Hello! Happy New Year and welcome to Week 1 of Living Arrows for 2020. I’ve been writing these weekly posts since the start of 2014 so I’m now heading into the seventh year of sharing a photo of each of the boys and a little bit about what we’ve been up to during the week.

Considering how quickly time was flying before Christmas the last week seems to have lasted for ages! Although we’ve enjoyed spending lots of family time together I think Toby and Gabe are definitely ready to get back to the routine of school!

Last week we had a trip down to North Wales to see our friends; all the boys enjoyed a day of playing together, especially now they all love Minecraft. Toby still seems to enjoy watching other people play on Youtube more than actually playing himself though!

Barry was back at work on Friday so after several requests from Gabe we went to McDonalds for lunch before going to a local play centre. It’s a bit of a mixture with a wooden play tower in the middle of the space and small world play stuff around the edges.

We’ve been to the play centre quite a few times before – it’s quite small so I can just sit in the cafe area and the boys are happy to play by themselves for the most part. This time they spent most of the afternoon dressed as Police Chief Gabe and Builder Toby, playing on the little ride on toys that they are much too big for really!

It was a nice way to finish off the holidays, and it might be the last time I can take both boys there as Toby is almost at their height limit! He seems to have had a bit of a growth spurt lately as all his trousers are looking to short too.

Anyway, I hope you all had a lovely second week of the holidays and the return to school and / or work isn’t too stressful this week. I’ll be back next week with another Living Arrows post but for now I’m going to leave you with a little tradition of mine – the first ever Living Arrows picture of Toby from January 2014, and then the first one including Gabe (even though you can’t really see him) the week after he was born in August 2015…

This is my ninth year taking part in this linky celebrating childhood, based on a poem by Kahlil Gibran, “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth” .

If you’d like to see the rest of my Living Arrows posts you can find them all here.