One year on - and a new home

It's funny how having two children, moving house and returning to work have seen 12 months elapse since the last time I wrote. I've just re-read my last post and I honestly can't remember writing it. Not a single word of it. I must have written it in those heady, sleep-deprived early days of Edith's first weeks when my world consisted of little more than the four walls of our house.

Our old house. Since I last wrote, we've moved. No longer the owners of an eighteenth-century chocolate-box cottage in Penicuik, we are now the owners of a rambling farmhouse in rural central Scotland, somewhere south of Falkirk and not very close to anything. It's totally idyllic. We have sheep on one side, cows on the other, and it's 2 miles to the nearest shop. We have chickens, raised beds, a big range cooker, off-grid heating, and a little bit of land with a copse - where the chickens live. Ok, so we also have foxes that steal chickens, an inconvenient tendency to run out of oil in the middle of winter and rather slow broadband. But let's focus on the positives.

Over the past 12 months, our view has ranged between this:

And this:

Our neighbours look like this:

And just down the road we have this:

There are downsides. We had to move away from some wonderful friends, although they are still only 45 minutes away. And we all now spend a lot of time in the car. The round trip to take Alec to nursery is 50 minutes, and my commute to work (on the 2 days I have to do it) has doubled. But Andy's has halved, and he has to do it every day, so that is a huge plus. And driving home down windy country lanes, gazing out over the hills, with little else on the horizon but lush green fields, forests and the occasional wind turbine, truly makes it all worthwhile. I can't think of anywhere else I would rather be right now.