Dear Cooper and Finn

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13th January 2019   Dear Cooper and Finn, We got home today from a lovely weekend in Southwold with our friends Heli and Mark. Your dad and I met Heli years ago when we went to V Festival with our other friends Annabel and Craig, who’d persuaded you…

13th January 2019

Dear Cooper and Finn,

We got home today from a lovely weekend in Southwold with our friends Heli and Mark. Your dad and I met Heli years ago when we went to V Festival with our other friends Annabel and Craig, who’d persuaded your dad to buy the tickets at around four times face value from a resale site when we had a party at his mam and dad's house while they were away. It turned out to be one of the best decisions he's ever made - we had years of fun at that festival with so many friends. We spent Saturday afternoon drinking champagne and talking fast and loud like you do when you haven't seen people ..love for a while. You want to fill each other in on the essentials, but you know you don't have to say everything that's happened since you last saw each other. You can just pick up and carry on in the present, and fill in the gaps when you need to. You two were thrilled at the change in surroundings and all the open space and spent the whole time crawling round and round the kitchen table and up and down the hallway. You were also enchanted by the dogs, Meg and Kosmo, and did everything you could to make them love you. In the evening Mark served us up his famous beer and Guinness stew. We've loved it in the past but sadly this time he'd made it with gone-off suet and it tasted a little rancid. It turned out to be a great test of the limits of politeness, anyway. Heli piped up straight away and told him it was absolutely vile. I kept mumbling that it wasn't so bad really and ate about a third of it. And your dad insisted it was absolutely delicious and ate the whole thing (which worringly I think is more a reflection on his taste buds than his manners). Before we left today we had a bracing walk on the beach and the most delicious fish and chips at the Sole Bay Fish company. I was a bit worried about eating in but far from making the other diners hate us, you actually managed to charm them! Thanks lads. XXX

Dear Cooper and Finn

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6th January 2019   Dear Cooper and Finn,  One thing I wasn't really prepared for  is how hard it is to do things with you.  Obviously I knew I wouldn't be going to  fancy restaurants and bars, and I knew  that just getting out the house would be  ha…

6th January 2019 Dear Cooper and Finn, One thing I wasn't really prepared for is how hard it is to do things with you. Obviously I knew I wouldn't be going to fancy restaurants and bars, and I knew that just getting out the house would be hard because of all the things we'd have to do to get ready. But I didn't think about precisely how many individual tasks would be involved, and how uniquely challenging each one would be, and what it would feel like to do every single one of those tasks twice, for two uniquely challenging individuals. I wrote a little guide to going to the park today, just so I could remember it.
How to take the kids to the park:

1. Wrestle them into coats and hats, put them somewhere safe, and put on your coat 2. Open front door, go back for pushchair and carry it through the hall, taking care not to gouge holes in the walls or whack the kids round the head as you go 3. Run down steps with pushchair and erect it 4. Go back for one child, reassuring the other one that you're not leaving them alone forever 5. Carry first child down steps and put in pushchair 6. Repeat for child two

7. Go back and lock door

8. Realise you've forgotten your phone/water/changing bag/soul 9. WHY DID YOU PUT YOUR COAT ON YOU’RE ON FIRE 10. It's actually pretty dark now 11. Go to bed?

Dear Cooper and Finn

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30th December 2018  Dear Cooper and Finn,  We've been at home in Weardale for  a few days now, and it's been lovely.  We had Christmas Day number 2 with  gran Jan and grandad George on Friday,  and we all wore paper Christmas hats  and watched you …

30th December 2018 Dear Cooper and Finn, We've been at home in Weardale for a few days now, and it's been lovely. We had Christmas Day number 2 with gran Jan and grandad George on Friday, and we all wore paper Christmas hats and watched you wipe food around your mouths before throwing it on the floor. Then you opened your presents - some great ones, like the musical instruments and the toy cars- and some not quite so great ones, like the whale shape sorter and an assortment of other odd gifts from the £5 shop that looked like bargains on the surface, but once opened revealed fundamental design flaws. Like the fake Tamagotchi I got from Penrith market when I was twelve, which died on day 7 every time, no matter what. Then on Sunday we had our third Christmas Day of the year with grandma Hazel and granda Geoff, and aunty Gemma, uncle Alan, and cousin Freya. We had the full works all over again, and it was chaos in the best way, because we were all so grateful to have ach other there. It was also pretty stressful - you can be grateful for something and get annoyed by it at the same time. That's just life. X X X