Loving the van

Last night Sam went to his room early so he could watch a film in bed and Will and Scott sat in the front room watching videos whilst I lay in bed reading my book and suddenly I realised how great it was living in the van because for that short space of time we were all together and all sharing the same experiences... but really sharing them - not sat in separate rooms, having different experiences.

I realised that playing cards by the light of the torch before bed was a really cool thing to do and not having television meant that we had to make our own entertainment and get out there and do things... sometimes it's so easy to sit in front of the telly and miss the day, we talked a lot more when we were living in the van. It also makes me realise how quickly we could slip back into our old patterns if we aren't careful when we get back and lose the important lessons we have learned along the way.

I probably didn't fully appreciate the van fully until now, and the song, 'don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got til it's gone' keeps running through my head as I write this. Thinking about it now, we really did pull together like a tight little unit in the van. All doing our own little jobs and making the adventure run as smoothly as possible. Not that I would like to go back to living in the van - but my point is that I also don't want to lose those lessons and I hope that Sam appreciates them too and also remembers how much fun it was.

But anyway - enough nostalgia - back to the here and now. The fence building has started, well that's not strictly true, the tree digging up has started. This involved Will climbing up rickety wooden ladders and sawing branches off the tree (almost hitting me I might add) and Scott pulling on the end of a rope attached to the branch so that it wouldn't fall on Will's head!! Sam was chief sawer upper and sawed the little branches of the fallen big branch so they could be removed... and all in the rain. I decided that it would be a good time to tidy the house, wash the clothes and clean the toilets (anything's better than standing in the rain avoiding falling branches). So now it's 7pm and I'm about to start tea, pasta tonight, and the boys are outside still digging.

Internet is very slow today so I'm afraid no picture!