Summer has very definitively come to an end in the last two weeks, with the weather dropping down to around 16 on average and plenty of rain rolling in. We haven’t quite reached the ‘beautiful autumn leaves’ part of the autumn though, so that gives us something to look forward to.

School has been very busy, with the ‘honeymoon phase’ of returning seemingly coming to an end as well. The children have been very rowdy the last few days, and there’s a tummy bug going around so we had an interesting afternoon of people throwing up in the classroom on Thursday afternoon. However, we’re past the halfway point of the first term, so we’ve only got three more weeks before half term break. This is the only half term break that is 2 weeks, so that’s definitely something to look forward to.

On the house front, there’s not much progress; we’re just waiting on the lawyers to finish asking each other questions and clarifying before Peter can exchange contracts and set a date for completion. Luckily it seems as if you can set quite a quick date after exchange, so we’re still crossing our fingers that we’ll be able to use the half term break to move.

Last weekend I didn’t have much to report on so didn’t bother doing a blog post, but I spent most of the weekend familiarising myself with the Ancestry website and doing a bit of research into our family history. It was funny to realise that Grandpa’s father’s family all lived in East London and the photos that people have uploaded to ancestry include the churches in Shoreditch and Hackney that are quite nearby to where we live. His mother’s family were from Guernsey as well, so that definitely adds somewhere interesting to visit on the list! Pa’s family all seem to be from a small radius of a village in Wiltshire, so I’ll be trying to visit there when we’re able to as well.

After a busy week at work, we had a fun Friday evening doing a virtual Oktoberfest event with Peter’s cousins. We ordered in some bratwurst and salad and tried a range of special German ‘Oktoberfest’ beers. It was nice to catch up with cousins as well, particularly since they’re in parts of England that are under lockdown at the moment.

On Saturday I had my first meet up for a second book club, and we had a great discussion of Rodham – a book about ‘what if Hilary Clinton had never married Bill’. It was a fascinating book that I really enjoyed reading, and made for very interesting discussion in the little group. We met up at Boxpark Shoreditch, where we had a nice lunch and a couple of beers. After book club I met Peter at a cute wine bar recommended by Bridget, one of the girls in the book club, and we had a beautiful glass of wine in the cute little covered courtyard. We then walked up to the Mikkeller pub in Shoreditch (right across the road from the church where Grandpa’s ancestors were baptised and married) and met our friend Justin for a pint. We had to rush home to meet a food delivery but afterwards Justin came back to ours for dinner and some nice beers. It was an unintentionally boozy day, but we did manage to get to bed at a somewhat reasonable time.

This morning we skyped Mum, Dad and Jess and had a good catch up, but the rest of the morning is planned for just relaxing and doing food prep ahead of the week. We’re going to Lee and Sus’ place for Canadian Thanksgiving dinner tonight, and with the rising cases in London we’re anticipating that this will potentially be our last social engagement with other households for quite a while!