Bad Haircuts and Llama Farms.

Hey, how are you all? I hope you're ok. If you're not ok message me, I could cycle to your house and act out your favourite film in interpretive dance, or something, to make you smile. I am really sorry for the people who aren't having a good time, but I'm having a lot of fun! Its hard work and full on, but I'm doing things I would never normally do and I think I feel less stressed than normal, because all I have to do is keep my kids alive and entertained, I don't have to be anywhere, or ever be professional.

I was excited but stressed about the weekend of Eric's 3rd birthday (next weekend). I had a gig on the Friday night, then on Saturday I had my hour long show at the Coventry Comedy Festival and then the Sunday was Eric's birthday. So all this meant I had to make a Fireman Sam birthday cake, learn an hour of comedy, (and also 10 minutes of comedy which needs to be 10 mins of best bits not just the first 10 mins of the show) make childcare arrangements for Saturday, because Dan would have a small part in my show, promote my show, then after the show immediately drive home and then host a 3rd birthday party. All fun things to do, but 3 fun things together does not equal a fun weekend. So I think Eric will have a way better day with just the 4 of us having time for him.

I think these times are great for creative people, theres so many fun ideas going around of stuff you can do with kids. We've done a lot, with varying levels of success. Percy has tried stop-frame animation with lego, most days they do yoga, we made the stairs into a slide, we made bagels that were horrible, we made rhubarb crumble that was not horrible.

Making the crumble

We made dinosaur eggs,

Tape town, 

We made paint bombs and painted the drive, 

We played "what's the time Mr wolf?" a lot, learned telling the time with a paper plate clock, decorated the house for a drive-bye wedding.

We've eaten outside most days. Percy cycled 3.5 miles, we've made toilet roll rockets,

and rainbows,

We've drawn on the walls, (we're going to get rid of this awful wall paper)

I made a pinata, (find out how I did it on my art page)

Dan launched his improvised comedy story-telling podcast

And we did one disastrous haircut that was traumatic for everyone.

Sorry Percy.

It doesn't look quite as bad now, but it's safe to say Dan is not looking forward to his lockdown vasectomy.

We've also had a lot of chats about future adventures, which we do a lot, but I think now that we have decided not to have a third child I would really like to do something fun so that I don't regret not having a third. So I can look back and say "a third child would have been nice, but if we'd had a third we never would have bought that llama farm in Peru." The average cost of raising a child in the UK is apparently £75,000 which coincidentally is also the exact cost of buying a llama farm in Peru.

More likely ideas are moving to the south of France, or having a family gap year and homeschooling the boys in a camper van. This is really a whole separate blog post, there's lots to think about. It's fun to look at what kind of house you can buy for not a lot of money in France, but it's less fun to think about what you would actually do for money, and what you would do with your old house and about how my French is so bad that I once accidentally announced in French to a French person "I am very pretty".

Stay Safe. xx