Its been the first full week of term and we’re all getting back into the routines and rhythm of daily life. January always seems such a long month so we’ve been trying to plan something different at the weekends to give us something to look forward to.

My week has been very work focussed and my day off was spent doing a long run as part of my half marathon training and then simply pottering around at home doing some life admin. It is good to have a day like this, its been a long time since my last and my diary looks quite busy in the coming weeks too. I ran as early as I could when the children left for school, it was a rare daylight run as I generally run very early in the morning or at night so in winter these are dark runs. I took advantage of the light to do the lanes, it was a clear bright blue sky and the sunshine was melting the frosted fields, it was an absolutely stunning run. As it was my longest run for nearly 9 months, I did warm down and stretch after and it worked, there were no pain or niggles.

It was decided that this weekend, we would spend some special time with a child each, I had our son, Mr S our daughter. Its nice to have this 1:1 attention and the children had the choice on what they wanted to do. Although Little Miss had a session at the farm, she then went shopping with Mr S. Little Man chose to visit one of his favourite museums, The Aviation museum. It is just a giant playground for him, its all outdoors and is a field of planes where you can climb into the cockpits of all the planes on display and be a pilot. It is also right next to the airport so you can view close up, the planes coming in and going out. Its so close you can wave to the pilots! After a morning here, we went to the neighbouring town for lunch and a little wander around the shops, although not too many shops as my son isn’t too keen! The final thing my son asked for was to visit the Smyths toy superstore on the way home which we did although he did feel he was a bit grown up for a lot of things now. It was a lovely SaM day, this is our special name for our son and mum day, perfectly finished off with a curry and all the trimmings for dinner with us all back together around the kitchen table.

Its another ordinary week next week, I need to pop over to ‘big’ town on my day off for an appointment so it’ll be nice to potter around too and see if the Spring stock is in shops yet. I do worry if it’ll be quite eerie now the big M&S has closed and there’ll sadly be no food treats to take home which has always been a thing if we were in town. We also need to plan our weekend surprise next weekend, I’m wondering if we can combine a trip out and some parkrun tourism, we’ll see what the week holds.