Five Friday Favourites.

HAS something shifted in your house since earlier this week?  Has a certain calmness descended, a new routine emerged?

With us it takes anything from a week to ten days for everyone to adjust to a change in routine.  Specifically the transition from school time to school holiday time.

I believe we have transitioned.  (Love that word.  So damn satisfying)

It’s been a lovely week.  I thoroughly enjoyed it so I thought I might list five nice things that happened on this, the seventh day of our school holidays and call them Five Friday Favourites.

Sleep and Breakfast. A new routine in this department has definitely emerged. I haven’t been up before 8.30am most mornings then gotten dressed in a leisurely fashion instead of the usual cartoon routine of washing my face and applying deodorant at the same time whilst stepping over the dog on my way back to the bedroom.  It has been another half hour before the last person to wake up appears.  I have also gone from making pancakes twice a week to every flippin’ morning for breakfast.  It’s not a bad thing though.  I can make them in my sleep at this point and they are a firm favourite with the boys.  They never seem to tire of them and it means they are nicely full for the most part of the morning.

Swimming.  Every. Day.  This has been absolute bliss.  Lowering myself into the pool at 10am is nothing short of hedonistic. One morning there were two other people enjoying the water so we practically had the place to ourselves.  Oh, the lads love it too in case you were wondering.

Picnics. Well, we managed one so far but it was a spur of the moment decision and despite changing the venue at the last minute, it was a rip roaring success.  Full of “thank you for bringing us” and “can we come back?” and “that was amazing!” after two hours of tearing about.  And all I did was cook two pizzas, a marshmallow brownie type desert and throw an old curtain over the picnic bench.  Even the dog fell asleep when we got home. 

Journals. The older boys requested a journal each during the week in which to record their “hunts,” “hunger games challenges” and “stories.”  I broke into my notebook collection, (yes, I have one) gave them each a pencil and off they went.  Scribbling away and asking me how to spell all sorts for the day.  Great stuff to watch and isn’t the way kids spell everything phonetically really funny and endearing?

      

Decking.  Wine. Weather.  Bliss.  Bliss.  Bliss.  All three together.  Throw in a good book and I was in heaven for the first half of this week. 

In other news, I worse a beige linen trousers on our picnic.  Delighted with myself.  Walked the small wood with four kids and one dog and everything.  Delighted with myself.  Later on that same day when I took off the linen trousers I saw what I knew was a smushed lump of chocolate brownie on the backside of it.  But I know the 67 people who saw me between the hours of 2pm and 11pm thought it was shite!

Ah, well.  At least there’s sleep again, right?  Oh and wine.