Home Sweet Home

Hello bloggy friends, remember me ?! We are home from Florida safe and sound, and have come back to earth with a big bump :-/ Back to the drudge of housework and laundry but also to the crazy colours of loom bands, sticking, marker-ing, and, with autumn in the air, leaf collecting has commenced, and the fingerless mittens have put in an appearance.

 

It's been over 2 weeks since I posted and such a lot has happened. I'll try and keep it brief : we enjoyed the remainder of our Florida holiday - the highlight being swimming with dolphins. Wow, that was such an amazing experience, we felt very privileged to have had them let us get so close, and even be taken for a ride! They truly are gorgeous, so strong and powerful and yet graceful and gentle at the same time. We have no photos except official ones of us looking fetching - NOT (in my case anyway) wetsuits and I am NOT sharing that picture with anyone !!! So here's a lovely last pool shot instead .....

Another highlight for me was having a ride in a hot air balloon :D That's another one ticked off my bucket list :) Disney have a very tame, tethered hot air balloon and you can take a quick 20 minute ride in it (straight up, hang around admiring the view for 15 minutes, straight back down). 

I would love to experience a "proper" hot air balloon sometime, but this was a really great surprise, I hadn't expected to fit it in, it seemed a bit self-indulgent seeing as hubby had to stay on the ground with the Little People: they didn't want to do it (and 20 minutes to myself was heaven, I don't mind admitting). Look, there they are right in the middle, looking up. Little Man is in a green shirt leaning over the fence along the promenade thingy.

We had a day at the Magic Kingdom .....

Colour everywhere ....

And of course fireworks at night ....

And so with heavy hearts (and heavier suitcases) we said goodbye to Florida :(

The journey home was draining, lots of sensory overload for Little Man - cue lots of tantrums, crying and refusing to get up from being in a ball on the floor, and then some really spectacular vomiting (sorry!) from him (poor soul) when we finally arrived home.

We had 2 days to recover from the jetlag and unpacking chaos before the Little People went back to school. Little Man has started at Secondary school. It's been pretty horrendous, he's really unsettled, not coping at all. We've had to enlist loads of help, make lots of phone calls, and I've been into school soooooo many times. One day last week I kept him at home for a day so he could take a breather and calm down. We went on a lovely bike-ride-come-nature-ramble. Autumn is nearly upon us, the days are still warm but the leaves are turning and there's that early morning chill.

We gathered loads of lovely autumny treasures Including this wonderful teasel ....

The whole school thing has been very hard and it's been an incredibly stressful couple of weeks. However, I think today we turned a corner and he had an o-k-a-y day. And okay is good enough for me. I'm pretty sure that this is why I've felt like starting blogging again, I couldn't be positive about anything and didn't really want to blog whilst feeling so negative. But now there is light at the end of the tunnel :)

Since coming back Little Tomboy has celebrated her 7th birthday. 7??? My littlest Little Person is 7. Really ? It doesn't seem possible.

And so I'm settling into my new routine of school runs, school runs, and more school runs :) I'm getting some crochet done - hurrah - I have a couple of little ta-dahs to share soon, and my current project is very exciting!

But it's late now so I need to log off for the evening, I'll be back with more tomorrow:)

xxxxxxxxxxx