Good morning! I’ve actually managed to write my post so it’s ready to go out on Monday morning this week! The boys are back to school today after a very relaxing and chilled out two weeks off. I think the 7 weeks until they get another holiday is going to feel like a long time, especially after being at home for so much of the last 12 months!

We had another quiet week of not doing very much after the Easter weekend. We managed to get some more work done in the garden. Barry and I had to carry 2 tonnes of soil from the top of our garden to the bottom just using buckets! You can see our garden in this post – it’s big and the steps are quite steep in places too. According to my FitBit I went up and down 48 floors, and my calf muscles are only just recovering!

My mum and dad came over this weekend too. I bought the boys a swing to go in the big tree at the bottom of the garden but we didn’t have a long enough ladder to actually put it up so it was Dad to the rescue. Toby is loving the swing so far, Gabe’s a bit more hesitant because it’s a bit tricky for him to get on it at the moment. I’m sure he’ll get the hang of it soon though, he just needs to grow a bit!

While they were here my dad also did a bit of his favourite past time – chopping things down! He brought his chainsaw and cut some of the lower over hanging branches off from near the swing, and also a few other over grown shrub things. It was good to get it done but did leave quite a lot of debris all over the astroturf to I had to get the broom out, and Gabe decided he was going to give me a hand…

If I’m honest, our one regret about the garden is getting astroturf on this section at the bottom. I thought it would be good for the boys to play on, and less hassle than actual grass but it takes more effort to look after than a lawn would! It probably doesn’t help that it’s under a massive tree so there’s always leaves and fallen branches that need tidying up, and all the birds sit in the tree and then poo all over the grass! And it autumn we spent so much time with the leaf vacuum trying to keep it clear. We’ll probably keep it for a few more years though, now we’ve spent so much money on it, before we replace it with something a bit easier to maintain!

Anyway, as well as spending some time in the garden, we managed to meet my brother, and my mum and dad in a country park that’s about half way between us all, while Barry was working on Friday. It was fairly busy but big enough to keep our distance from other people. We took a packed lunch and then had a walk around the park. We tried to introduce the boys to geocaching but despite finding the location of three different caches we couldn’t actually find any of the containers! I think someone must have taken them, or moved them because it seems very unusual that we couldn’t find any of them.

Toby and Gabe enjoyed using the phone app, and my dad’s GPS device thing to find the locations anyway, and it was nice just to have a day out and something approaching normality!

I hope you’ve all enjoyed the Easter holidays so far – I know a lot of people have got another week off so hopefully the sun will shine and we can all make the most of the shops and things opening up again. I’m getting my hair cut on Tuesday for the first time since September and I can’t wait!

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.