• Feeling:  Hot (again)
• Listening to: Now that’s what I call music mix
• Watching: The Saint

Woke early again (before 6) because of the heat. I thought I’d have the house to myself for a bit, but both the kids woke early as well and were downstairs not long after me. Unusually this meant D was the last up, but she then braved the heat to go for a run.

I managed to get a good chunk of work done before 9 and despite flagging a bit mid-morning, by lunchtime I’d been pretty productive. Unfortunately in the afternoon the heat and early start caught up with me and I didn’t get a lot done and was quite grumpy at times. It was too hot to be out in the garden for long, but D and I caught a bee busy at work in the afternoon.

F has been complaining that we’ve made Friday’s too busy because all the things she was previously doing on weekdays have been moved to Friday now she is at school Monday-Thursday. This only actually means 2hrs 20minutes of scheduled time for her, and the biggest issue for her today was boredom (and the heat and tiredness didn’t help) so I think her sessions with Liz, Explore and her drum lessons were probably the most enjoyable parts of her day despite her complaints.

We really noticed during F’s session with Liz how her brain races ahead of her explanations when she’s doing maths leaving us often confused. I’m not sure how Liz copes – it drives us potty with both kids when they are already three steps ahead of any explanation they are giving us about their work!

B did his school work in the morning and then more work on animation/special effects projects in the afternoon – he can be a bit obsessive when he’s got a project like this – which is exactly the same as me.

The forecast for tomorrow is cooler although the likelihood of rain and thunder seems to have dropped considerably. I’m hoping it will be cool enough and dry enough to get going on the decking – although I’m still waiting on delivery for some things that I need so there’s only so much progress I can make at the moment.

Stay safe, stay strong, keep cool

• Feeling:  Hot
• Listening to: Nothing today
• Watching: Stumptown

Another hot day. I woke up early feeling OK and glad to be awake before it got too hot. The forecast for tomorrow is “thundery showers” and I’ve been a bit worried that the decking timber would get wet through before the weekend. At the same time F had been begging for a fan because of the heat – so I decided to do a quick order from Screwfix of a tarpaulin and a fan and went to collect it before taking F to school.

Picking up from Screwfix was well organised – people kept separated, order numbers for collection taken before you enter the store, and some protective screens in place at the counters.

D was in work for a couple of hours again today. B and I drove to pick her up and popped into Warwick Books to collect some books that had come in for us. The book shop has pick up from the door only for the moment – again all well thought out and effective. I think good for all of us to go out and although the roads were busy the town centre was very quiet.

Decided to get pizza from Red Hot Mamma for tea as a treat and worked with B on transferring some of his animation/special effects work over to a different computer to speed up some of the processing.

Hope the thunder comes with some slightly cooler weather, but that it’s not too wet to get started on the decking this weekend!

Stay safe, stay strong.

• Feeling:  OK
• Listening to: Nothing today
• Watching: Staged

It is so hot! Woke this morning not really feeling like I’d slept, and spent the rest of the day complaining about the heat. But of course rain is forecast for the weekend when I could do with some dry weather to get some work done outside.

It’s hard to think about anything but the heat this evening, the air is heavy with it, but its been an good day overall. I had some good work calls (although slightly frustrated that I’ve not got more done today), D went into work briefly to record a video for inductions for students starting in September, and B had his usual school work.

F helped me cook lamb burgers for tea and got experimental adding some cinnamon into the burger mix. Despite her urging me to add more, I was a little too conservative with the spicing for it to come through in the final product – but lamb and cinammon is a classic curry flavour combination so I think it could work – next time!

The government is further easing the lockdown conditions from 4th July and I read the guidelines today – but they make little sense to me – it appears there is a difference between “social distancing” and having “social interactions” but no definition of what that difference is.

I don’t suppose we will be rushing to do any of the things that will be allowed after the weekend. At choir this evening I was talking it through with N and he pointed out that given sensible behaviour the chance of encountering someone with COVID19 is pretty low – which made me feel a bit more comfortable about the risks we are likely to be exposed to.

While I was at choir (always enjoyable) D and the kids were meant to be doing their weekly quiz with cousins, aunts and uncles. F invented a new game for them to play – an online version of “chinese whispers” in which the first person sends a private message to one of the people in the group, they change one letter of the message and send it to the next person and so on – until the final person has to guess what the original message was – apparently it was quite successful!

Going to try and ignore the heat and sleep now.

Stay safe, stay strong.

• Feeling:  OK
• Listening to: Taylor Swift
• Watching: Vagrant Queen

Was woken this morning when D got back from her run to find Travis Perkins parked outside to deliver the timber and other materials for the decking. I hastily got myself dressed and we moved everything from where it was unloaded at the front through to the back. So by 8:30 I felt like I’d had a real workout (and D had had two workouts).

I’m still waiting for some additional decking supplies from another supplier (Wickes) before I can start properly assembling the deck – but I can get landscaping fabric and gravel down now which is the first job for the weekend.

I managed to grab a tea before taking F to school (just very slightly late). Had nice chat to a couple of the teachers both of whom taught B and were asking after him.

The rest of the day was pretty standard – just work for the three of us at home, then D collected F from school and D, F and B had ice cream (there were only three left so I opted out). It seems to have got gradually hotter and stickier through the day and this evening its unpleasantly warm for me.

B made chocolate hazelnut mousse to a Nadiya recipe this afternoon. I tried to help with whipping the cream but I think I overdid it, and we ended up with a grainy mess. Happily we still had some cream left and I managed to rescue the problem (that was probably caused by me in the first place), and we ended up with a delicious dessert.

We shared two between the four of us for dessert – it was really good and despite the hazelnuts we had in the house being somewhat past their “best before” date (by a couple of years) the hazelnut flavour came through really well. Definitely recommend.

Stay safe, stay strong

• Feeling:  OK
• Listening to: Taylor Swift
• Watching: Black and British: a forgotten history

It’s funny how F going back to school has changed the pattern of our day and the feel in the house. Of course it means we have to be up in time for her to have breakfast before heading off to school. It means my coffee has to wait until I’ve dropped her off. It means less interruptions throughout the day and less need to move into a different room to do work calls on the computer. It means a much quieter house with three people just staring at their computer screens.

These changes makes it easier to get on with work – but I’m missing having her at home! When she gets back from school I want to hear all about her day and what she’s been doing – while she mainly wants to watch TV – so I can’t tell you much about her day except she enjoyed it but its still strange to be at school with all the distancing rules. And that she had a delicious hot chicken wrap for lunch (apparently we have never let her have a *hot* chicken wrap).

B was practicing for the Junior Mathematical Challenge today – the real thing is next Monday. It was fun to discuss some of the questions with him and interesting to see his approach to the questions – even at 12 he is skilled at using the potential answers in a multi-choice situation to give him clues to the right answer (which is probably an indictment of how much testing he’s already been through by 12 and how much we teach children to pass tests – but still very interesting to observe!)

Later in the day he had his online tutoring session where he was doing work on A Christmas Carol (seasonal!) and doing some work on angles in which the computer managed to set impossible questions which resulted in some of the angles in a triangle being 0° (as B said “its almost as if they found a diagram and put some random numbers on it”).

In the garden unfortunately D’s sunflowers have been demolished by slugs and/or snails, so she moved some of the borage plants to where the sunflowers are no longer taking up space.

Stay safe, stay strong x

• Feeling:  Tired but OK
• Listening to: Happy music
• Watching: Vagrant Queen (until I fell asleep)

This is (I think) the 90th day I’ve written a post since I started writing about our experience of quarantine (initially) and then lockdown.

I was up early (6:30) to get some work done before a meeting at 10. No school for F today because they close the school to deep-clean on a Friday. She had her Friday morning session with Liz which seemed to go well as always (although I didn’t hear it as I was in my meeting at the same time).

Once I’d done with my meeting I found it more difficult to settle to work for the rest of the morning (which caused a bit of friction with D as I was looking for distractions while she was trying to work).

At lunchtime I got some bread going ready for a planned picnic with my Mum tomorrow. We’ll still be socially distancing (Mum is part of a bubble with E and family as they live 5 minutes walk away from each other), but it will be lovely to see her and for the kids and D to see her – and hopefully have a nice walk in the countryside and a picnic.

B had been planning to make a lemon meringue tart all week, and so with his schoolwork all done by lunchtime he decided he should make it this afternoon – his first attempt (as far as I know) at pastry. He had a Mary Berry recipe (I have to admit I’m not that keen on her recipes – they always seem a little off to me) and started well getting the pastry together – getting the flour and butter to breadcrumbs in the food processor without any help. But after adding the sugar and eggs it all went a bit wrong (I think it was probably a mistake to carry on with the food processor when adding the liquid to be honest – mixing by hand would have been the safer bet) – and ended up with a past instead of the promised (by the recipe) ball of dough.

I wish I was better at helping B at these moments rather than just taking over – but whatever my failings at teaching I did manage to rescue the pastry and we got a reasonable ball of dough to chill for a bit. It was still incredibly delicate when it came to roll it out – and again I had to help and we ended up doing a bit of patching once it was in the tart case – but it went better than I expected to be honest.

The rest of the recipe B got on with pretty well – although he needed reassurance from me several times he was able to make the lemon filling and the meringue pretty much by himself (he was remarkably patient while zesting 6 lemons which seemed to take hours!), and the result was pretty damn good.

B isn’t the tidiest of cooks, and I felt like I spent the whole afternoon tidying up after him – but he did show willing and he’s getting better at doing these things for himself, or at least realising that he does need to wash things up or put them in the dishwasher!

I was trying to work alongside all the cooking, but my back was aching and I decided to stop a bit early and rest it a bit. We ate late (because of the ongoing lemon meringue tart baking) and after the kids were in bed I pretty quickly nodded off on the sofa and didn’t wake until after 10pm.

Need to be up reasonably early tomorrow to pick up some bakery treats before we head over to Mum’s, so time to sleep (again) now.

Stay safe, stay strong

• Feeling:  OK
• Listening to: Nothing today
• Watching: Giri / Haji

Been tired today and although I think I worked hard, I don’t feel I got a huge amount done 🙁

F was in school again, and D was at work for a couple of hours. B had a piano lesson in the morning but despite that managed to finish all his school work by lunchtime.

B has started working on some Project Euler problems (basically a list of mathematical problems you solve by writing computer programmes) and has been enjoying the challenge.

Water butt update – pretty much both water butts are now full – that’s 400 litres of water collected since the weekend! I’m starting to feel I should have gone for a bigger butt (!). But actually tempted to order more to collect water off the front of the house – seems terrible to me now that we’ve just been letting all this water go to waste!

We had pre-prepared pizza & garlic bread for tea – nowhere close to a homemade one in terms of taste but sometimes it feels like a treat to have a “lazy tea”.

I should sleep now, otherwise I’m going to feel tired again tomorrow.

Stay safe, stay strong.

• Feeling:  happy
• Listening to: Nothing today
• Watching: Staged

Big day today for F as she went into school for the first time since 16th March. The children and staff are divided into “bubbles” which have up to 15 children in them (so half the usual class size for F) and are with one member of staff the whole time (F is with her usual class teacher who she loves which is really nice).

I dropped F at school – they have separate entrances per ‘bubble’, and was able to chat (at a reasonable distance) with a few of the staff – it was lovely to see them as the staff across the whole school are really nice and friendly, and most know B as well as F and were asking after him as well.

After dropping her off it was then through the one-way system (which goes round the outside of the school buildings) to get back to the entrance/exit to the school. It was pretty well organised and not too busy (they’ve staggered start times for some children I think) and they close on Friday for a deep clean.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of the children being back at school, she was obviously delighted and came home full of excitement and chatter.

Meanwhile B was still at home – but that was fine. I think it was nice for him to have more of our attention (although I think D spent quite a bit of the day worrying about F). B made borage tea and waffles for us as part of his “FT” (food technology) work. The borage has been growing in the garden (D planted it as its meant to be good for bees) and it has pretty blue flowers you can use to make a (mildly laxitive B informs me!) tea. I guess overall the waffles were the better of the two cooking experiments today 🙂

Once F was back home after school (3pm) B was less settled – I suspect because it was then that F had all the news and excitement whereas B had just spent another day at home with us. F said she had done “tests” and it was “great”.

In the evening D and the kids had a quiz with cousins, aunts & uncles while I had choir – which was fun. Chatting to others in the choir someone (Seb?) recommended Staged which is on iPlayer and features Michael Sheen and David Tennant as themselves trying to rehearse a play during lockdown (via Zoom) – we watched the first episode tonight and really enjoyed it – definitely recommend (episodes are about 15 minutes each).

Overall a pretty good day, and was really lovely to see F so happy.

Stay safe, stay strong.