This week has been a mixed sort of week. The highs came first, followed by the crash (almost literally), and then thankfully some more highs. So I’m sorry for disappearing so soon after starting this blog, but my head has been in a strange and busy place for most of the week…
The early part of the week was spent visiting friends, both old and new. A few of my friends had babies around the same time I had Squishy, so we visited them and marvelled at how tiny Squishy is even compared to babies younger than her. Not that there’s anything wrong with her – she’s absolutely perfect – she’s just petite. At 11 weeks she is just growing out of her newborn clothes, which is a huge difference from Twink who was a chunk from birth and was moving into 3-6 month clothes by this age!
Next Squishy and I went on an adventure to London to meet up with some new friends (well, I’d met some of them before, but only once or twice). There were loads of us, with hoards of children, and we all had a massive picnic in Coram’s fields. Squishy slept in her sling almost the whole time, just waking up once for a quick feed and then deciding she wanted to watch the world go by on the train going home. When we got home, Hubby decided to take us to our favourite pub for dinner and all in all life was good.
Then Friday happened.
It started so well…breakfast in Starbucks (we don’t eat out all the time…it’s just we hadn’t had time to buy any actual food, so it was a choice between going out for breakfast or eating pasta…) with Hubby who then popped into the office briefly before coming home to pick us up for Twink’s Water Babies lesson. It’s a real treat to see so much of him on a weekday, so we were having a lovely, happy time.
We were about a minute away from the swimming pool when a warning light came on in the car…then the steering went reeeaaaalllly heavy. Trying to move a three tonne car with no power steering and the engine working against you is not easy. So we pulled over. Turns out important parts in our car had snapped. For no reason whatsoever. Just one of those ‘it’s not fair’ type things. Grrrr. We managed to limp to the swimming lesson, but had to rush (slowly…there are a lot of roundabouts where I live and even Hubby found turning the car a challenge!) to the garage in the hopes our car could be fixed.
This car is Hubby’s baby (and he’s worked really hard to get a nice car), so he was more than a little stressed by the whole thing. Especially as we were just gearing up to buy it new brake pads and tyres. Even more annoyingly, the garage is tiny and in the middle of an industrial estate, so we had to stick Twink in the pushchair, Squishy in the sling and walk for miles to keep them happy and entertained, while we tried not to worry about how big a dent it would make in our bank balance.
In the end it wasn’t that big a dent…but then we had the 3 hour long bedtime from hell, just when we needed some wind down time! Twink just doesn’t seem to want to go to sleep, although he sleeps fine once he’s asleep.
In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t that bad. Our car broke down. It got fixed. There are bigger problems to have. Ironically I was also supposed to be buying a car this weekend (we currently share), so we spent Saturday looking for one, but all the cars we can afford seem to be damaged…so we have to wait until we have more money…and I have to share a car for a few more months.
We made up for the stress today by going for a picnic at the safari park again, where Twink again slept through the animal drive through bit, but had huge fun in the soft play area, and was even persuaded to eat an ice cream this time!