Living out a suitcase

It’s the end if my 7th week of living out a suitcase and it’s roughly 1 million days since the kids broke up from school. I’m currently staying with some very generous friends in France waiting to be not homeless again which will hopefully happen on Wednesday. In my bedroom here I have a box of spices, a folder of all my important documents and some finger puppets. In the garage there’s winter clothes we needed in England but we don’t need here. In the car is some suitcases of Dans clothes and some camping chairs. A few miles away is a storage unit full of stuff we haven’t needed since April but still want, like furniture and skis and a sewing machine. In another house 45 mins away is some stuff in a fridge from when Dan lived there for a few weeks. In the house we’re going back to on Wednesday is our most useful stuff that we do need but can’t get to because it’s an occupied air bnb. And in my parents loft in England is a load of stuff we chose not take to France 3 years ago, but every time we visit we take something back. This time it was finger puppets (for teaching English) and the board game Risk.

Every day the position and contents of the bags change, because the room we’re staying in is an office in the day time and so I need to move the stuff I need out of it. And then every time I need a bag to go out with I have to empty my hand luggage bag somewhere so that I have a more empty bag if I’m going to the supermarket. So we’re forever losing stuff and re-buying stuff we already own somewhere. 

I was going a little bit crazy earlier in the week with the bag chaos, and general lack of sleep, and the fact I’ve not really had a moment to myself since the beginning of July.  

I was trying to plan English lessons but my folders are in the air bnb I can’t get into. It was raining but I wanted to get out of the house with the kids so I planned to go to the library in the next village, but the coats were in the garage because I thought we wouldn’t need them, and then I got very wet trying to open the garage door. Then my phone couldn’t charge in the car for me to use the sat-nav because there was water in the charging hole so I was rapidly running out of battery, and then the library which my friend said had very easy parking actually had zero parking because there was a big market on. And it was impossible to navigate the tiny French streets that were not made for big cars like ours. People were watching me trying to manoeuvre out of a very tiny street where traffic was backing up behind me. Eventually I managed to park miles away, and walk in.

In the library my German friend Marie phoned me. We had arranged to meet at the beach but had to change our plans due to the rain, and she was ringing to make a new plan. I told her I was having a bit of a breakdown and then embarrassingly I actually cried. She was super nice and said, “come round we’ll make you pancakes,” and she made the most delicious apple and cinnamon pancakes while the boys played on the Switch. And then they made me take a nap, which was so nice of them.

A few times people have done that for me when I had newborn babies, and I try and do it for other new mums when I can. If you ever go round to see a new mum probably the best gift you can give her is to hold the baby and make her nap.

I first met Marie 3 years ago when she put a post on the English speakers of Perpignan Facebook group asking if anyone wanted to play board games with her and her girlfriend Aurore (who is French but they speak together in English). Since then we have met up nearly every Wednesday to play games and they have introduced us to loads of new games. We’ve all been on a bumpy up and down ride navigating being new to Perpignan since then, but it’s been so nice to consistently see them and catch up on life together. 

They are moving to Montpellier next week because Aurore, who is studying law, is moving onto her masters degree which she fancied doing in a different city. They’ve had a really stressful time recently with their car breaking down while they have been trying to find a new apartment in Montpellier, and they just managed to get one only about two weeks before they needed to move there. Today Dan is helping them move as much stuff as possible to the new place. But it has not gone smoothly because our car had a flat tyre. I dont know why we have had so many flat tyres and general car problems this year but I think it might be time for a whole new car.

We are staying with Matt and Anais, and their two very cute kids aged 5 and 2. They very kindly had Dan for a while when me and the boys were in England, and now they are hosting us all so that me and Dan don’t have to be apart for any longer. They have a really nice house with a pool that the boys are loving. It’s sort of the party house, they like to host, I think the first party we went to here might be when they made a Christmas dinner for about 25 people. This week it was Matt’s birthday and he had a sort of surprise party joint with another friend, but he knew about the party for the other friend, so really the only surprise was there were some ballon’s that said 35 and he got a cake. 

The house is closer to Dan’s work than our house so he can cycle into work and leave me with the car and I can go to the beach which with the boys which is only 15 minutes away from here (whereas its 25 or 30 from our old house). Apart from the rainy day the weather has been lovely, in the high 20s not in the high 30s like it was a few weeks ago. Our closest beach from our old house was Canet, which is quite touristy and you have to pay to park in the summer months. Just north of there is Le Barcarès which our the closest beach while we’re staying in this house, we’ve been several times to there too. But I found 2 new beaches that I’ve never been to before by just failing to find the Barcarès beach we normally go to. And one of them was such a cute mini beach right next to a jet ski place, so we could watch some people whizzing around on jet skis in the distance.

Yesterday we were invited to two pool parties! Which has not surprisingly never happened to me in the uk. We went to one of a couple we know who were celebrating the wife’s 60th birthday with a bbq round their lovely pool. But because of that we missed out on the pool party that was happening in the house that we are staying in. Matt got a slushi machine for his birthday and made at least 4 different kids of slushis at the party that we unfortunately missed out on. We arrived back as people were leaving but the kids still got in the pool, for their second swim of the day. For homeless people we really are living our best lives.

The 60th birthday pool.

I am looking forward to the end of living out a suitcase and school starting back though. I don’t love the air bnb but I am grateful that it meant we could stay in our village and the kids can continue to go to their school. We have seen another house for rent in the village that we are going to try and get if we can. It’s available from October and so we’re trying to do everything we can to prove that we are good people and we can afford the rent and are flexible to move whenever. The landlord is not great at getting back to us, and he said he had 200 enquiries in 24 hours of putting up the advert, but he is a friend of a friend and he has said we can view it at some point so I hope we’re in with a good chance.

To all the exhausted parents at the end of the holidays, we’re on the home straight now. I was going to put something else about parents who work all summer because I know its a privilege to get the summer off with your kids, and the people who homeschool because schools cannot provide for the needs of their kids. but then I have to mention people who don’t have children who can never take time off in the school holidays because the parents take those dates, and aliens who’s had a hard time this summer because they live on another planet where the summer holidays are 45 earth years long. Well done everyone!

96 Friends

I’m nearing the final week of my 6 week tour, and my people count is up to 96 people that I have intentionally seen. (This does include the children of friends, some of which I had little interaction with.)

Dan just arrived in the UK and we will now be spending the final week in Preston to see his family. Unfortunately I’ve already seen them all, so they won’t count as extra people and I’m unlikely to make it to 100 people which would have been cool. One of his sisters is pregnant so maybe I can count her as 2 people? If she gave birth a few weeks early and it’s surprise quads I could reach my goal. But a surprise quad premature birth is probably not what you want at a family BBQ to be honest.

Since I last blogged I’ve been to a fake Centre Parcs near Blackpool called Ribby Hall, with my extended family. They had a little zoo and a crazy golf and a swimming pool and boating lake on site. The highlight of the zoo was the anteater, such a mad creature that poked its long nose through the bars while we and another family just laughed at it. 

The weekend after that we went to my cousin Lauren’s wedding. The boys didn’t come, I dropped them off at Dan’s parents. Weddings are kind of boring for kids and kids have been known to ruin weddings. Hopefully it was nice for my parents in law to have some time with the boys. The wedding was very beautiful, very fancy compared to my own wedding which accidentally resembled a school fete. But very emotional and personal as well. I didn’t really know much about my cousin’s partner and how they got together, but it was a lovely story. They were friends at uni and then housemates for years before they got together. Just a beautiful day in a lovely venue with very nice food, and some fun dancing at the end. It was nice to catch up with family. 

It was easy to see the Marshall descendants because we all had the same curly hair. It’s like they didn’t even need to ask, “bride or groom?” the hair gave it away.

Curly hair boomers

Curly hair millennials

 It was really nice catching up with other family there too, particularly two other cousins who were there, and are just both really interesting people. One of them, Marie, I’m trying to persuade to get into stand up. Whenever she tells stories they’re really good, and some stuff in her life is not going well right now, which is the perfect time to get into stand up. No one wants to hear stories when your life is all going great. 

I got to see my old housemate from my uni days Josh, with his fairly newly adopted boys who were a similar age to mine and got on well. It was super nice to see him as a Dad. I’ve always seen him around kids (working with, them not just lurking in playgrounds) so it was lovely and very natural to see him smashing being a Dad. He had been at a festival in the south and drove up in a big van full of crazy props and circus stuff, to where he lives near the Lake District, and stopped off on the way to visit me for a BBQ at my parents house.

After that I did a trip to the North East. I saw my sister in Leeds and my friend Lydia who got the train down from Gateshead to York with her two kids, aged 5 and 3. We went to the railway museum where you could see some big old trains from the olden days and there was one you could go inside, the Japanese bullet train. 

Eric was unfortunately feeling unwell, even though he was fine when we left that morning. He had a temperature, said he was very sleepy and wanted to go home, which would have been a massive shame given that my friend had made the effort to come all the way to York for this day. Obviously we didn’t have calpol on us but Lydia did have paracetamol. Which we crushed up and put in a ham sandwich. After a lot of bribery Eric ate a bit of the disgusting ham sandwich and he did improve a bit. We didn’t see a lot of York, but we did find a canal boat that was selling ice creams, which is fun but not as fun as if an ice cream was selling canal boats.

It was nice to hang out with my sister Jo in Leeds, but I can’t say it was relaxing. They have a two year old and a four year old and are in the middle of house renovations. The boys really loved their collection of board games though and wanted to play some very complex ones, which was not easy in a house of tiny people and renovations. One highlight was getting to make pancakes dressed as a shark. I didn’t have a dressing gown and the shark was the perfect over pyjama outfit. 

I’ve been enjoying seeing people in their own homes and seeing how different people parent and asking couples what they do for fun, and what they do on weekends in their family. The boys have also noticed that not everyone does things the same as us. Especially that lots of kids are allowed to get up earlier than them.

On the way back from Leeds we went to Dan’s sister’s baby shower. It was really nice and different to other baby showers I’ve been to. She had it in a community hall and she had a big table where you could make something out of clay and another table of flowers where you could make a bouquet of flowers to take with you, and some very delicious cakes. I tried to make a clay pot that was a cylinder but the hole in the middle was star shaped. It accidentally ended up being the perfect size and shape for an ash tray.

My next little road trip was to Staffordshire to see Abi and Jon and their girls who are the same age as my boys. We hung out a lot when they were little and we both were in Liverpool, and for a while we had a childcare arrangement. Both the older kids were in school and so I looked after their youngest with Eric a day a week, and then they had Eric a day a week so we could both have some child free time in the week. I highly recommend getting a deal like that if you’re in the toddler stage. It’s not twice the work to have an extra kid for a few hours, it actually kind of makes you put a bit more effort into doing some nice activities with them and your kid gets to bond with another kid and then you get time off, to do things like sit in a silent house.

Unfortunately my boys can now hardly remember their girls. Eric does have a great memory for what toys other families have though and asked me are they the family with the lego train, which they were. When we first arrived Abi said the neighbours were having a party next door and we were invited. So this was the second stranger’s birthday party we would be crashing since arriving in England (see my previous blog for the story of the first one). This was a BBQ with a bucking bronco and the family were so lovey and welcoming, getting us burgers and trying to speak to us in French, because initially they thought we were French. Bad French in a Birmingham accent is my absolute favourite kind of French, because it really makes me feel better about my own level of French.

Since moving to the midlands Abi and Jon have got a big fluffy dog called Dolly who we took for a mad long late night walk through the forest that was really fun. If it was just me and the kids they would have got bored and moaned straight away, but with kids their own age they loved it. 

I noticed all the families I’ve visited with kids the same age as ours are calling their parents “Mum” and “Dad” now not “Mummy” and “Daddy” and they just said it happened naturally. But I think it’s not happening naturally with my kids because they don’t see other English kids, so I’m intentionally trying to phase out Mummy and Daddy now. If you get to an adult and you still say Mummy and Daddy then you’re posh. I don’t know why this is true but it is. Why don’t we all call everyone by their actual names that is a lot more logical. It makes absolutely no sense when you’re in a park and someone shouts, “Mum” and everyone looks round.

I was really pleased to get a visit from Helen and Esther while I was at my parents. They are both good friends that had visited me in France and they’re both paddle board kind of people. Helen sometimes even does yoga on a paddle board and they both swim in ridiculously cold water for fun. When I started planning this trip I was happy that I would be able to see 5 of my 6 bridesmaids. Helen was the one I wasn’t going to get to see because she lives all the way down south and it is far, but it was really lovely of her to make the trek up north. Next time it’s definitely my turn to go south.

Helen and Esther

Me and Helen

I picked Dan up from Liverpool airport on Saturday afternoon, squeezing in seeing one more Liverpool family (the Ravens) that morning. They have 3 boys who are giant compared to my midget sons. Their youngest is 5 and was only a tiny bit smaller than Eric, who is 8, and their oldest, who is 11, was loads taller than me.

I’d been apart from Dan for 5 weeks, the longest I’d been apart since we’ve been married. To be honest I didn’t really miss him on week one, I was seeing all the other people that I miss all the time. But I did really miss him by the end. No one gets me like he does, and things just feel a bit weird like I’m not quite a full person.

We’re now in Preston. You never really expect to be holidaying in Preston, but it’s sort of the unexpected side effect of loving a Mediterranean holiday destination so much that you move there. Prepare to take your holidays in weird places forever.

Today we ate a full english and went to charity shops, that’s really the top things you can do while holidaying in Preston. Tomorrow we’ll take a day trip to the lake district because that’s the other good thing you can do in Preston: Go somewhere else.

Next week we’ll be doing more of living in random other people’s houses, but in France.