Back again, the intermittent blogger.
Quick update on my life goes as follows:-
Jack is now 2 and Amy is 1.
Jacks speech is starting to improve. He still tends to be monosyllabic, but his vocabulary is huge. Nappies ceased to be a feature of his life a few months ago, days are problem free, nights are not quite as reliable. He is a joy to have around, except when he wakes from his daytime sleep, then he is horrid for about half an hour, even ignoring him doesn't lessen the bad-temperedness. Thankfully he is unbelievably tolerant of his cousin as she expresses herself in a very physical way, hitting and biting. Her Mummy maintains that she doesn't understand that she is hurting people, I'm sure that she does it's just lucky that she is a little extrovert and really entertaining, a big girl with a big personality!
Jack's Mummy is pregnant again and we are keeping our fingers crossed that her scan next week, when she will be 16 weeks, is a happy event. Certainly 'poppy' is an active little bump who takes exception to Nanny listening to her heartbeat, I can feel 'her' kick the sonicaid.
Son and DIL have moved from their flat to a house and DIL is starting to make noises about starting a family, when that happens I hope that she will want me to be as involved as my daughters do. I'll have to wait and see.
We are in negotiations at the moment with a property developer. He has bought the house next door and after several bargaining episodes has agreed to pay us a good price for ours. Obviously it is all subject to planning consent so I'm trying hard not to think about it too much. I shall be really sad to leave this house, it has been a wonderful family home and holds a lifetime of memories for us all. The garden is my domain, it started off as a wilderness and has gradually turned into an outside living area and retreat for when I want to escape the frenetic activity in the house. It's strange how you suddenly see things differently when circumstances change. After the initial approach by the developer we had a valuation done on the house by a local Estate Agent. We've lived here for 15 years and have never had it valued, plus, when we bought it it was derelict so we have have made massive changes to it so we had no idea what it would be worth. After the Agent finished waxing lyrical about everything we were pleasantly surprised by his guide price but also saw it through a strangers eyes, it really made me think hard about moving on. We've always known that this house was our 'pension', it's all just a bit earlier than we had anticipated.
Work is going from bad to worse, not just for our Trust but Nationwide. Something has got to be done but I fear that it is already too late to save many of our services. It is really depressing to see the disintegration of something which wasn't perfect but was there. The statistics and tables may say that things are improving, but down on the ground they are being held together by that perennial plaster, goodwill, and that is slowly becoming unstuck by that solvent that solves nothing, bureaucracy.