What a week that was!

It’s amazing how everything always seems to happen at once!  In one week our prematurely born granddaughters were released from hospital, we had the handover of our bush cottage ( situated on our son and daughter-in-law’s property) and we moved out of our town house.

It was an exhausting week!

The news that our son and daughter-law’s beautiful babies were home at last after four and a half months in hospital was greeted with relief and jubilation but the first two weeks have been very hard to say the least!

New babies are exhausting anyway, and having two little ones is doubly difficult and tiring but having one still on oxygen and both with awful reflux and subsequent difficulties with bottle feeding is on another level!

But the good news is that both girls are doing so well and have shown excellent improvements in their general health and demeanour and are both doing great in hitting their developmental milestones. 

Sometimes the universe sends you a little message to remind you to have hope or encourage you through a hard time.  We received one of these on the day we moved our furniture from our town house to the bush cottage.

We had booked a removal truck from the company Two Men and a Truck and two delightful young men arrived, politely shook hands, introduced themselves and did an excellent job of moving some very heavy furniture quickly and efficiently. 

These two weren’t burly blokes but they were strong and energetic. I was quite intrigued that they looked so alike and thought that they could possibly be brothers. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t ask but when they arrived at our place in Lake Manchester, Jonathan also noticed the resemblance and didn’t hold back!

It turned out that like our newest little granddaughters, these two boys from Brazil were identical twins but the most surprising thing was they too were born at 28 weeks had shared a placenta and one of them had been born very much smaller than the other. Like our little twins, they had also spent more than four months in hospital. And here they were, many years later, tall and strong and healthy! It was such a timely message to receive the week our tiny granddaughters had come out of hospital!

Before we moved out of the townhouse we made the decision to lay new carpet on the stairs and in the bedrooms. We also made the decision to use a styling company to furnish and “titivate” the house to help attract potential buyers. 

We have been assured by those who know about these things that both of these will increase interest and overall price so fingers crossed!

The handover of our “bush cottage” from Hoek Homes was a great milestone and we are very happy with the result!

Although we were able to move some of our furniture in just before the hand over we were unfortunately not able to move in for another ten days as we had no water!

We assumed that we could just phone up and book a day for the water to fill our two massive tanks for a time that would be convenient to us. Wrong!  As there has been no rain to speak  of for a few months now, home owners without a mains water supply have become nervous that they will run out of tank water, so the suppliers who truck in water to these properties are working flat out!

Anyway, we eventually managed to get water delivered and are now gradually settling down to life in our new home. 

Fortunately, we have a caravan and were able to set it up with water and power next to Ben and Sarah’s “small” shed.   We spent a very comfortable ten days in the van before moving into the house properly. 

We are still in the throes of unpacking boxes that have been in storage during our sailing years (since 2015) and are enjoying finding objects that have sentimental value as well as a whole heap of tableware, a hangover from our last very social years in the family home. 

It’s so good being just down the hill from Ben and Sarah’s as we are close at hand to help when required and can pop up to theirs to help as and when we are needed!

In amongst all the busy-ness we managed a little bit of socialising which was as always, great fun and definitely helped us push through the more challenging moments.

Busy times and so they continue – in just over a week we will shake it all up again with a trip to visit Hannah and Pieter and our eldest granddaughter in the Netherlands!