• Feeling: like a measure of whisky (or two)
• Listening to: Stay, Shakespeare’s Sister
• Watching: Hitmen

Its Friday, which would usually be cause for minor celebration and the question “what shall we do this weekend?”. But instead we face another day of being at home.

F, at least, is looking forward to the weekend with the promise that the rest of the family will drag themselves away from work and do something more interesting instead.

While I think we’ve settled into a reasonable routine, I also feel like (ironically) I’ve been less ‘present’ for the kids than I usually am during the week. Work has tended to seep in at all edges and I feel like I’ve spent quite a lot of the week in my own work “bubble”. On top of that now my (limited!) social life is also online – so I go from working on the computer to doing social stuff on the computer almost without a break. I’m still looking for the right balance, and don’t think I’ve found it yet.

Doing the Joe Wicks PE with F has been fun and good for me, although it takes me a good hour to recover from the high intensity workout! Hopefully that will improve as well.

B is still coughing and although his 7 days of isolation finished last weekend I still don’t feel completely comfortable with the idea of him going out. Our own 14 days of isolation finishes on Sunday and it would be great to get out for a walk if we can, but it might need to wait until B is fully recovered.

Plans for the weekend involve spending time in the garden. I need to give the hedges a good trim, and I have an idea the kids could build a bivouac or den of some kind from the clippings if we can find some suitable wood for the basic frame. I also want to try to give a new lease of life to a small trampoline (more of a trampette really) that we bought F for her 3rd birthday. Six years later it’s just sitting in the back garden and it would be lovely if I can find a way of making it useable again. I just hope the sun shines again this weekend.

We should have been going away to Wales at the end of next week with my Mum and E & family, celebrating Mum’s birthday, nephew J’s birthday and F’s birthday, and it’s sad to be sitting here knowing we are going to miss all this, and to know this is being reflected for so many people across the country and across the world. But we have so much to be thankful for, and in the big scheme of things these are relatively small hardships. So far the overall impact on us has been about inconvenience and disappointment, not tragedy – for which I’m hugely grateful.

So I sit here sipping a whisky, listening to Shakespeare Sister, moisturising my hands, and remembering how lucky we really are. Here’s to the weekend!