AT HOME IN LOCKDOWN

This post is part of the “travel” linkup, all about home!

One blessing of being stuck at home in lockdown has been the weather. Since mid-March when we found ourselves stuck firmly at home I can only remember 4 or 5 days of rain. There were no April showers, no smells of petrichor. Instead we have enjoyed the most glorious spring, with a few spectacular heatwaves thrown in, it’s like Earth breathed again when the pollution stopped and it’s been rewarding us!

The other blessing has been living somewhere beautiful, remote and cut off. We have felt very safe and protected from what has been going on, raising our eyebrows if we see a car we don’t recognise come through the village! Although I do wonder now whether the virus rattled round our commuter village far earlier in the year before we understood or realised?

The blessings of good weather and surroundings have been a damn good thing, because home was until last weekend was no blessing and it has been hard to stay positive. Coated in brick dust, kitchen-less (it still is actually) and with our downstairs cramped into one ‘everything’ room without an oven or a sink or a dishwasher! Being mid-way through a house extension, working full time and parenting full time, and dealing with the stress of pandemic-living has been pretty awful. On the day of lockdown our builders boarded up the back of our house for a few weeks – we didn’t have windows!

It got to the point recently, that after 8 weeks of lockdown (and not having had a kitchen since 25th February) I was sobbing away into the bath as I did the washing up one evening because the builder forgot to temporarily plumb in my dishwasher… That I’d asked for 100 times! Thankfully Mr P had a sensible conversation with him and the critical nature of my polite request was finally understood and fixed at 9am on a Saturday morning!

My mum sent us a copy of Julia Donaldson’s ‘squash and a squeeze’ a few weeks ago and it’s the book of the pandemic for me, especially as we now start to get our space again!

Enough of our house woes, we can now use the big space at evenings and weekends. And thankfully we live somewhere beautiful and through these past few months we have still pinched ourselves daily. Being stuck at home 100% of the time isn’t so bad! We are so grateful we made the move here three years ago, now more than ever.

We’ve seen baby cows and baby sheep. And the little man has yelled ‘hiya doos’ at the cows and roared ‘bye bye baas’ at the sheep each day. We have even made friends with ‘cluck cluck’ although I’m not sure how friendly she is as she has a tendency to come towards us at pace! ‘Hiya chiiiicks’ was squealed with excitement last week when a box of them were pushed towards him in a socially distanced fashion!

We know there are ‘ducks in there’, there being the ‘fish-pool’ which is actually a babbling brook! We’ve also paddled in the brook and taken our little boat on a rope sailing. But mostly we throw stones and grass in and wave ‘bye bye’!

We’ve seen every stage of growth and flowering of the bluebells. There’s a beautiful copse just off the Watercress Way in walking distance from home with no nearby parking. It’s a treat to have untouched and undiscovered bluebells and a little toddler-size path that winds through them!

We’ve got a little vegetable patch and things are growing happily in the garden. We also have a hosepipe that waters us as much as it does the plants when it finds its way into little hands!

We have seen all the tractors there are to see, it isn’t something we tend to miss as B can hear them a mile off! We know the farmers so well now from our daily walks that we even get honked at when we wave!

We’ve walked and we’ve biked and we’ve triked and we’ve run. Most days now we get taken for a walk by our 22 month old son who runs about 1km without stopping, has a little rest carried on shoulders for a while then demands ‘down’ to charge off again!

We didn’t let no kitchen get in the way of Tuesday baking days. And we’ve done our best with packet mixes and our new combi oven, doing our mixing up in the ‘everything’ room!

We’ve worked hard learning to blow a dandelion clock apart! Some days it is frustrating, but other days it is just so darn cute! And I think by the time we get to his 2nd birthday he’ll be able to blow his candles out!

We’ve loved watching the fields come alive with crops. I used to notice how much the view changed by the week, but this spring we’ve seen the growth and the colours change by the day. Seasons really are always on the change!

We’ve been so grateful for our garden views. When the stud wall came down a couple of weeks ago and we could use the new doors and enjoy the views, the stress washed away. Having daylight back, having the view back, it’s made such a difference and we can see it in the little ones character too.

We have revelled in paddling pool life, since we can’t go on holiday this year, we’ve made the most of the hot days by staying put!

It might not look like it, as we don’t take photos of it, but we have also done a tonne of work. Work hasn’t let up despite being flexible. Thankfully we have been able to work in an agile manner around childcare but that does mean we have worked every single day since lockdown began to make it work. Nursery reopening today is something I’ve been dreaming of for a while, even with the risks that I’m not sure I understand fully. It worries me I don’t know all the families B will be with and what kind of social sensibility they employ. And it makes me sad we will have to continue to shield from my parents who I used to see so much of. But I know we have a responsibility for many reasons to go back. We are apparently low risk and chances are from either commuting or our builders, we had the nasty bug as one of many bugs and illnesses in the winter.

I’ll miss the little one like crazy and have been dreading today’s drop off, so much tougher for us all than the end of maternity leave. But I am desperate to focus on my job now, without the crazy juggle. I want to over-deliver again rather than get by! I want to go for a run if time allows. And I want my toddler to spend time with his little friends – as much as he’s had the time of his life these past few months he needs the interaction too! And a reminder of how to eat all foods, not just spaghetti hoops and babybel…

I think when things went pandemically-sideways in March it helped us to remember that home is just bricks and mortar, we still had our health and we still lived somewhere safe and rural. We’ve had the chance to really explore the area and are just so incredibly grateful we get to call it home! We won’t be forgetting lockdown in a hurry – the highs or the lows!

Join the link up!

Whether it is an adopted home, a birth home or somewhere that felt like it was a second skin – we want to know about your local area. It could be a country, a city, a scent, a view. Or even the special moments that you like to share with visitors… Just pop your post up over the first week of the month (the 1st – 7th June 2020), and add it to the linkup widget found on Binnys Food and Travel Diaries, Adventures of a London Kiwi, SilverSpoon London, or Lux Life London.