So, it all started on 18th March when I scooped up Robin & Roy early from their respective schools, and together with one of my children, drove 7 hours north to our home in Scotland. We were loaded in with all our worldly possessions, 4 dogs, a tortoise and little more than room to breathe!
Eight weeks on and we are all doing OK! We have settled in to a daily routine of online school, our daily walk and an evening together of board games, TV or the WII party which has been dusted off and become a firm favourite .. the kids laugh hysterically .. mainly at my inability to achieve any of the challenges! Every Sunday is family zoom quiz night which everyone enjoys participating in and last week we ran the quiz, each leading a section, after Roy had pulled it all together on a fabulous interactive power point. This was particularly great for Roy’s English and confidence. It is fair to say we have all become completely obsessed with food … watching daily food programmes, reading recipe books, learning to cook, sharing the cooking and then enjoying a good critique of every meal and deciding what meal is next! Both Robin and Roy have enjoyed learning general food preparation skills through to delivering a whole meal to table and although there have been a few mini disasters they will both leave lockdown proficient cooks enabling them to look after themselves through university and beyond. It has been so rewarding for me to be able to share this passion for cooking.
We are blessed living here in the glen that the great outdoors remains largely open to us .. at least the view of mountains which surrounds us and our daily walk, although shorter than once and restricted to lanes, not the usual hillsides. Still, we are managing 5 km daily and the once a week 10-13 km to keep ourselves and the dogs happy and active.
Roy is also enjoying a 3 km run every day with my son and is rising wonderfully to the challenge of improving his fitness during lockdown.
Other activities have included a DIY session taking down an old fence and then upcycling the panels and nails to construct a hedgehog house and a cold frame. This is part of a bigger plan to start growing some veg .. the kids have planted seed potatoes and are having competitions with their beans shooting in anything from jam jars to empty loo roll holders & every part of every windowsill is taken with anything from squash seeds to tomatoes. At night we have been using the telescope here to discover planets and stars and often with the eye alone we can see the weather satellites and shooting stars and one evening the super moon in its full glory. They have even embraced my madness for sitting a while waiting to spot the deer in the forest, the hare, the red squirrel or the oystercatchers that frequent here.