It's been a long time! The last year has brought many ups and a few downs. We were pregnant with twins in December 08-January 09 but sadly we lost them at 12/13 weeks. To give ourselves something positive and happy to focus on, we booked flights to Nova Scotia for Easter 2009, and spent a fabulous couple of weeks there. Moving to Canada is now very much 'on the cards', perhaps for around 5 years time. We enjoy life here, but at the same time are always on the lookout for a new adventure.

In June we were overjoyed to find out we were pregnant again and Baby Sproglet (19 weeks and 1 day), is now kicking and rolling away happily inside me, and is due to make an appearance in February 2010.

In July we moved house to the house of our dreams in a gorgeous Derbyshire village, and we're very very happy here. Our old houses is rented out and life is back to being fab.

Life is busy, as ever, and I'm finding it harder and harder to find time to update my blog. We had a fantastic month in Canada and as the weeks go by since our return, I yearn to be there more and more.

I've also had a few ideas for the next reincarnation of icklesarah.co.uk so watch this space...

The Summer holidays are upon us!

I had a mostly good end of term, bar myself, and the rest of the year 5 team, spending the entire last half term ill with a nasty coldy virusy chest infectiony type thing. Still, Speech Day and Sports Day went well, my kids made £60 profit by running a fruit shop for a week and I got some lovely comments from the kids and parents at the end of term which made me feel all fuzzy. And 12 kids/parents in my class clubbed together and gave me $200 to spend in Canada!! Awww!

We're off to Canada on Saturday... if you want to follow our travel blog, it's on the website which used to be our wedding website. Email me (or look at my facebook status) if you know me but don't know the address!

Today saw the long-overdue completion of the sale of our house 'down south'. It's a massive relief to know that that huge weight which has been dragging us down for the past year is now gone. At last, the money I earn through working the silly, stressful hours that I do will actually come to US and not go straight out on a house we no longer want.

This hasn't been a great week.... end of term is approaching at school and that means stressed and tired children... and stressed and tired teachers. Some children, some teachers and some parents are acting incredibly out of character and school isn't much of a fun place to be at the moment. Safe to say I will be very happy to greet my new class on Thursday and not sad to say goodbye to the issues I'm having to deal with at the moment with some of the children and parents from my class. Term is almost over!

Two weeks tomorrow we're off to Canada. I can't comprehend that it's quite so soon...

On Monday we exchanged contracts on the sale of our 'other house'! Yes, the weight-around-our-necks that has resulted in us having a double mortgage for 9 months will, come next Friday, be someone else's! It's a gorgeous house, and I loved living there, but it's 200 miles too far south for us to live in now... and it's such a relief to know we've managed to sell it. The price it's gone for is a lot less than we wanted, but in the current climate, a sale is a sale... so we've gone for it.

Last weekend we went down with a big van (after all sorts of shenanigans with the van hire place being closed at the time we'd booked to pick it up etc) and packed all our earthly belongings (bar the few we've had with us for the last few months) into it. I'm amazed we managed to fit it all in... but we did, and now it's all sitting in our dining room, piled almost to the rafters.

It's nice to have everything with us... nice to be sitting on a proper sofa... although if anyone needs a washer dryer, double bed, computer desk, chairs and table or sofa just let me know as they won't fit in our downsized house!!

We've had our house completely replastered (including boarded and skimmed gorgeous flat ceilings) and have painted two rooms... although we've ground to a halt on that front due to the large amount of stuff we brought up in the van that now fills much of the house!

But we're happy. We celebrated Ben's birthday on Sunday, exchanged contracts on Monday, have our 2nd wedding anniversary (and 5th together anniversary) in a couple of weeks and then go to Canada in just over 3 weeks. It's an exciting few months for us!

I've just signed up for a 'pro' account with flickr so we can upload lots of Canada photos this summer... and also because we've just bought ourselves a new toy: a Nikon D40 Digital SLR Camera. Ben got his annual bonus at work, and for some reason I've started being paid about £40 more a month recently (teacher payrises don't happen until September!) so we thought it would be a good thing to buy prior to our Canadian trip.

We're off to Canada in a very exciting 44 days time, so from 12th July we'll be sharing our Canada photos here. We're also planning on blogging whilst we're out there... I'll share the address of that when the time comes!

Spent the weekend on a whistlestop trip down south to do a bit of 'sorting out' at our house down there. We accepted an offer on it just over a week ago, and although we aren't holding our breath, we thought we should check that the place is still ok.

And it is.

It's gorgeous! I can't believe it's been on the market since last summer... bloody media and their scaremongering about a housing crash.

We're currently having our 'Midland House' (home) plastered, which is pretty exciting... every day we come back from work to a new surprise! Our plasterer is really really good, although he's had a few mishaps and hurt himself a couple of times, poor chap.

This week it'll be finished and then we start the mammoth task of painting the whole place.

Fingers crossed that in a month or so we'll have all our stuff that's still in the other house with us... and that it will have sold!

All's going well at the moment, bar various issues with selling the house that i won't go into.

School is good... I'm feeling really settled and happy there, and extremely glad I moved here last summer. I can't believe I'm only 2 months off the end of my first year there. It's great to know I have a permanent job and will be in the same place with the same people come September.

We're off to Canada in just over two months to spent a month travelling around thre different provinces - can't wait! And it'd be even better if we have the house sold by then and actually ahve some money...!

It's the holidays!!!

Tomorrow I'm off to York with my fellow year 5 teachers to do some scouting out in preparation for our residential trip next month... should be fun.

Went for a drink with some of my work-mates after work today... we headed over to the bar in the senior school and picked up some free 'end of term' champagne! Was nice to have a bit of a chill with everyone. We're starting a sweepstake to predict what year groups everyone will be in in September. I only have 11 more weeks with my current class. 55 days... not long at all really.

In some way this year has shot by, but it also feels like I've been at my school for ages... in a good way. :)

This week brought parents' evenings. Overall they were fine, although a couple of parents were the very stereotypical pushy-private-school kind who I was just glad to get rid of. Well, at least it's over. On Monday and Tuesday I was at school for 12.5 hours each day.... by Wednesday I had already worked a 'normal' person's 36 hour working week.... so the total this week came to just under 60 hours. Ouch. No wonder I have a head ache.

Only 3 days next week and then a glorious 3 weeks off. I'm going up to York with my 2 Year 5 colleagues the day after we break up for a recce on the place we're visiting on the way to our residential trip in April. We sorted room allocations today... crickey, I can't believe it's so close.

I'm looking forward to spending time over Easter finalising things for our summer travelling around Canada. The flights are booked, Toby's bunny-hotel is booked (and gorgeous) as is our travel insurance. Next on the list are coach tickets to and from Heathrow (and now we live a lot further from the airport than we used to!), accommodation in Vancouver, Banff area and Jasper (as they're the busiest so most likely to book up) then Calgary, Ottawa, Victoria and the other 2 or 3 places in BC Interior. I am incredibly excited.... in exactly 17 weeks we will just have landed in Ottawa for the first leg of the trip....

Back at school now... as busy as ever! I'm feeling a bit 'fragile' at the moment, so struggling to stay focussed and positive on things at work. I'm spending around 12 hours a day here at the moment... and 60 hour working weeks aren't much fun, especially when the majority is spent either alone or with 18 ten year olds! :(

We went for a couple of lovely walks at the weekend... one down the canal in our town and another round a beautiful village about 10 minutes away by car. It was nice to get out... although the original plan had been to go and fly my kite... until we realised we'd left it in our other house 200 miles south of here!

We're hoping to head down south at some point to pick up my keyboard/synth and stand, which is currently the only piece of furniture (bar a toy box) in the spare room in our old house. I miss my keyboard... I'm accompanying my violin group at the Spring Strings concert on Thursday and I wish I had it up here so I could practise! I must find some time tomorrow to play it through a few more times.

I'm also playing my violin in the concert, in the 'teachers' ensemble' with the 2 violin and cello teachers... should be interesting! Hopefully I haven't lost the ability to play... I haven't played regularly (bar in my Thursday violin group) for a three years now, since I started my PGCE.

This week marks 22 years since I started playing the violin - how time flies!

What a week... on Monday we accepted an offer on our house, got all excited about it, then I've just had a call from the estate agent saying that our buyer has pulled out. I'm very annoyed, cross and upset, but I know it can't be helped. Apparently they'd put in an offer on another place several weeks ago that was refused... and now they've come back and said they'll accept it. So they've dropped out house.

What's even more frustrating is that yesterday I booked our flights to Canada, and accepted the quote from our plasterer to come and plaster all our ceilings and most of the walls. So we have a lot of money going out and not much coming in. Grrrr...

Sod's law that after a buyoant lots-of-years of the property market, the one time we want to sell the market falls apart. I'm not planning on moving again for quite a while after this!

Keeping everythin crossed we get another buyer soon... we're in Canada for a month in the summer so we really can't afford to have everything hanging on until then...

I've just checked my sitemeter to have a gander at how many people have visited icklesarah.co.uk recently... and someone arrived here by searching for "I hate shopping for wedding dresses" in google... a kindred spirit!! :D Well, actually, I enjoyed it in the end... it was just the prospect I hated.

It reminds me of when I found that someone had reached here by searching for "cardigan fetish"... just don't ask! :)

I'm spending a gorgeously indulgent morning in bed with the laptop, planning our summer of travelling around Canada.

The current plan (and they change regularly) is to fly to Ottawa, spend a few days there, then fly on to Calgary, and spend a few days there before driving into the Rockies. We'll visit Banff, Lake Louise, Jasper, drive the Icefields Parkway, then head down into British Columbia and take a scenic route through lots of towns/villages - Radium Hot Springs, Nelson, Nakusp, Kelowna - and then drive on to Vancouver. After a couple of days in Vancouver (timed to see the massive fireworks festival we saw last time) we'll float-plane across to Victoria (on Vancouver Island) for a few days, then head back to spend my 27th Birthday in Vancouver, staying there for a few more days.

We'll be away for a month... and I am SO excited. We need to sort out somewhere for Toby to stay... there's a good 'bunny boarding' place not far from here, which we're hoping to visit in a few weeks.

It's all very exciting!

It's half term! Today my class earned their 100th class point (since September!) so we had a 'day of fun' - free choice time after assembly, decorating cakes after break (which they loved) and then musical bumps/statues and a dance competition after Games in the afternoon. I enjoyed the day, although it was probably just as tiring as a 'normal' day. It's nice to see my kids in a different situation though.

I'm now over half way through the year with them, which is a very strange thought.

Now I'm looking forward to a week of doing very very little. And probably rather a lot of marking and assessment... (not looking forward to that part).

I'm trying to write in here more often... so here goes!

I am absolutely berluddy knackered. Half term can't come soon enough! I know hitting this bottom-of-a-black-hole feeling every so often in teaching is inevitable, but that doesn't make it any easier when it comes. My kids have been challenging today, and on top of that I had a kid visiting for 'assessment' - I don't think I did it as well as I could have done (I completely forgot to hear him read!) but he seemed to enjoy himself, and seemed a nice chap. My terrible two have been bouncing off the walls and can't seem to behave themselves... cue lots of Golden Time lost on Friday. One has already gained a yellow card, which means 5 minutes off, and I'm sure there will be more to come...

Ben's playing me feel-good music to cheer me up, from the early years of University.... is it really 9 years ago?!

It's the weekend! Unlike many schools around here, I don't have half term for another week... but with only 5 more school-days tso go, the end is in sight. My kids have been getting niggly and hyperactive over the past few days, so they're definitely in need of a break as well. But my mood was lifted yesterday by the beautiful sunshine - I had Golden Time outside (democratic vote... and no yellow cards this week, a first!) and then volunteered to co-supervise After School Care outside, as the lady who runs it was out on the Year 6 trip. It was great!

I can't wait for the summer... I love being able to take the kids outside to do work. I think I need to order a set of 18 clipboards!

Today we're off to collect Granny and take her to a big garden centre nearby to spend her Christmas garden tokens. Just waiting for Ben to prise himself away from Football Manager on hte PC...!

Tonight Ben and I have our second plasterer coming round to give us a quote on skimming most of the house... I'm quite excited as it means we're actually getting somewhere with this house!

The big jobs we have to do are:
- re-plastering/skimming
- redo kitchen
- new carpets/floor throughout
- fix damp patch in dining room.

Not too much then... well, compared to our old place anyway. Which, incidentally, still hasn't sold. Perhaps the cut in interest rates will encourage a few more new buyers onto the market...

Along with the rest of the teachers in my school, and probably in the country, I'm getting increasingly tired and grumpy in the run-up to half term. One of my kiddiwinks (the challenging one who moved to my school because of his behaviour at his old one) has been completely up on the air and I feel like I'm spending about 90% of my time/energy on him. It's tiring.

There are changes afoot at school, and it'll be interesting to see how things work out for next academic year. We're already starting to think about year groups for next year... I'm hoping to remain in Year 5, as it'll only be my second year at this school. It'll be quite cool to do things next year for the second or third time (or even fourth for a few things!) and hopefully get a bit better at it. :)

My class are on 93 class points - when they hit 100 they get a whole class party. They're very excited about it but I'm semi-dreading it - a few of mine get very silly when the routine changes...

2 more sleeps until the weekend!

I've spent the afternoon messing around with icklesarah.co.uk - I'd had some problems with the coding of my previous template and never got around to fix it. I've decided to pretty much discontinue my 'teaching blog' as I don't often have time to update one, let alone 2 blogs... so this will become both.

I'll still link to my teaching/PGCE blog just in case anyone's interested in ancient history, and I may pop the odd 'comedy teaching quote' in there for posterity. :)

I took the picture in the background whilst we were on our honeymoon in British Columbia in 2006- it's my favourite view in the world. I've spent a lot of time this weekend researching this year's summer jaunt - 4 weeks travelling across the Canadian Rockies. All being well, we'll be heading up the Vancouver coast to see My View on 2nd August 2008, before watching the final of the Internation Celebration of Light fireworks festival at English Bay. Holidays doesn't come much better than that. :)