I’m writing this late which isn’t great for my blogging intentions, but at least I am writing it!
It has been a week of sunshine and showers, literally and metaphorically. The glorious weather broke which meant a change in tempo, although it came back again towards the end of the week. Our nanny returned two afternoons a week – the excitement of the children was great to see, a different person! And then this has resulted in much pompom making after she brought two pompom makers. In between showers, the children have been rescuing and attempting to nurse back to health a poorly bee, unsuccessfully but she died in a flower bower; collecting snails from the garden and generally investigating the natural world. There have also been a lot of cardboard boxes entering the house which have now been put to good use as dens. Frankly, 12 weeks in the idea of curling up in a box with an audio book seems pretty appealing.
I felt like I had lost my lockdown/work/kids mojo this week. Just felt relentless and tired without any sense of when things would change. Also I have some weird hives thing going on by my eyes which has got much worse and that is not helping my mood. And its been another relentless week attempting to plan timetabling for next year and write business cases for more resource which I feel worried about. I realised that I had been putting off writing the summer fun list (it needs rebranding says Mike!) so I set an intention to definitely do that this weekend, and carve out some time for some fun stuff. Even if we can’t go very far we can still do things and embrace this time. I have to be able to take a breath and accept and try not to get overwhelmed with the frustration that everything is so up in the air. Hopefully planning some leave and time will help. It feels that lockdown was easier in some ways but now this strange half lockdown without knowing when things will change is harder. And so many of the relieving of restrictions do not impact on us – drive-in cinemas are open, er ok!
In more positive news, Sylvia’s work this week focused on Black Lives Matter and she has done a whole series of projects and artwork on this. One of which is given below, we took time to watch a film about systematic injustice together in the USA and talked more about the impact of this and what we could do.