• Feeling: good kind of tired
• Listening to: nothing today
• Watching: Parks & Recreation

Saturday, and in theory the last day of isolation for us because it’s now 14 days since B first developed a persistent cough. B is still coughing, and still doesn’t seem quite 100%, but the rest of us haven’t shown any symptoms thankfully.

I spent a lot of time in the garden today. First F and I cleared the rest of the grass from the path – it’s a long time since parts of it have seen the sun!

After that F and I dug a hole to sink a small trampoline into and make it level with the ground. The trampoline was one she got for her third birthday, and its been sitting unused at the back of the house for a while now – so good to see it get a new lease of life.

It was fun little project to work on together and F has discovered a love of digging and started digging holes in other parts of the garden – not sure what we are going to do with those yet!

After lunch I started to trim the hedge, but a basic trim turned into a full scale cut back as I decided to cut it all the way back in an attempt to reclaim some of the garden!

Damyanti had been up early drawing pictures of objects from the Ashmolean museum and B, F and I all wrote descriptions of them based on our own version of where the object had come from and its history. We read them out to each other over lunch and had to guess which object we were describing.

B still seems tired and not himself – I think not just being ill but also the situation – he loves school (as does F) and misses it. He is in touch with a few friends, but its not just seeing his friends that he loves, but interacting with the teachers and learning. He does like to learn by himself as well but I think he’s missing the stimulation of school.

After all the gardening B, F and I were going to have a band rehearsal, but unfortunately tiredness led to F and me both behaving a bit badly/grumpily and we didn’t manage to get to any actual practice – hopefully we can do that tomorrow.

Pizza delivery from Basement Browns and a Zoom call with my brother & sister and their families, and my Mum, was meant to cheer us up and it was lovely to see everyone, and B and I had a nice chat with them all. Unfortunately, it was a frustrating experience for F – she had something very specific in mind she wanted to discuss (planning a musical play with her cousins) but it wasn’t really the right environment for that, and she felt no-one was listening to her – so got frustrated and upset again.

However a quiz organised by C from choir (again on Zoom) was a real pick me up at the end of the day (and coming third was very pleasing) and we all enjoyed taking part (although F opted for watching a cartoon on the iPad after the first two rounds). It was a really nice way to use Zoom – just the right amount of structure with chance to see and hear each other. Big thanks to C for organising it.

One other high point of the day was finding that the Golden Monkey Tea Co. in Warwick could deliver us some much needed tea and coffee. It was lovely to talk to M even though it’s obviously a really hard time for the business.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to do the top of the hedge I started today and then attack the other hedge in the back to see if I can reduce the height. Although isolation ends today I’m not sure we will go out tomorrow with B still coughing – while he shouldn’t be infectious at this point I’m not sure people want to see someone with a cough walking around currently. I guess we’ll see how he is tomorrow.

Stay safe, stay strong everyone.