Since I last wrote Dan has entered his 40s and Eric also celebrated being 9. Dan is a very different person to me, and he didn't feel the need to invite everyone he has ever known to attach wheels to their feet in a warehouse in Wigan to celebrate becoming 40. He decided that as it was the school holidays we should all go away to Spain and we choose to go Valencia which is 6 hours south from us. Normally when we go to Spain we just cross the border to buy cheap milk and fuel and jelly and decaf teabags (did you know you can't buy jelly or decaf teabags in France?), occasionally we go to Girona or Barcelona but we've never been down further than Barcelona since living here.
But before his actual birthday I did want him to celebrate with more people, it's been a really difficult time for him and I wanted him to know that people do care about him. So I messaged one of his friends from work and asked her to invite the people he liked, and not the new boss that has recently made him redundant. I also invited a few other people. It was very easy to organise because I just told him we were going out for a meal and got a babysitter and then everyone just turned up there before us. I planned it in a food hall thing in Thuir, because when I started planning it we were about to offer on a house in Thuir, and I was just really into Thuir, and it's not far from us and I'm lazy. But since the beginning of the planning of this party and now a lot has changed.
After finding out that Dan had lost his job and we therefore can't get a mortgage and offer on this house we liked, we started looking into what we could do with about half of the original budget. We had this idea about doing up a wreck of a house, because Dan will get paid some benefits for a while and he would have the time to do something. So we went to see a house in Thuir that needed work. In 20 years from now I can imagine my kids telling a therapist about this day. So we arrived at this house, and Eric says "it looks like a prison" it's in the old town, which are little tiny streets made before cars that you would never want to drive down. This house you can't see from the street, you can just see a wide alleyway that's gated off the house is behind the two next door neighbours so it's kind of worse than a terrace. You go through the ally and you end up in a court yard which is very overlooked by the balcony of one of the houses you can see from the street.
The house had 3 floors but the whole first floor had no windows and no working electrics so it was just completely black. The other two floors were a wreck too, no one had lived there for a long time there was no electricity, everything was dark and dusty and broken. We straight away realised we could not live here, even if you could imagine it all done up the space was weird. The boys had only seen nice houses up until this point, so it was a bit of a shock. Percy started getting angry saying "why has someone left rubbish here? If someone is going to look round a house at least clean it up!" at the end the estate agent went to shake all of our hands but Percy refused. The poor woman was only doing her job, but Percy seemed to be blaming her for everything that had gone wrong. Poor lady!
So it was probably for the best that we left that boys at home with a babysitter on Dan's birthday, as they were probably fed up with any mention of Thuir. Along with Dan's work colleagues our board game friends who we used to see every week but have since moved to Montpellier kindly made the trip over to celebrate Dan. They also stayed over at ours after but Dan didn't know that was going to happen and was actually impressed that I was changing the duvet cover on the sofa bed, when he thought it was for no reason and I'm just a tidy person.
I did imagine the surprise when he walked in to be a bit more of a big moment when he realised that in amongst all the self doubt and turmoil that he was loved by so many people. But it was a bit anti-climatic he just said "oh there are my colleagues" hopefully he was happy about it. I think he had a good time, it was nice to meet some of his colleagues that I haven't met, although the table did dive quite quickly into a French speaking end an and English speaking end with Dan in the middle. It was a nice relaxed semi outdoor food hall place where you just go up and order your own stuff, which I really like because then you don't have to do a awkward bill split at the end.
A little later in the night our friend Flick arrived who had driven 9 hours from Paris that day! (not specifically for the party but still I'm impressed she could do anything after driving that far) Her 9 year old daughter sat down at the English end of the table and got right in with the adult conversations asking funny questions and bringing a fun perspective to the discussions. Dan's colleague Charlotte had gone all out and made people sign a book for him filled with photos and memories. It was a lovely night.
The holiday was fun too, we first stopped in Montserrat Abby which is a monastery place you can get to by cable car. Once you get up there's a whole village to explore, with a cathedral and gallery/museum. Unfortunately we didn't explore them because we didn't want to pay extra for them. I just feel like you should have to pay to go in a religious building or a gallery, but if you have to I'm more on board with paying to go to a gallery. The cable car was fun though and the views from the top were great.
We stayed one night in Tarragona/ Salou in a fairly budget hotel where we really got our money's worth by using the pool and using the buffet breakfast to the max. There was every kind of breakfast you can imagine and some others that you can't imagine, like a thing that looked liked white jelly and was possibly cheese. Who knows what that was. but there was a man that cooked pancakes and omelettes to order and there was a churro machine! The kids were delighted to eat churros for breakfast.
In Valencia we stayed in a air bnb apartment. We went to a massive science/ space museum and we went kayaking in the sea on the morning of Dan's actual birthday. The city was really nice and we found possibly the coolest play park we had ever been to. We went to this park which was based on the story guliver's world. there was just a giant man lying down that the kids could climb all over. an adult would maybe be the size of his nose. There were lots of bits you could slide down and climb up, it was great for big kids, ours are a bit old for parks now aged 11 and 9 but this was perfect. The drive back was a bit less fun because we did it all in one day and it took 6 hours.
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| coolest map image ever |
We had one day to get the house sorted before Eric's 9th birthday. He had 4 friends over for party food we made a pick a mix station so they could choose a bag of sweets and then we all went to the cinema to watch the new Mario film. I drove 6 kids in our big car and Dan followed behind on his motobike. Eric had a lovely day he is a massive mario fan so finding out he could see the film as his birthday treat was very exciting for him. Almost all his gifts were either Pokemon or Mario themed.
It was his second birthday in this house and it was a little sad because pervious birthdays in the old house have been so much easier because we had outdoor space. I also feel a bit weird about it because people we don't know well don't know the whole story of how we ended up in this weird house, and a few times people have been a bit confused as to why we live in a worst house than before. But hopefully we will get to leave this house this year, there's been a few interesting developments which I will share when they have developed further.
Thanks if you've been watching my "attic to chateau" series, (videos where I show my art from my weird attic bedroom) a few interesting things have come out of that too, and I will share that soon.
Thanks for reading!
