Today at 11.30 Tyrus finished his maths online lesson and announced, time for the holidays! Which is technically true, he doesn’t have any online lessons on a Friday and next week is half term in the UK, although it doesn’t really feel like it!
The other children still have lessons until tomorrow afternoon, and then it will officially be the holidays, my husband would usually consider taking a week off, but after a discussion, we decided its probably better to continue working next week, and have our fingers crossed that the country looks a little brighter by the Easter Holidays.
My birthday is at the end of March, so I had a lockdown birthday in 2020, i’m now wondering if its going to be a second lockdown birthday, but I guess nobody will know until the announcement on 22nd February, so until then I shall keep dreaming of luxury holiday cottages with hot tubs, or plan my next snowdrop walk in our local area, although with a good deal of snow currently here in Norfolk, it’s looking more like a snow walk than snowdrops, which is at least keeping all of the children and the giant Newfoundland happy (even if she does keep eating the snowballs!).
Looking back on the last year, its certainly been a strange one! February last year saw me getting all of the paperwork ready for the tribunal, it had already been cancelled twice, so I was still not convinced it would ever take place!
We finally got a new date of 13th March , looking back now, we were so fortunate to have been able to attend and get the resources put in place for Tyrus, especially as the schools all locked down the following Friday.
March saw a mad dash to get both older children home from uni before the lockdown, this involved a 12 hour trip for Xene and a 5 hour for Lochlan, within 24 hours, looking back it feels almost like a dream.
All of the April birthdays were spent in lockdown, thankfully when you have a large family, its still noisy and chaotic!
May, June and July passed in a blur of schoolwork and both Asa and I working from home, the zoom calls got more frequent and the length of them increased!
It was looking more promising in August, and the tourists arrived (socially distanced), there was a feeling of getting back to normality.
Schools returned in September, different but familiar, children moved to their new school groups with ease, Eowyn started high school and it looked like we had turned a corner, we got to October half term with a few positive cases within their schools but none that affected any of our children.
Tyrus was making excellent progress at his new school, my 3 hour school runs were hectic but it felt ‘normal’ then BAM! A new strain, increasing numbers of deaths, too many cases to feel safe and back into a full lockdown!
Although I have to say since January the schools have been AMAZING, so much support, online lessons are frequent and the children still get to interact with their classmates, which is so lovely to see, and makes me think we are going to come out of this OK (whenever that may be!)
That’s pretty much our last year in a nutshell, how about you ?