I've been a bit slack with the old family update posts in 2018 after deciding back in March to take the pressure off myself with regular monthly family photos.
I'd taken part in the monthly Me & Mine tag since 2015 and I loved having those monthly family portraits to look back on but the fact is, it's just not really feasible for us to make a conscious effort to get the photos taken so often right now.
Life is always pretty chaotic, and the boys are at ages where they're really not that keen to have their photos taken much and I don''t want to force them to - so stepping back and doing less frequent ones has been working well for us. We've been taking a photo when we go somewhere nice and we're all in the mood to, rather than going somewhere nice with the sole focus of taking a photo...which has made all the difference!
As long as we a photo from each season to look back on, I'll be happy and it seems we've managed that pretty well so far...only Winter to go!
This year has so far has absolutely flown past and, I know everybody always says this but it's true, I just can't believe it's already November!
The whole year has seemed like it's zoomed by but October in particular was gone before I knew what was happening, and I guess that's because we crammed so much in to it.
I made a bit of a mistake with my holiday planning, and when I cancelled our planned 2 week Canary isles cruise and changed it to a 5 night European cruise instead - I forgot that we also had a trip to Disneyland Paris booked in October...whoops!
So we ended up going to Disneyland as planned for the beginning of the Halloween season from 30th September - 5th October, and then just 2 weeks later we headed off on our cruise!
Noah & Sailor didn't join us for the cruise for a few reasons - one being financial (it's SO expensive to cruise as a family of 5, as they offer limited cabins to accomodate us which means we'd need to book into two separate ones...) and the others being that they're too young to be allowed to use the pools or kids clubs on board, and this would cause a lot of tantrums when they see Tyne enjoying those things.
So instead, they spent the 5 nights on a mini holiday of their own in their Nan & Grandads caravan which they absolutely love doing - and we took our biggest boy off on the cruise.
It's lovely to get some one on one time with Tyne as it's difficult to get much of that with the little ones around, and it also meant we could focus more on making the trip educational for him too.
We had a fantastic time, and I'm really keen to book a cruise for the whole family soon.
As for Disneyland - I've already written a whole post about that but as always, we had an amazing time! I love that I'm raising little ones who are as Disney obsessive as I am, they absolutely love our visits there and ask pretty much every day about when we can go back again!
Holidays aside, October has largely been a game of playing catch up - with everything from work, housework, life admin and Tyne's home education - it feels as though we'd no sooner caught up after our time away in Disneyland then we were away again, and trying to catch up from that too!
I'm still working to get back on top of things now, and with Christmas around the corner things look set to remain pretty hectic for the foreseeable future.
I have been feeling more and more though that we overstretch ourselves and take on too much - and I'll be honest, it's mostly my doing.
I have a real problem with saying No to things, and so I end up over-committing myself. My diary ends up full of obligations, leaving me struggling to squeeze in work...and it's usually family time that I end up feeling like I've scrimped on.
I hate that feeling, and so I've promised that for December I'm going to take on a lot less.
I'm going to time block my available work time so that I can't take on too many projects, and I'm going to make sure that I don't my usual trick of booking every single Christmas activity I see that sounds fun...because it ends up meaning that Christmas becomes one big rushed, hurried month with no down time and I don't want that to happen.
My plan for now is to limit it to our Santa visit (which is already booked) and our usual trip to the Polar Express...nothing else! Then we should be able to enjoy lots of snuggly movie duvet days at home, rather than rushing about here there and everywhere.
Fingers crossed I can stick to the plan!
So that's us for this month, I'll be back with another update at the end of the year - I hope October and Autumn have treated you all well!
If you enjoy my blog, please consider following me on Bloglovin'
