After the surprise Ofsted inspection last week this was a time to simply reflect and process all that has happened in the past few weeks. I am an organised person and like to know what is in my dairy and plan accordingly, so the unexpected can throw me a little. Interestingly it never happens at the time, I take it all in my stride and am cool and confident, its after that I feel wobbly!

It was nice to have my day off this week, its been a while. It was a day to catch up on family admin and Mr S and I had an online appointment for one of the children. I also packed my and my daughters’ bags for our weekend away at my parents. The boys also were away, they went to my father in law’s to help him with some jobs and visit Castle Combe for the cars. They actually got away earlier than expected, as Covid has closed my son’s class for a few days so they took advantage of this and got to spend more time with Grandad. I did leave work early on Friday, well not really early, I didn’t do a couple of overtime hours which I normally do, so I was able to pick up my daughter en route at the end of her school day. We managed to avoid rush hour traffic and made it to my parents just after 5, which was impressive. By arriving early it just seemed to make the weekend feel like a proper mini break.

Our big day was Saturday, I was keen for a bit of parkrun tourism and visited the parkrun in Clevedon. I had hoped to run the new one in Weston Super Mare but the high tides cancelled it. Anyone who knows WSM knows that the sea is rarely in and it is normally so far away from the prom that there was a certain irony of the cancellation. I’ll do it next time I’m down but I really enjoyed Clevedon, its a lovely course around the park and up to the prom and to the pier. An added bonus was unexpectedly and without trying I got a parkrun PB by 30 seconds. Since starting parkrun, I have managed to knock 5 minutes off my parkrun PB. However, in a very telling statistic of how tough our new home parkrun is, I was 9 minutes quicker than my previous Saturday’s time on the brutally, hilly course.

Following the parkrun and quick shower and change, we headed off to the big shopping mall with our lists. It was an experience … it was quite hard to find something for my daughter to wear to a 90th birthday lunch but we have a jumpsuit which seemed a fair compromise. We also had to get some new underwear and I had arranged an appointment at M&S, that’s a maelstrom of teen angst and anxiety on a Saturday afternoon, fair play to the M&S lingerie assistants for making the teen girls feel better about their changing bodies. I did well on my lists, but oh my goodness the queues in shops, they simply didn’t have the staff. We did get an amazing tea from M&S for Saturday night an Indian feast with all the trimmings, I love sitting around a table with good food, good company and witty conversation.

I added a couple of photos not mentioned so far in this post. On my walk to work this week, I noticed the blue and yellow flowers for Ukraine at the beach, On my parkrun, I also passed a peace tree decorated with blue and yellow knitted hearts and crochet flowers, both displays were beautiful and moving to see.

I have also started to wear a few summer dresses, although this week, layered up with jumpers. Last week’s sunshine is a distant memory, its been a very cold week. I am loving a Celia Birtwell print dress I have bought in Next. Its a cheesecloth 70s style maxi dress and is gorgeous, its my new go to dress.

We’re still at school this week, well sort of my son has a few more days off for the Covid class closure and then an Inset day so he has a very short week. My daughter and I have our normal week and then its Easter! We’re at home for the holiday but family are visiting to celebrate my father-in-law’s 90th, so I have a few creative activities to do this week ready to dress the house for the celebrations.