Another week finished and I still can’t believe how quick the year seems to be going already. I know I sound like a broken record but I swear it was only Monday 2 days ago!

We finished January on a definite high as our charity walking challenge made the local paper as we smashed our mileage target as a team. Polly was proudly showing the paper off in her zoom class last Friday! As a team we’ve decided to carry on walking ‘together but not together’ as it’s been a great motivator to get us out into some fresh air and it’s also been quite nice having regular contact via WhatsApp with each other.

One of my walks last week has also had a very lasting impact on me. Firstly the walk was amazing, it was an area I hadn’t explored at all and it gave some of the most amazing views of our local area that means I will definitely be going back up there. I made it up the road part of the walk with Clara on my back and was just gathering my bearings at the edge of the wood, wondering which path to take, when a lady getting out of her car with her 2 dogs noticed me looking a bit lost. “First time up here?”

After I confessed it was, she gave me the low down on which walks I could try but then she offered to show me her favourite walk. We started chatting and boy did we chat (we obviously stayed socially distanced!). After a short while she confided something that had recently happened in her life, now her story is not mine to tell so I won’t go into details but I will just say if Covid restrictions weren’t in place I probably would have hugged this complete stranger. We shared a really lovely walk round the top of the hill and we shared all sorts of stories, but we didn’t even exchange names! All I know is that she taught me in those 20 minutes that kindness is really the most important thing we can give each other during these dark times and I’m so pleased we shared that walk together.

Another walk just this afternoon will be memorable for a whole different reason. I took the girls on a trek up a different hill nearby and Polly was proving a great conversationalist much to the amusement of a gentleman who passed us on the way up… Me- “Watch out for that poo.” Polly- “Eeeeew it’s huge, what is it?” Me- “It’s from a horse.” Polly- “Horses don’t poo.” Me- “Of course they do, every animal including us poos.” Polly- “Oh yeah, I do.”

Anyway when we reached the end of the road we stopped to admire the view and the same man was on his way back down with a smile on his face- “Does your youngster like actual animals as much as she likes admiring their poo?”. After a bit of confused giggling all round he let us know that if we ventured a bit further up the track there were 3 deer in the field. I’m still amazed that Polly kept quiet for the next 5 minutes (anyone who knows Polly will understand this as she is usually the loudest child on the planet!) but she did and we were rewarded with a beautiful view and the deer still in the field. Too far away to see if they’d done any poo for us to chat about though!

She has been an absolute superstar this week with her home schooling and this showed too, when she was awarded star of the week after putting in lots of effort with her letter and number writing. We’ve been keeping the learning varied and fun to keep her attention and it seems to be working on me too as I now can’t read letters properly without sounding them out- something I discovered while doing a word puzzle the other day which Henry found hilarious.

Another hilarious thing that keeps happening is curtesy of Seb. He keeps getting the giggles. And I mean really getting the giggles. There’s something so refreshing about watching a 2 year old loose himself completely as he sister is making the voice recording dinosaur repeatedly blow raspberries.

Talking about blowing raspberries, this seems to be Clara’s party trick at the moment. She’s started imitating people and this is her favourite noise to copy. She’s started to get to the stroppy ‘I want to move’ stage but hasn’t quite figured it out yet, I mean she can roll all around but crawling isn’t quite on the agenda just yet, although I don’t think it’ll be too long.

And that’s it from me for now. I’ve got the blog’s social media accounts all active now so I thought I’d try and post regular little snippets on there to just encourage me to keep writing.