We are home from our lovely 'holiday'! We survived. Lots of people have read my last post and asked if it was as bad as I made out - everything I wrote in the post is true, but things did get a bit better! We had one day of lovely sun on the Thursday and so we went off to the beach for an hour in the afternoon, and Daph played with the pebbles (cue me being a helicopter mother convinced she'd choke on one of them) and stared at the sea and we had an ice cream and it was almost like a real holiday. We went for a few walks with Daph in the baby sling too - that was a great solution to our non-off-roading buggy, until we both got sciatica (she's a heavy little monster these days). Ah well.
We also went back to Totnes when the shops were open and I went a bit crazy buying things for Daph in Gazebo - which is the coolest shop ever (I've been going to Devon since I was a kid and it was my favourite shop back then too). We got loads of decorations for her first birthday - banners, cake decorations, napkins etc, all in Liberty print. They are SO lovely and I can't wait for her birthday now.
I also bought this cute 'letters to my baby' book (above) - which contains lots of empty envelopes with prompts on, such as 'What I want you to know about me is...' and 'My first impressions of you were...'. The idea is you write a letter to your baby in each envelope, seal it up and then specify a date on which they can read them. It's quite a sentimental idea, I know, but it really appealed to me. When I was a kid, I actually wrote letters to the future me (yes, I was a geek) and I loved opening them up and reading them as an adult - it was crazy how much my thoughts about things had changed over the years. You can find Letters to My Baby at Leafcutter Designs, along with a host of other amazing and cute things (the tooth fairy letters are so fab!).
But I am sorry if my post came across as massively negative as it was meant to be quite tongue in cheek really - I don't mind laughing at these kinds of situations, all of the bad luck kind of amused me in the end. Worse things happen at sea and all that. Our journey back was a lot better too as we stopped off twice to visit relatives which broke the journey up nicely for Daph. And now we're home, back in our claustrophobic flat and I've done eight loads of washing since we got back, and am now staring down the barrel of a lot of work. But hey ho.
In other news it's Oli's birthday this Saturday and so we are going out for dinner. In the evening. Alone. (Well, alone with each other, IYKWIM). My parents are kindly babysitting. It'll be the first time we've been out for dinner together since Chip was born. Isn't that a bit tragic? The thing is that my family don't live that near me, and trying to find a babysitter seems like an impossible task as I know no one in my local area really. Which is quite sad, but that's London for you. Anyway, I'm looking forward to it, and hoping we both manage to relax and not rush home the second we put our knives and forks down. We shall see!