half term beckons

Half term started a bit early for us today, as Andy was working at home during an Inset day at school. He understands now how difficult it is to combine concentration with the myriad of jobs, clutter and chores you notice when working from home!!

Usually our half term breaks are filled with visits to us, or us visiting other people. This time we've elected to stick at home. It's been a busy and emotional half term since early September - and with the knowledge that we'll now be in Maldon and in our current jobs for a while yet, it's good to take the opportunity to chill out and just 'be' in one place. We're often tempted to go off and see people, cos that's where we get our energy from, but we know we need this upcoming week as a time to sleep in, eat together, watch movies, walk a bit, sleep a bit more and generally enjoy each other's company.

We were due to have the RB's come down but JRB is now on a training course so that's been postponed. JennyR (M's godmother) might come for a night or two, but it's just like family to have her around and she doesn't need entertaining!! Andy is going to have breakfast with the men from church tomorrow morning and also with our friend AlexR at Heybridge Basin.

I'll be catching up with KarenC for lunch too - so hopefully a good mix of time all  3 of us together and some other folk stirred in!

As well as that, we'll try to include some working in the garden, going to Mersea for the day or part of, doing some 'make ahead' Christmas cooking and perhaps doing some shopping at Lakeside or Bluewater....maybe it is all looking a bit busy? 

I'll be working around all that, probably most of Monday and Wednesday - combining some big project work and some funding applications with fun family time.

At the end of the week (Thursday) the Hodson parents are arriving for a few days, to visit and also to have M for us while Andy and I go over to St Alban's Abbey to set up and lead a Labyrinth as part of a Lock In event that the Diocesan Youth Officer, Dave Green is running there. I ran a similar resource/event at the Solid ReMix event in January in Chelmsford Cathedral so it'll be good to develop those ideas in a bigger space and with only 1 responsibility! Some other youth workers from the Area are joining us and we will be offering a self guided journey through the Labyrinth path on the theme of darkness into light. Much of my week of work will be on fine tuning the elements of this event and I'm really looking forward to it. It'll be a night of little sleep tho as we run from 8pm through til 8am!
Finally, we'll be having a bonfire and some small fireworks in our garden at the end of the half term week and I'll be 'releasing' some young people from a Big Brother fundraiser event in Chelmsford...which should be good fun!