Sea, sand and sickness

So for a few years now we've been taking holidays with family down south, however this year we went North instead and headed towards Northumberland.  It's not far to drive just over an hour and the beaches there are wonderful. We were staying in a grand and beautiful holiday house, they have to be quite big as it's for Sue & Dave(Mother/Father-in-Law) and their dog Fox, Claire and Lee(Sister/Brother-in-Law), their children Ben and Josh and their dog Bonnie and myself, Stu, Maisie and Lucas.

We were staying within a short drive/long walk with children from Cresswell beach, a shell finders haven, and after a week of beautiful weather I was hopeful it would continue throughout the week. 

Well how wrong was I, and the week had more in store than a bit of dodgy weather.

I'll leave the highlights for other posts but a quick run down of the week is 

Friday:
arrive to lovely house settle in, weather nice.

Saturday:
Alnwick Castle (Harry Potter day), weather nice, Barter Books, Ben get sickness bug.

Sunday:
Holy Island, pleasant weather, long walk, Lucas gets sickness bug.

Monday:
Cragside, beautiful weather and amazing place, long walks, great bridge, play the hat game :-)

Tuesday:
Farm park outing, it bloody snows, came home to 12 hour power cut, drink a lot by candle light.

Wednesday:
Claire gets sickness bug, Meal at Tree house at Alnwick, get call from solicitor to say house sale can complete, Stu and I have to drive home remove furniture from house and post keys into estate agents. Goodbye house. I start throwing up on way back, sickness bug gets me.

Thursday:
Sunny :-) Bamburgh Castle (amazing), picnic, surreal telephone call in Castle to sale house sale is completed. Onto the beach, everything is lovely. Maisie get sickness bug.

Friday:
Pack up, Stu complains of tummy aches :-( bug comes home with us.

All in all a strange and yet wonderful holiday, and in the next few posts I'll explain why.

Hope you had a great half term holiday

Amanda.x.

Goodbye Little Cottage

June and most of July has been a stressful, amazing and weird few weeks, and it's taken me this long to kinda get my head around it all and evaluate it's meaning upon our lives. 
In May we decided to try and get our act together and get our house on the market, you know splash some white paint around and fix up all those things that you've put off for the last few years. 
Our house although lovely was bursting at the seams with the mixture of craft materials and children's toys, and to be truthful I was very wary of bringing any potential viewers into it. I mean seriously how do you sell your house with children in it, do you cage them them up or something? by nature they're messy creatures, the thought of having to make our house look amazing at the drop of a hat just brought me out in a cold sweat.
Then Hubby hit on a plan, we'd rent a house close by move into that house, leaving our house empty, not in a chain and more likely to sell. It would be tough financially but could work out better as we could sell our house quicker. It's a crazy plan but it might just work.


So then to sort the rental house, this may seem strange but Hubby and I have never lived in a rented house, we managed to buy our first house at 18year young, and have owned our owe home since. So looking into rented was very strange, we found a house just around the corner, managed to barter on the price(always worth ago) sent off our forms and waited, and waited and waited.....
They rang saying pop up sign the forms get the keys, yeah.  
We all headed to get the keys, having had many chats in the weeks before explaining the situation to our children they seemed very excited by the prospect, Maisie was especially excited about having her own room as she's always had to share with Lucas.
So we get the keys and suddenly realise we don't have another day off together for 2 weeks, Maisie wants to sleep in the new house, I don't drive so couldn't move anything big and all of a sudden at 11am we think okay lets move in today. What were we thinking, never ever move house this way, we were packing stuff into boxes as in was going into the car, it was a nightmare. The kids thought the chaos was amazing, and had loads of fun throwing random items into the car, we didn't have a van just a mates people carrier but had managed to get all the big stuff moved in that first day. Phew.
The children were completely chilled out about it all, even though my stress was probably edible, and they slept fine as if we did this kind of thing every day.
But it's now done, after a couple of weeks painting and fixing we have our empty on the market house.
4 Sinclair Cottages. FOR SALE. 

Strangely I thought I'd really miss our house but I feel that we had lived all we could there, it has loads of potential that we were too young and silly not  to build on. We've learnt many lessons from living here, had 2 children here, started a business here, laughed and cried with friends here. It's been a great house but now we need to get it sold so we can find our home.
Thank you
Amanda.x.