Finally, I have something different to write about this week! Last week we took a half term holiday from school work, and Barry had a few days off work too. It was my birthday on Thursday which we celebrated with afternoon tea at home, and on Friday we all left the house together for the first time in over 10 weeks.

I had a lovely birthday even if we were just at home like every other day. I had a lie in then got up to open some cards. I did get some presents but I had organised them all myself so there wasn’t really anything to open – I was happy to be getting exactly what I wanted though!

I usually make myself a birthday cake and we go out for a family meal but this year we had afternoon tea delivered from a local tearoom and it was amazing! I bought my mum a voucher for the same place for Mother’s Day so I can’t wait for them to reopen so we can go and use it.

On Friday we all got in the car (for the first time since I think the weekend before lock down officially started) and drove about half an hour away to a local hill. We had a lovely walk through the woods, and then climbed the hill. It’s not very high but given how flat the Fylde coast is we could see for miles from the top. You can see some photos I took at the top in my May Me & Mine post here.

We walked about four and a half miles in the end and the boys did really well, especially considering they’ve hardly walked further than the bottom of the garden for two and a half months! There was a bit of moaning but we all really enjoyed getting out and into the countryside again.

I took this picture of Toby when we stopped to let some people coming the other way down the path pass us and he took the opportunity to have a little sit in this tree…

There were quite a few other people around but everyone was walking so it was quite easy to keep our distance.

For some reason I didn’t manage to get any pictures of Gabe on our walk so instead I’m using this one of him reading to Daddy at bedtime. Most of the time the boys have the same bedtime stories but at the moment I’m reading Kid Normal with Toby and Gabe wasn’t interested in hearing it so he has a couple of short stories with Daddy instead.

That’s all from me for this week anyway, I hope you’re keeping safe and staying sane, and I’ll be back next week with another Living Arrows post.

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.