Well, we made it to the last day of January. And thank goodness this week is over! I don’t normally wish away my weekends but as I write my diary entry this evening I’m just hoping I can stay up to midnight so I can have a cheeky drink before bed. A completely dry month, and no takeaways either. 2021 is such a walkover!
Ok so that was a little white lie. I know it can be infuriating when people post on social media about all the great things they have achieved during lockdown and in the good weeks I might have been a bit guilty of that myself. But this diary is all about an honest record of the highs and lows of lockdown and so when things have been hard I’ll tell you. And this week has been really hard. Home schooling went from being a real job to being an impossible undertaking and it felt like each day was a battle. None of us are sleeping well which leads to grouchy and snappy behaviour but the kids seem to be forgiving us that! But there were some moments of light in amongst the darkness and so here is a positive top 5 for you to enjoy:
1. This latter half of the week has been all about tits. Blue tits, coal tits, great tits and the like. I sincerely hope you didn’t think I meant anything else. This is not that kind of diary! This weekend was the Big Garden Birdwatch and the girls in my house were very keen to get involved. They both work together every day in the kitchen aka office aka classroom and have a perfect view of the garden. We are very blessed to have a lot of avian visitors so it seemed like a great thing to participate in. Steph got everything downloaded and ready for Saturday morning and even ordered a ridiculous amount of bird feed and fat balls – I’m not quite sure how the birds are expecting to be able fly after eating all of that! So they sat for their hour ready to count and unbelievably the birds all started playing hard to get. It was like me heading into a nightclub at university. An unmitigated disaster. We convinced ourselves that perhaps Sunday would be better so tried again and fortunately some did turn up. At least it wasn’t just one again, as that really would be like my university days – one big great tit! 
2. Many of you will know that E attends a weekly stage school class. With the pandemic her classes are now on Zoom and they learn a different song each week with a dance to go with it. The first week the teacher realised that having all the microphones live did not work at all(!) so they now all stay on mute unless they raise their hand to ask a question or share something. Very civilised I feel. So this week’s class was all about space and the song was about wishing upon a star and how you can be anything you want. The kids kept wanting to tell the teacher about various unrelated things like how their teeth had been falling out, or they had a new puppy. She did really well to make positive noises each time and tried to press on with the class. We reached the line in the song “a seed, a tree, a flower that grows and grows” and suddenly E has her hand up. The teacher notices and so I’m trying to unmute her without knowing what she was going to say. “Miss, are you sure flowers can grow in space? I’m not sure they can.” Well, that set a cat amongst the pigeons! The poor teacher tried to explain that the song was just make believe but clearly E is missing having a teacher to ask her probing questions of. Next week is all based around the movie Sing – can animals really talk? 
3. E has heard her parents talking this week about dry January. Clearly it’s been on our minds and we’ve been talking about it far too much with earshot of someone so impressionable! It was perhaps inevitable therefore that E would ask what it meant. I overheard Steph explaining. “No wine. No beer. No gin. No cider. No whisky. No cocktails.” E’s response was a cracker – “But then what’s left Mammy?” What indeed my darling daughter, what indeed. Maybe we should take this as a sign that we need to take more care as to the level of our lockdown drinking next month. But I’ll worry about that after I’ve topped up my alcohol level properly in February. 
4. I think because the week has been so tough, emotions have been heightened, and sadly that means there has been some very obvious emotional blackmail going on. The most obvious was E trying to negotiate extra pudding from me one evening, so explained that she loves Mammy 1000%, and Matthew 100% but Daddy only 20%. You’ll never guess what would happen to those percentages if I offered her another chocolate mousse… I’ll confess I’ve been guilty of it myself this weekend. I mean, who would send a video from downstairs to their wife who was upstairs, just showing their ultra cute kids explaining that their Daddy was really sorry and loved her a lot? It still amazes me when these things work but I really need to just stop putting myself in the bad books to begin with! 
5. We are starting a walking challenge at work in February where we have teams of 5 and you have to submit the number of steps you’ve taken each week to see which team can accumulate the most over the whole month. There’s been a really good take up and I think people are just keen for a bit of motivation to keep active as lockdown seems to be pretty draining at present. Of course Steph and I are on different teams so that’s going to be interesting given how competitive we both are. She thought she’d be sneaky on our family (extremely muddy) walk today and try and recruit E into going out every day to help get her step count up. Little did she know I’d already nobbled her and explained Daddy needed her support. Unfortunately the little turncoat was swayed by her Mammy and apparently she wants to be on her team because they work in the same room together. I’ve therefore signed up for the Brain Tumour Research February Challenge where you have to hit 10,000 steps each day for the month. I guess that means I’m contributing at least 280,000 steps to my team’s total but also I’m asking for any sponsorship you might be able to spare. The exercise definitely helps the mind and the body so no matter what your situation, make sure you get up and move and we can make it to the other side of this! 
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