Back to School - Day One

Monday morning. After all the festivities of the last couple of weeks and the lazy ‘can’t be bothered to get up’ days, the alarm waking us up once again this morning comes as a very unwelcome interruption. I don’t actually have to get up this morning, as our youngest daughter isn’t back at school until tomorrow, but Mike needs to be awake to drop our eldest two daughters into town. The eldest works there in a nursery- although officially she was working over Christmas, in reality she only worked two very short days between Christmas and New Year, so today is the start of her first proper working week for two weeks. Our second eldest daughter is in Sixth Form College in the city, and needs to be in town for the 7.20 bus to get her into college for the first day of term. Mike is on another ‘working from home day’, so pops some clothes on over his pyjamas and heads off with the girls.

20 minutes later, and he’s back. After stopping downstairs long enough to make our early morning cuppas, he’s back upstairs and we spend a nice cosy hour reading our new books and trying to ignore the fact that today is actually a ‘proper’ working day, and not just one odd day in the middle of a nice long holiday.

Eventually guilt kicks in, and we drag ourselves out of bed to begin the day. It’s already 9 o’clock by now, so a bit of noise around the place won’t harm the sleeping children- after all, by this time tomorrow even they’ll have been awake for a couple of hours, so I collect up some washing and head downstairs. Mike is already on his computer in the dining room, working away, and I look sadly around at the Christmas decorations. It’s been a wonderful Christmas, the best we’ve had since before our house fire cut Christmas short two years ago, and I’ll be sad to see this one end. There’s a lot of debate as to the actual timing of Twelfth Night, but we’ve always followed the traditional opinion that the decorations need to be down by nightfall on the 6th, and although that isn’t until tomorrow, with the girls out today the decorations already are starting to feel out of place.

I’m feeling a bit down today- a touch of end-of-holiday blues, mixed in with extreme tiredness, I’m missing my big girls, and when Mike heads off out to sort out some items we have in storage, I miss him too. Lunchtime is a quiet affair compared with how it’s been recently as there’s only four of us at home, and there are complaints that Tesco only brought ‘normal, boring’ food- the fact that that’s what I ordered fortunately seems to have escaped their notice. After lunch the two younger girls settle down to playing with their brother, or rather to watch him playing on his new Wii U- his joint Christmas and birthday present from everyone.

Now that I finally have a name for this blog, I decide that today I am going to unleash my new idea on the world, before I think too hard about it and change my mind, which I may well do in today’s state of mind. Logging onto the computer I decide just to go straight for it, and without stopping to think too much about it I click on the ‘create new blog’ link which shows up when I sign in. I’ve already done the hard part- I’ve named the blog, and drafted more than just the first entry, so getting the first post up and published is fairly straight forward. All I have to do now is pick out a template, a colour scheme, the page layout…

Ok, there’s a bit more to it than I thought there would be, but by the time Mike and the girls get back in, complete with chips, Dolly Clothes Diaries is up and running in its most basic form. Feeling positive, and feeling that I’ve finally achieved something, I pack away the computer and allow myself to relax in front of the telly, with a glass of wine, in the pretty glow of the fairy lights- for one last time until December.