One marriage proposal, three birthdays and a divorce or two

If you thought the title of this post was propaganda or clickbait, you were wrong. One marriage proposal, three birthdays and two divorce’s are just some of the things that have happened in the last few months.

To be a little more accurate…

One marriage proposal, three birthdays, two parties, two divorce’s, two flights, ten train journeys, five hotels, one blog conference, one gymnastics competition and lots of day trips… would describe just a FEW of the things we have done in the last few months. We have been crazy busy, to put it mildly.

In March, Mike and I took Baby Bear to Holland for a weekend. We stayed in a fab hotel in Zaandam, went diamond shopping, clothes shopping, waffle shopping (my oldest daughter loves the Dutch waffle biscuits), we strolled around the rivers in central Amsterdam, we dined out, we ventured out into the countryside and took photographs of the old windmills and generally had a fantastic time.

A few weeks later, Mine and Mike’s divorces both came through, which we started in December.

On April 17th, to mark our one year anniversary of being together, Mike took me to the Painswick Rococo Gardens and dropped onto one knee. If you want to read the full story of the proposal, pop over to my travel blog and you can read it there (and see what my answer was!).

To celebrate our engagement, Mike, Baby Bear and I took a road trip down to Bournemouth in Dorset and spent a weekend in the most wonderful hotel I think I’ve ever experienced in this country. It was called The Green House, but I will save talk of that for my travel blog too. We did more shopping, more eating out and enjoyed Bournemouth’s stunning gardens and beach.

Bunny turned 10 years old and we bought her a digital camera, amongst other things. Her father took her to get her ears pierced, which she has wanted for years, but soon changed her mind when she realised how much it hurt! She celebrated her birthday with an evening of tenpin bowling with five of her friends.

Just a few days later, we had the twins birthday and they woke up to new bikes, so we went to the park to test them out. They celebrated with a disco and party games and invited their whole class from school. This was their first big party and they absolutely loved it.

After that was Traverse 17, a conference for travel bloggers in London. We ventured up to Surrey and stayed in a lovely hotel in Cobham. This was where we realised we had left our suitcase on our bed at home! I commuted from Surrey into London for the Conference over the two days, as it wasn’t far on the train. I also went to the boat party with City Cruises which was a brilliant evening, cruising up the Thames with all the other travel influencers, meeting new people and networking.

We’ve also recently had Bunny’s gymnastics competition. She was put up to a competitive squad (her goal for the past 5 years) and for the club’s house competition she was partnered with another gymnast to compete at level one of the British Gymnastics. The pair won silver for second place, but Bunny is not quite so happy with gymnastics at the moment. Because she’s moved up, a lot of her classes are about polishing the more basic moves, rather than learning new ones, so she is not feeling challenged anymore. She wants to be learning new moves or perfecting the more advanced tumbles.

We’ve had lots of days out lately too and the children have had lots of extra curricular activities with school. I finished my maternity leave and have returned to work part time. Bear is thriving, not far off of walking and we are still going strong on the breastfeeding.

And obviously we are busy planning our engagement party now and starting to think about potential wedding dates and venues. It’s all go in this household.