Wow! It’s been a very busy week and thus my lack of posting.

The builders have arrived 😀. Cue noise and chaos!

Last week we managed to get a lot of the seedlings in the ground and so our vegetable garden is looking more like a real veg garden, although the weeds are still threatening to take over!

The next challenge is getting used to going to the garden for our food, rather than the fridge. The lettuces, spinach and herbs are all ready to eat and so we are making the effort to remember to go out and pick the leaves for meals. Spinach isn’t overly popular with some of the children, but hidden in a fruit smoothie they gobble it up, well the younger children do, the older ones are not fooled!

Last weekend we had such a lovely time, we had friends to visit, who stayed in the courtyard, in their camper van. We ate barbecues and sat outside in the evenings sipping wine. With the wisteria growing up the barn walls, the camper van in the courtyard and the balmy evenings, there was a definite French holiday feel about the weekend.

Monday soon came round and I took the children to a gymnastics session. It was a free family fun day and so the whole tribe, minus Christopher, who was working, came along. Jonathan was having a blast and throwing himself (literally) into the activities. Sadly he rather overdid it and threw himself into a springboard and broke 3 toes! Bless him, he’s been very stoical and cheerful throughout, despite it being extremely painful. One of the challenges of living in the country is that it takes 30 minutes to get to the hospital, instead of the 5 minutes it took, when we lived in the town. He’s getting very good at hopping and is not nearly good enough at sitting still, will he ever learn?!

Tuesday was a very different sort of day. A dear friend has recently passed away and so I returned to London for her funeral. It’s the first time I’ve been back down south since we moved here, nearly 2 years ago. The day was full of emotions. I arrived for lunch and enjoyed catching up with a few old friends, what a joy it was to see them! The funeral was the first I’d ever been to that I could actually say had joy woven throughout. Our dear friend loved the Lord with all her heart and walked in faith, service and humility and so we were all full of joy, knowing that she is now resting in the arms of her Saviour. She will be missed hugely, but there was more of a thankfulness for the time God had given us with her, than a sadness of the future without her. We were all privileged to know her.

The journey home was a trip down memory lane, the M25 did its best to remind me of one of the reasons why I love living in the sticks. By the time I’d arrived at Oxford services I was pooped and needed to pause, to gather myself. I’m clearly not very good anymore at handling London traffic, I’ve got used to only being delayed by cows crossing the road and slow tractors 😊.

Yesterday we visited the local lake and made the most of the glorious sunshine. The children swam and built sandcastles, it was the perfect antidote to the M25.

2 thoughts on “Builders, Broken Toes, Vegetable Gardening and the M25

  1. Anna Collins says:

    Love these updates. Hope your life has changed. It seems soo soo busy yet also a sense of plenty of time too. Thinking of you too in your loss. God bless xx

    • Vicki Goldby says:

      Life has changed in almost every way. We are outside much more, more in touch with seasons and how our food is grown, we have time to stop to have a chat or have a cuppa with a friend, life is more of a rhythm than a goal. We’ll never get ‘there’ and we are peace with that. Many people think that a change of lifestyle is what’s needed to improve their life and in many ways they are right, but the reality is nothing will be perfect this side of Heaven. There will always be weeds, deaths, broken toes and busy days, but if we are living in the will of God there is no better place to be. Town or country is not important, living where God wants us to be is what brings us joy.

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