Saturday 28th November

We had lots of packages arriving this week, from Amazon, M&S, Curry’s, Ebay, the list seemed endless. Everyone in the house had something delivered either for themselves or a present for a relative, even the dogs had a visit from Bob & Lush – their favourite brand of food and doggies treats! We started off with just two guests and now we have a full house as the weekend gets under way.

This is Chris and Joyce’s second visit already this year, they have come to visit their daughter and grandchildren for a week to celebrate Thanksgiving. It’s always nice having repeat guests, it feels more relaxed as both parties know the other, the routine and what they like for breakfast.

The conversations are lot more varied and interesting as everyone is more comfortable around each other.

We’ve started to get all our ducks in a row for the start of December. We like to make a lot of our Christmas gifts by hand and this year Sally has pulled out her vegetarian mincemeat recipe which we jarred up last night, just before midnight.

We’ll be posting the recipe on line on Tuesday so keep an eye out for it! We also have our rich fruit cake mixture soaking in the wings which we’ll cook tomorrow.

Sally has bounced back quickly after her operation and fingers crossed her eye will fully recover over the coming weeks. She has been doing a few bits and pieces here and there, but Zuzanna and I have stayed firm, insisting she does as little as possible. We have banned her from setting up breakfast, so instead she took the dogs out for a walk this morning for the first time since her op and managed to get a lovely picture of Purdy – one of our doggy family, in the woods!