One word? When seven would do…

I woke up around 8am and sat chatting with my Dad who was also up for nearly an hour before anyone else got up. It was nice 🙂

Everyone else got up and Frazer and Cat went off to watch the Remembrance Parade in town. I’d half planned to go down but we’d have needed to walk as you can’t park anywhere when it’s happening, particularly not in a big old campervan and the kids were not up and about early enough. I’m hoping their sleep pattern will settle a little while we’re here but want them to catch up on sleep so didn’t wake them. As it happens it’s been a gorgeous warm clear day here which would have been perfect for the walk but we all watched the service in London on TV together instead which Davies and Scarlett have never seen before, having participated in the one in Worthing for the last 4 years as Badgers. Interesting conversations about who all the wreath-layers were and why some saluted and some did not, who all the various royal family were in relation to each other and so on.

After that Mum & I went up to the supermarket for food supplies – lunch and dinner. I remembered how much I hate supermarkets and had to stifle lots of laughter at my Mum’s rather mad ideas about nutrition and what is good for you. She was buying packet ham and chicken, all nasty and processed and then questionning why I wasn’t buying the reduced fat suet 😆 Having spent much of this year living with people who simply don’t use supermarkets at all we have learnt it is an utterly achievable aim and when 24 hours worth of food has cost more than we were budgeting for 2 weeks while living in the van it is all strengthening our convictions that we are making the right choices about our future. Not wanting to preach or convert anyone else and certainly not going to try and explain to my parents but there are various aspects of living here that will come hard and this will be one. Not composting, recycling or being remotely sensible about waste food is another 🙁

Back at home Ady made a start at clearing out the van and brought in all the kitchen cupboard stuff. Amazing how much food supplies we did still have, tins and packets along with stuff like herbs, spices etc. We had lunch and then Ady and I went into our room to make a start on going through boxes to discover forgotten possessions, find clothes and so on. We managed to look through all the wall of boxes, although we didn’t go to the bottom of every one and it is now far more condensed. We will need to get hold of some proper packing boxes though as the ones we had used were plant storage boxes from Ady’s work, designed for carrying six poinsettias in pots rather than loads of books and they are not standing up well to things. If we can get everything into proper boxes we can seal and stack it will be way tidier, we can go through and label them all and it will then all be ready to transport when we finally settle and are ready to move all our stuff. We do have some more stuff in the loft of our house and in the garage too.

The kids now have loads of their toys up in the bedroom they are using and are delightedly spending hours up there playing with them. We’ve also set up a TV and the X box for them so they are very happy. I went through my 4 boxes of clothes and reduced it to 2. All of my jeans were too big, I won’t be needing any of the smart skirts and jumpers I used to wear for work. I have kept most of my tops simply because they still fit even if they are big and I’d rather spend any spare money reclothing the kids than myself.

We got out lots of our kitchenware – our knife block, loads of our pans etc to use while we’re here as my Mum’s kitchen is surprisingly poorly kitted out. It’s not too late to make a Christmas cake so that is one of my plans for this week :). The room still feels like a big cupboard with a bed in it as there are still boxes all around but I feel like it has a bit more order to it. Today’s funny story from my Mum was her offering to clear some drawers for us. In this house are NINE double wardrobes and probably almost as many chest of drawers. She managed to squeeze things up so the four of us have use of one chest of drawers and when I asked if there was room in the drawers in the kids’ room she looked horrified and said that was where she’d put all the things she’d taken out of these drawers! 😆 Fortunately we don’t have many clothes… We’d out the kids two mattresses in the spare bedroom stacked on top of the single bed in there but she asked for them to come back into the room we’re sleeping in ‘incase anyone wants to sleep in that spare room’. In my whole entire life my parents have never had a house guest so I think it is highly unlikely!

But I am reminding myself that we asked to stay here and it is very kind of them to have us.

You may read this line a few times in the coming weeks 😉

We all enjoyed watching Frozen Planet on their huge HD tv, quite a contrast to watching it on my little laptop in the van. They have questions about Rum but seem to have accepted it fairly easily and I suspect they have come to terms with the fact we won’t be back to stay over the last few months and that they are unlikely to really understand what the hell we are up to with our lives but that we are going to head off and do these things anyway.

Ady and I cooked most of the dinner which was very nice but we ate very little as we are trying to stick to the portion sizes we have been used to. After dinner the kids headed off to play again while we looked at some photos of this year. We’ve been trying to work out how to make the laptop connect to the TV so we can show pictures on that but have realised we’ll need some sort of lead which will probably be more than we want to spend just to show one load of pictures once.

Tomorrow we’re planning to get out the house and do some walking, possibly into town. I have a job list of phonecalls and paperwork to deal with and other things we need to attend to while we’re here, along with meeting up with various friends and of course making a start on that business plan but I think some fresh air and exercise is high on the list of essentials, especially as the weather is forecast to be fine.