Anyone else reaching that point of August when you’re counting down the days until your kids go back to school? We’ve had some lovely moments but two months is a bit much right? Since we got back from our France road trip we had two weeks of boring trying to get jobs done, me and Dan taking turns looking after the boys while the other one does some work.
And then there was a week where I was running an English learning holiday club from my house, which was actually pretty fun. The preparation is boring but then when you’ve got a fun day planned with all the materials ready for different activities and a timetable to follow, it’s kind of an easier day than a day at home with the boys where I’m just suggesting things and they say no, and then I just let them do their own thing until they start arguing. This week made me feel like a better parent because we were doing nice things like making pizza and clay pots and my kids actually wanted to do this stuff because other kids were doing it too.
It was still hard work. On the pizza day I had 6 kids making pizza, one of whom was gluten intolerant and nothing we were using could touch her special pizza, which looked absolutely rank. I really feel for kids with allergies your food is disgusting, and you have to live with a constant fear of death.
At the end of the holiday camp week it was the Olympic opening ceremony and we had a party where everyone brought a dish from another country. It was one of the best parties we’ve had. Everyone was very generous and the range of random food we had to eat was incredible. We ate the leftovers for the whole next week!
The boys stayed up until the end of the opening ceremony, until 11:30! The latest they have ever stayed up. Percy was particular interested in watching all the countries and their boats, I feel like our family flag knowledge has at least doubled in the last few weeks.
We got quite into the Olympics too, we watched a lot of sports including gymnastics, trampolining, skateboarding, climbing, diving, breakdancing and basketball. Me and the boys even made up our own artistic swimming routine in our paddling pool, and we made the sink and a ruler and lego people into an Olympic diving pool.
Between that party and last week we spent a few weeks considering moving to a chateau near Carcassonne after seeing this advert:
We spoke to the guy and then were going to arrange a trip to visit. It would solve our job and housing problems but would create other problems like, being trapped in a job that you might not like and the boys having to move schools, and in Dan’s words he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be a “chateau bitch”. In the end we were turned down because the guy decided we were too poor to be his servants. He said we would need more than just the 20 hours a week each of work he would give us and then he worried that working for him wouldn’t be a priority. He wants a richer couple who want to be his servants for fun and have nothing else to do in their spare time.
Last week our best chums the MacMaster family arrived to visit. Or as Eric writes about them in his diary “the Max”. We’ve known Jude (the mum) for almost 20 years but we got to know them as good friends in 2016/17 in my pregnant and homeless stage. Jude was also pregnant a few months behind me but ended up having a very premature baby and then having another baby a year later and now our kids look a bit like quads together, they all have the same hair and are roughly the same size. Their youngest Theo (6) is almost as tall as Percy who will be 10 soon!
It was so fun to see them. They were the family that hosted us in our last week in Liverpool so we could clear out our house and they were meant to come and visit us in 2022 right after we moved, but unfortunately chicken pox struck at exactly the wrong time. So gutting. But we made up for it. The first day we went on these big inflatables in lake Vinca, I’ve got no photos so you will have to trust me that it was epic! What’s not to love about basically a big bouncy castle obstacle course on a lake on a hot day? People who go to museums and see culture on holiday are missing out. Also I got to test out a new French word that I just learnt the week before “zizi”, when Eric fell down an inflatable climbing wall and the life guard wanted to know he was ok. “What has he hurt?” He shouted across the lake. He then started shouting body parts at me in French just to help me out. I tried subtle pointing but then I had to resort to shouting “penis” and I had no idea how rude the word I was saying was, like was it the equivalent of shouting “willy” or “dick”?
That evening we went to a really nice restaurant , where I recommended people having a burger where instead of bread it’s like a hash brown kind of thing. It’s so good. For a lot of the week the Macs were staying in a holiday park by the coast, and we had been fortunate enough to be housesitting for friends. If anyone wants a house sitter I will happily sit a house like this that has 1) a pool 2) a trampoline 3) air con all over not just in one spot like ours 4) lots of space 5) British TV 6) no pets not even any plants that need watering.
The Macs joined us one night for a meal but were very late arriving. When they got there their shiny bright hire car was brown, and they looked very stressed, their sat nav had taken them a ridiculous way though many fields. A few hours earlier our sat nav had tried to do the same but we ignored it, I said to Dan, “shall I text the Macs and tell them not to drive through any fields?” “No,” he said, “they’re coming from a different direction so they’ll be fine.” It’s all Dans fault. If fact if he’d have taken that job with google maps he could have fixed that.
One day we went to a water park, we have been wanting to go to for ages, it was amazing but incredibly busy, the queues for some big slide were nearly an hour. We were there from 10am until 6:30pm and guess what time Eric decided he did actually likes water slides? 5pm. So in the morning he was in a grump he only wanted to go in the wave pool or lazy river, so Dan went on the lazy river with him while Zac had the other 3 boys on the smaller water slides leaving me and Jude to queue for a big halfpipe one. While we were in the queue we saw Zac at times wondering around with only 2 kids, looking worried. Jude left the queue to see what the problem was, while I tried to work out the how to argue in French that my friend only left the queue for a minute please let her back in. We were almost at the front of the queue when Jude returned to say that Percy was missing. Which meant I had to leave the queue or everyone would judge me. Sorry, I mean I had to leave the queue because my child’s safety is my top priority. Turns out Percy couldn’t see Zac for one minute so had just wondered off to find Dan and was having a lovely time on the lazy river while poor Zac was panicking that he’d lost someone else’s child. The whole morning was a bit of a right off but the day redeemed itself in the afternoon, and everyone left happy.
On their last day they gave back their hire car and we were going to give them a lift to the airport in our bag car but as just Dan and Zac were driving on the way back from the hire car place a warning light came on our car AGAIN! Not the same one as on the previous blog. This was not a reliable car to take them on a fairly long journey to get a plane. We looked into trains which are also not very reliable and sort of annoying because you need to get to the station and then get a connecting bus from the town to the airport. So Dan made the embarrassing call to the family we were house sitting for. “Hey Matt you know you let me stay in your incredibly nice house, and have our friends over, please can I also borrow your car?” And being the incredibly nice family they are he said yeah sure no problems.
So they all got to the airport safely only to discover they were there at completely the wrong time! Not in the very bad way though they were 4 hours early instead of 2 hours and there is NOTHING to do in Carcassonne airport. But thankfully Dan was only 5 minutes down the road so he turned round and took them out to see the lovely city of Carcassonne, which was the original plan which got lost a bit in the stress of our car being an absolute zizi.
