Life is settling back into a rhythm again which is good. I can’t quite see where the school job will fit into that and if I’m honest I am not really looking forward to it starting but I’ll cross that bridge when we get to it and can always re-evaluate if needs be.
We’re in a good groove of eating well – we never ate much processed food (aside from the very early days of chicken nugget parenting) and never ready meals so we’d not have been consuming accidental horse meat consumers anyway but it’s good to be cooking everything from scratch these days. We eat a lot of home made soup and fresh baked bread and while we’re a bit away from self sufficiency (as in, a hell of a long way from self sufficiency) it feels like we’re more in touch with our food than we’ve ever been before which is good.
After much debate and discussion we have a plan for the house – it’s going on the market on Friday, we have a personal lowest offer we’d accept in mind and aside from Scarlett who always gets a bit emotional about such things we are all ready to say goodbye to it and move on. It’s been our house for over 19 years but not our home for a long time. I’m so looking forward to paying off the mortgage, clearing the last of the debts and putting that whole period of our lives firmly behind us for good. We’re looking at alternative builds again and have a last date for selling Osborne Drive before knowing we’ll not get a proper house built before the winter this year so need to come up with an alternative for the winter. Options discussed so far are: Approach someone in the village about a 4 month house share over winter, get someone to look after our livestock and head back to the mainland for the winter to find work either with tied accommodation or paying enough to rent somewhere short term or WWOOF or house sit or something. Or put up another temporary build which is more weather proof than this. Something like a well insulated log cabin with woodburner could work with partitions for bedrooms. We could still use the shower etc in the static but live, cook and sleep in a cabin. Once we actually build it would them be more holiday home accommodation so would pay for itself in the long term.
I’m really adamant that we don’t just leap into a housebuild that we later look back on and regret elements of or kick ourselves for not following hearts and dreams. We spent so long looking at alternative builds and salivating over glass bottle walls, cord wood features, exposed wooden trusses and so on that I would feel we were cheating ourselves for not encorporating everything possible into our home. We have looked at over 100 kit house layouts and not one of them felt like ‘our house’ even though £100K is a fairly small budget for a housebuild I don’t want to spend that much and not feel like it’s our home. Lots of sitting looking out over the view drinking tea and thrashing stuff like this out brings us back to the same realisations and resolutions to do it the right way even if it is the hard way.
We’ve had some great chats with the children this last few weeks with everyone in reflective, philosophical, new beginning type mindsets. Today Davies was asking me the whole story of how we came to Home Educate which was interesting and some of the story was not one they’d ever listened to in full and asked questions about. We talked about pet ownership, parenting, marriage, friendship and relationships and making choices about which bits of yourself to give. We talked about if we had a cloning machine and could just please ourselves with one version of our self to do whatever we wanted, how that would pan out long term, what my alternative hopes and dreams might have been had I not ended up here in this life with these people and about loving and losing rather than never loving at all. We talked about how they’d remember me, what they’d celebrate about my parenting and what they’d feel I’d fallen short on. We talked a bit about adoption, abortion, fostering and parenting. Last week we talked about family trees and I drew out what little I know of the generations above us which is not a lot. Yesterday we heard an advert on the radio where some aging rock star described himself in ten words (father, lover, grumpy, poet…. etc) so we did the same which was enlightening.
Ah people. Such fascinating creatures.
Keeping fingers firmly crossed re house. How have the tenants taken it?
Okay I think. We’ve not talked to them but I asked the agent what feedback he got from them when he measured up and took photos and he said they seemed disappointed to need to move but cooperative to viewings etc.