Gregor & Emma Visit + The French Dick van Dyke

One of our biggest drivers in our move back to Europe was to be closer to family. This has already paid off, with us seeing everyone more in the past eighteen months that we had in eight years. This trend continued during the Scottish school holidays with Gregor and Emma coming over to stay. Alan actually left on Saturday morning and the newest Mr & Mrs Clelands arrived that afternoon. Brilliant. We had a lovely week with them here: hanging out, eating great food, talking nonsense, playing Balderdash (Emma kept winning) and them even offering to look after William allowing us to go on a late afternoon cycling pub crawl.

Amazingly, the weather was still good enough to have dinner outside on the evening they arrived.

Been doing a bit of baking this week. This one is straight off the Doves Farm website. 

William's latest artwork (clearly an autumnal theme going on....) and fun at our local library.

The poor boy's hair is already getting long enough to pin it back. And here's our bikes, parked outside the garage bar. Classy

The day after our pub crawl (where we had four drinks) which was nine days after my egg retrieval, I woke up very early and vomited. This was then followed by horrendous stomach cramps and diarrhoea. When you live in France and this sort of stuff happens, all thoughts immediately turn to the infamous french gastro, but something niggling at me thought it might be something to do with my IVF drugs as I was also suffering from shivers, headaches, cold sweats, heartburn and acid reflux. Cue yet another bloody visit to the hospital to see my specialist and make sure I was actually okay. Although I got the all clear in terms of the really nasty things, he sent me away with a heap of drugs and said I would feel better after I'd had my period. The joys of IVF. 

With one eye on autumn, I had been very organised in sorting out a chimney sweep to clean and check our fire before the cold weather kicked in. This was also great timing as Emma was duly forced into translating everything for us! And what she essentially had to translate was, "Your chimney is dangerous. It cannot be used. In fact, it should be condemned." As the guy was putting the brushes up the flu, pieces of bricks and mortar were just crumbling and falling down the inside. So, he had to stop what he was doing, he cleaned up the small mess he'd made, and gave us the number for a builder who specialises in chimneys. If I'm honest, I could see the whole thing coming. Honestly, it's the house that Jack built and I don't imagine this is going to have an easy or cheap solution. Watch this space. 

LM. :)