change in this year’s photos is that she finally had a proper hair cut.

Over the course of the last year she grew her fringe out and went to the hairdressers for a pretty dramatic haircut, which of course suddenly made her look years older!

And the song of choice for this year, if she had been singing for her photos the way she did in previous years, would be either something from Encanto or the theme tune to ‘Bunk’d’, the latest Disney+ obsession.

If you’ve not seen any of the photos from previous years, taken to the dulcet tones of Nerys singing classics such as ‘let it go’ and ‘this is me’, then take a little look at them now – do you think she’s changed much over the years?!

After a week of illness and disruption, the children were both back in school for a full week last week.

We’ve been lateral flow testing regularly and this seems to just be a seasonal cold that’s hanging around for a bit, but it really is still lingering.

So the last week has been a pretty quiet, uneventful one.  Other than drama class after school on Monday we’ve not done a huge amount outside the normal routine of school, home, dinner, bed.

The weekend was a quiet one too, mainly consisting of pottering at home, getting homework done, and finding new programmes on Disney+ to watch.

Rhys has been given the option with his maths homework to either do a page of his workbook or a couple of sessions on The Maths Factor.  The interactive nature of The Maths Factor really works for him so he’s chosen to do that for the last few weeks.

We’ve been big fans of it for a while, using it loads during the school closures to keep the children engaged with maths while they were at home.  So I love the fact that Rhys now has the option to do it through school as well.

Nerys still has a workbook that she brings home each week for her maths, as well as a book to read with us and some spellings to learn.

She thought at first that she’d been moved down a group with her reading when she saw the book she’d been given for this week, because it was quite small and looked like the kind of thing she used to be given about a year ago.

As it turns out, it was a great lesson in not judging a book by its cover, because it was really quite challenging!  It was a book on Hector Berlioz and was full of French place names and musical terminology that I had to look up because I wasn’t quite sure what it all meant.

Do your children bring books home from school to read?  Do they tend to be fiction or non-fiction?

We’ve had a pretty slow start to the year in our house.

Between covid and other bugs working their way through the family, we’ve really not hit the ground running.

Which means things like Christmas thank you letters that would normally be done pretty quickly over the school holidays have only just been sorted over the last week.

Rhys was questioning why he can’t send an email or a text to people to say thank you for his presents, seeing as that’s how we would normally get in touch with everyone these days.

And honestly I didn’t have much of an answer to give him, other than the simple fact that handwritten notes aren’t that common any more makes them a bit more special and so it’s worth the effort to write and post a thank you card to show the person how much you appreciate the gift they gave you.

It’s also just something we’ve always done as a family, and something my parents taught me to do as a child.

I do think the shift might happen in the next few years though, and the children may well start sending thank you emails instead of physical cards in the post.  I like the idea of them being able to send photos with their thank you notes, without needing to head out and get prints done!

Do your children still write thank you notes for the presents they get?  Or do you do emails or phone calls instead?

Here we go.  2022.  And a fresh start with the me and mine project.

I feel like I lost my spark a bit last year, and weeks and months slipped by without me really making an effort to take the photos I want to be taking of me and my family.

So this year I want to do what I can to get that spark back.

Sometimes that will mean leaving the big camera at home and having fun taking photos of us all with my phone instead.  This is what we did to get our first set of family pictures for 2022, and I really do love what we ended up with.

We kept it really simple, just propping the phone up on the sand and snapping some photos during a walk along the beach.

I did learn a great trick for taking photos on my Samsung phone though, that made the whole process so much easier.  You just prop the phone up somewhere, get in position, and then hold your hand up towards the camera.  This prompts the phone to take a photo 2 seconds later!

So quick, so easy, and weirdly a lot of fun.

And this year I’m up for anything that can make life a bit easier and a lot more fun!