One of the biggest financial drains on any family is the home. Whether you rent or you buy there are pros and cons. If you buy you eventually pay off your mortgage, but by the time that happens the house is 15, 20, 25 years older and now requires more ongoing maintenance. If you rent you can’t personalise or upgrade your house and there’s always a chance you can be asked to move.

What if you could find a way of increasing the pros and reducing the cons by combining the two approaches?

Our Father’s Day started fairly quietly, but turned out to be a bit of a surprise. We’d been watching the weather through the week and making a few plans and backup plans for the day. Then Isaac woke up not feeling great and on top of that the weather looked worse than we had expected.

Thankfully Isaac improved quickly and we were able to think of something to salvage the rest of the day. We decided that a National Trust property made sense, as we’re members, and that we wanted to try a new one. Ideally we were hoping to find one where we could take Willow, but it’s not always possible.

A quick search on the National Trust website (which works really well) showed us a few options. We eventually decided to give Barrington Court a try, which was only about an hour from us.

I’ve been trying to go paper-free for a long time. I even wrote a couple of posts about getting existing paper digitised on the TwinkleBob blog.

Recently I turned my attention to reducing the amount of new paper I need to use, particularly in printing things out, but it’s still hard because I’m a bit of a scribbler.

It’s May 2019. That means it’s more than 7.5 years since Isaac was born. It doesn’t seem that long.

The other night I helped him off to sleep, which I have done most nights since he was 6 months old and will continue to do until he gets fed up with me. It’s not always easy and it’s not unusual for me to fall asleep before he does, which can be frustrating, but I’m not giving up those moments of holding hands with him, having random conversations (and telling him to stop talking and go to sleep ) and saying goodnight. I’m not giving them up until he’s ready.

Back in January I took a day off from work and we got to do something a little bit special. Despite having half a draft post written, I’m only just now getting around to finish it. Better late than never? I hope so.

As one of his Christmas presents, Isaac was given a ticket to see Horrible Histories live on stage with his auntie and uncle. There were two options and he chose to see the Awful Egyptians show. There was no way we were missing out, so we bought tickets too!

So just a couple of weeks after Christmas we all went to The Playhouse in Weston-super-Mare to watch it together. We had such a great time!