Family Time In The Countryside

Family: A little bit of crazy, a little bit of loud and a whole lot of love.

Hannah, with the baguettes (French loaves) for lunch (sadly, this is the only photo I took yesterday)

I know I've been somewhat silence on the posting front over the last few weeks or so. My laptop (my main place of writing) isn't working at the moment, so I'm at the library. I've taken to heading to the library whenever I need to do computer based admin stuff as my iPhone and iPad are both tablet devices and won't let me access or use the full functions of certain sites (and these sites have useless apps).

So I'm here and I thought I'd write a quick update about how life is going. Andy and I just got home from an overnight trip to my aunt's place is Sussex. My aunt and uncle own a large house in the countryside of Sussex and often hosts us whenever we used to come to England (from Uganda) for our travels during my childhood as their home is big enough to host us. They also host the family gatherings for my mum's side of the family. Yesterday was one such occasion when we all got together to celebrate love, life and each other. We had two big birthdays to celebrate, which gave us all the more reason to meet up. My mum's family is very close-knit and will meet up twice a year. Often during the summer for a BBQ and then over Christmas, so my parents asked if Andy and I could travel down to join them. So after we got the time off work, we both traveled down yesterday morning and spent the night.

Hannah came over from Paris, as well, to celebrate with us. We had some lovely food, as my uncle had the BBQ (braai, for the South Africans) on and did some amazing sausages. Every year he puts the marquee up (often the day before with the help of my cousins from Kent). We spent the afternoon catching up over BBQ and bubbly. We had a lot of fun. Most of us haven't seen each other since the wedding (Andy's and mine) last November. There were loads of photos posted to Facebook of everyone.

Andy and I then came home this morning after my parents dropped us off at Colchester Train Station. They're flying to the Isle of Man for a conference that's hosted by the group of churches they were with in Cape Town and Hannah got a lift with them to Luton Airport as she's flying back to Paris today. She came in by Eurostar on Saturday and went to spend Saturday with our great aunt and cousins. It was easier that way.

Andy and I are both back to work tomorrow. We've got five days of work to get through before we're off for nine days. Andy has gone back to standard housekeeper because of the workload of being a supervisor wasn't healthy. It was too much for the minuscule amount of extra pay he was receiving per hour. So we're figuring things out in regards to jobs and housing (we've had to remove our washing machine as we can't afford to pay for a special unit to go around it because it costs about £1,000, which we don't have). I'll be posting more about all this over the next few weeks as I'm sure you'll want to be kept up to date with all our news as they develop!