After a few months of living the groundhog day life of work and school at home, things have been just a little bit different for the children over the last few weeks.
They’ve both been in to school for the past three Mondays.
It’s been a bit of a strange experience all round, with staggered start and finish times, only a handful of children in at a time and having to keep 2 metres apart from each other all day. But I’m so glad we decided to do it. The children have both come out with big smiles on their faces each week and I think it’s done them a lot of good to have the proper face to face time with their teachers and a few of their friends.
The rest of the time things have stayed pretty much the same.
We’ve carried on doing school work at home and we’ve stayed close to home on our trips out, just venturing to the local parks and the beach. We had a run of grey rainy days last week so when the sun reappeared I took the children through the park to campus to meet Steve after he finished work.
After a few days at home it was brilliant to have all this space for the children to run and burn off some energy.
There are quite a few hilly areas in this park that they both love running down as fast as they can, and there are quite a few different routes you can take around the park so you don’t feel like you’re just doing the same walk each time you go which I love!
I think possibly the highlight of the past month for the children came last weekend, when they were finally able to hug Nana and Pops again.
They’ve introduced ‘extended households’ in Wales now, so we’ve made one with my in-laws, which means we can hug them again, and we can go in each other’s houses. Such small things really, but they mean so much after all these months.
We went for a walk all together on the beach last weekend and it was so simple but so lovely. We walked, we talked, we didn’t have to worry about keeping our distance from each other, and the children were in their element.
Now we’re right at the end of term and the end of the school year, and this incredibly strange time of doing school at home is almost over.
As long as everything goes to plan the children will be back in school pretty much as normal in September, although we’re still waiting to hear details on how that will work.
The summer holidays won’t be quite the same as normal but I’m hoping we can make it as fun as possible with the children, making the most of living where we do and spending more time at the beach and in the park.
The travel restrictions have been lifted in Wales so we should be able to get out to gower again which will be amazing, and we’ll see what other places nearby are able to open up again safely over the next few weeks.