Today, it is April Fools’ Day. Today, we have lived in The Shed for two years.
TWO YEARS! No joke.
Golly gosh.
As I sit here now, at my computer at the end of the garden, listening to the birds and literally feeling the plants growing outside my flimsy shed window, I can’t actually see how living in a real house could beat this.
The Four Little Seymours have changed a lot since we moved in here. Mini Seymour still had her night time milk in a bottle back then. (I know! Dreadful parenting!) She wore nappies to bed then, too.
Now, she’s an incredibly feisty little six-year-old who knows her own mind (rather too well!), can actually read and has a marvellous French accent.
In the past two years, Number One has flown to France and back – twice, grown about two feet and has developed the most amazing study mentality. She will be taking her GCSEs next year, for goodness’ sake. I’m jolly glad she might have her own room before that awful kerfuffle begins.
Little Seymour Number Two is about to go into her last term at primary school. This, I cannot believe. She’s far too small to go to big school! And she is so happy in Year Six (except during the occasional tricky lesson) that it’ll be such a wrench for her.
And as for my boy? Well, he is infuriatingly adorable as always. Since we moved into The Shed, he has become much more quirky, even louder and ever wobblier on his legs.
Yesterday, he announced that everyone else made cups out of clay at school for their Mothers’ Day gifts. “But I made a toilet,” he declared. “For Dad.” So, not only did he make a bog, but it isn’t even for me! And he is currently planning how to catch sea fish in Devon and bring them back to live in our flooded ditch. He has drawn a diagram and everything. I will need my clever friend, Eco Jo, to explain to him, in the gentle way that only she can, just why this hair-brained plan is never likely to happen. He might listen to her.
Yes, a lot has changed in two years. Not least, The Funny Little Bungalow. It has gone from being a higgledy piggledy, damp, dated old dwelling (that we loved) to a spacious, modern rather stylish abode! I am concerned it’ll be so posh we won’t fit in. But the nice thing about it is that it retains so much of the old house: the fireplace, some walls, several windows. And we have even managed to use some of the rustic pink hearth tiles we unearthed in October, as a backsplash for our little downstairs basin.
I will miss this stage. But before I get ahead of myself and start lamenting The Lost Shed Epoch, I will hold my horses. We haven’t moved out yet, and there is still such a lot to do that we may still be living here in 2021. By which time, for all I know, there may well be mackerel in the ditch.
(If anyone can decipher what the heck this all means, please do get in touch.)
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