Saturday 12th November

Back in September, knowing my love for cake, my children nominated me for this –

And then I found out that I was one of the lucky ones and had been chosen 😬

I was allowed to take a friend. So this afternoon I went to pick up Nina and off we went 🚗

We had no idea what to expect. But we got a nice welcome from Rosy as we walked into the showroom (just in time another 4 couples were already there!) and had a cup of tea made for us 😀 We were then all given a form to fill out throughout the afternoon with what we thought the flavour of the cakes were, if we liked them and any other comments that we wanted to make.

Then out came the first cake 🍰 Exciting! Rosy’s daughter Emily was waitress for the afternoon. Everyone took a piece. They were all presented so nicely. I had decided just to take a small mouthful of mine as there were going to be so many different pieces of them (we had already all been given a bag so that we could take what we didn’t eat back home with us). Now to try and decide the flavour 🤔 There were lots of ‘discussions’ going on between everyone during this time and then after a few minutes, Rosy revealed to us the correct answer.

We did this 12 times! with a break for more tea halfway through. It was fun 😀

I don’t think I did too badly with my guesses. Some of the flavours that I can remember we tried were salted caramel, Bakewell tart, pistachio and rose, I think there was a carrot cake and there was an Oreo one. I wish now that I had made a note of them all. Not only were there the different flavours to try but they were different textures too. I thought the Christmas cake was a good idea (exactly the same ingredients as a standard Christmas cake but blended to make the mixture completely smooth!) That has completely confused me as to which way I like my Christmas cake now though 😖. My favourite was ginger and lime (I have since found out that this was in fact the overall winner from both cake tasting sessions that weekend!) and I also really liked the look of the two colours of the cake together too, so different 😋

Can you see the ‘burger’ at the back of the middle photo, this cake was made by Rosy’s daughter for a competition.

How about these tortoises and spaghetti and meatballs! These cakes, along with many others, were on display in the showroom and were all made by Rosy.

I have a big birthday coming up 😱 so I think I might drop a few hints and show my family this website link Cakes for All UK I definitely recommend that you contact Rosy if you need any special occasion cakes making yourselves – and don’t forget to choose the ginger and lime flavour! 😋

What a great way it was to spend an afternoon and a brilliant idea of Rosy’s, a good way to find out new popular cake flavours. (Rosy if you ever need any more cake to be tasted at any time please don’t forget to give me a shout 😂)

I am so glad that I was one of the lucky people that were chosen 😃

Monday 7th to Friday 11th November

I think this week was mainly spent on trying to organise things and settling into the new house. 

On Monday I was at home sorting and then when I had finished work on both Tuesday and Wednesday my time was pretty much spent in the same way!

On Wednesday evening we finally cleared the last two things that had been left in our old house. Gary took down the wardrobe as he now had a use for it and I had managed to sell the dishwasher, so a man was coming to collect it 😀

On Thursday I went off to the John Radcliffe hospital to volunteer. They told me that the usual man I visit every week wasn’t going to be there. It hadn’t been confirmed but they thought that he had got a call for a transplant. Yay! (About time too, he has been waiting for four years 😖) I was really pleased to hear this but I was also worried, I really wanted to know how he was …

It was good to go out for a walk later. I haven’t been able to go for a couple of weeks, I didn’t have the spare time to fit it in the week before the house move and then last week a couple of the others had a meeting to attend.

When I got in from work on Friday I decided to ring the hospital where my ‘hospital friend’ was as I really wanted to know how he was doing. They couldn’t tell me much over the phone as I am obviously not family but at least I knew he was there and he was ‘ok’.

I think we are all starting to feel a tiny bit more used to being in this house now and realising that we are here to stay for a while (well hopefully anyway 😫). I think we have all  worked out how much earlier we need to leave the house for our walks to work as we live a bit further from the town now. It’s the simple things like that which you don’t really think about, they all need to be fitted in to your new routine to make you feel more settled (or maybe that’s just me 😏)

It’s still hard work now everyone has gone back to their jobs but at least we’re in! The ‘normal’ jobs like shopping, washing the clothes, washing the dishes etc still all need to be done alongside the unpacking, the sorting of ‘paperwork’, changing addresses everywhere, re-organising the utilities (normally very long difficult phone calls), changing direct debits, the list goes on, and of course still needing to find a bit of time for my blog! 

Saturday 5th to Sunday 6th November

My mind was definitely away on other things on this Saturday morning but I was also desperate to get myself a new bed. I have been spending way too much time looking for one on the Internet with no success and it was doing my head in! So Leah took me into Banbury. I realise I was a bit of a nightmare in the shop. There were so many different questions to be answered and my brain just wasn’t working 😩 The man was extremely patient with me and in the end I ordered my new bed 😀

Then we went off to do the food shopping I think I coped reasonably well with that! Thanks Leah for putting up with me today! 

When I got home I gave the food cupboards a bit of a sort out before stacking away all the shopping. We seem to have bought so much today!

It had been an extremely cold day. In the evening I briefly went over to an outside party in Charlbury. It was nice to stand around the fire pit 🔥 they had there and try and keep warm.

On Sunday afternoon I went to my niece Laura’s surprise baby shower with both Robyn and Leah. She already has the lovely Oliver (who’s 3 I think) and his baby brother is due in December. We all had a fun afternoon. We played games – pin the dummy on the baby, guess the price of certain baby products, guess what’s in the nappy etc and designed our own vest for the new baby 👶 

Had some lovely food and went home with cake 🎂 Perfect 😂

A really nice afternoon. Good luck with the baby Laura 👶

Back to a visit from Julie and Hannah later.

Tuesday 1st to Friday 4th November

So with the hospital visit over it was now time to get back into ‘house move mode’ and see what jobs needed doing in the house. Robyn, Leah and myself had all booked the day off from work.

Leah was up at the crack of dawn and started (and finished!) painting her bedroom. She worked so hard, with just a short break for lunch. She did a great job. After a slow start Robyn spent the day spring cleaning 😂 She too worked very hard! And I crawled about in the cupboard under the stairs getting rid of the cobwebs so that I could stack a few things away. We had a good productive day 😆

Despite this very busy day we were still all feeling a bit strange about being in this new house. It really hadn’t all sunk in yet. Was this lovely house really ours now?

I think I need to find the regular spot where I will sit with my junk and my bags before I will properly feel at home 😬

Then back to work for me and Robyn on Wednesday.

Over the last few weeks Leah has been for an ultrasound scan and to have blood taken. Today she was off to hospital with her dad to see a consultant to find out the results of these. Leah’s dad has Polycystic Kidney Disease (this is an hereditary condition). We already know that Robyn has this too as we found out accidentally after she needed an emergency scan following a car crash. Now it was Leah’s turn to find out if she too has the condition …

She does 😩 More upset for us to deal with 😰

I didn’t go volunteering this Thursday which also upset me greatly as I hadn’t been able to go last week either. I wasn’t feeling in the best of moods and when I couldn’t find my bag that has my bus pass and volunteer badge in it (I was rushing around searching through all the boxes we have stacked around right now ) I was getting more frustrated and eventually I just gave up. 

When I had sorted myself out and calmed myself down I started to do some more sorting jobs around the house and then later in the afternoon I walked along into the town, called into the post office to redirect the mail, then called into the bank and building society to change all of our addresses there (that’s a never ending job in itself) and then of course treated myself to Caffè Nero for some much needed catching up with my blog  

Robyn was on a very late lunch (she started work at 9am, was finishing at 8pm and couldn’t have her lunch break until 4.45pm! I’m sure that’s not right 🤔) so she joined me in there for a little while too.

Friday was just a normal work day and then home to jobs in the kitchen 😖

Monday 31st October

Happy Halloween 👻🎃

Today was clinic day. Gary was taking me this time as Robyn has started a counselling course now which is on a Monday afternoon, so she sent us off with a list of questions that she wanted answered!

I don’t know if you remember, but at my last visit I was told that my PBC might have returned in my new liver as some of the readings in my last two lots of blood tests were a bit high. This came as quite a shock to us.

We have been waiting for this latest appointment to try and find out a bit more about what is going on.

I had an ultrasound scan first of all and then I went for the appointment with my consultant. 

As we were walking with the nurse to the ultrasound room I had a ‘flashback’. The corridor leading to the room and the room itself was so familiar to me, I’m sure I was taken for a scan there during my ‘crazy days’ following transplant. It was a bit unsettling, I didn’t like it much, but I didn’t say anything and just followed on into the room.

My consultant told me that the scan (which among other things was checking the blood flow to and from my liver) looked fine, so that was good news. But some of the readings in my latest blood results were still high, so he thought that there was still quite a good chance that my illness had returned 😫 The only way you can tell for sure though is to have a biopsy of the liver, which I can tell you is not a very nice experience! 

The decision on if I wanted to go down this route was now completely up to me. The biopsy isn’t completely necessary at this stage. If it did show that PBC is back, nothing would change in my treatment right now anyway. They don’t like doing these procedures if they can help it and I certainly don’t want my new liver being messed around with just for confirmation reasons. So my decision was to leave things alone (sorry Robyn, I know you wanted me to come away with a definite answer today but I think my liver’s best left alone right now, at the moment it’s doing the very best it can for me 😏)

I mentioned that I have actually been feeling unwell quite a lot recently, have been having pains in my tummy and have just been so very tired. Again it was up to me if I wanted further investigations on my tummy, so I decided to just wait and see if things all start to settle down a bit now the house move and hopefully a lot of my stress is out of the way I also showed him my blood pressure result sheet that my GP wanted me to do, he said it all looked fine to him.

So the outcome of the appointment was to go away and carry on as normal with everything. I just need to add ursodeoxycholic acid to my medications again (which is the drug used to treat PBC), keep an eye on how I’m feeling and my blood results will be monitored as usual.

I am a bit scared about all of this. I always knew that my illness could return. But so soon? I would have liked a bit more of a break from things if I’m honest! But what can you do? Nothing. So I will just carry on like I always do. Some days will be good, some days will be tough. I don’t know any different really 😑

We stopped off at Frankie and Benny’s on the way home as we were both hungry. I had a delicious spaghetti bolognese. Oh and some nice bruschetta to start 😋

When I eventually got home I was quite disappointed to find out that we had no Trick or Treat callers for Halloween and didn’t for the rest of the evening. We all thought that we might get quite a lot because of the position of the house we have moved to and were looking forward to it. But sadly not! Maybe next year we need to put a pumpkin 🎃 out!!!

Sunday 30th October

A VERY early start 😵

As Julie and Hannah had slept over we all seemed to be awake extremely early. They always wake early anyway, so does Leah and then I think the noise they were all making while messing around together woke the rest of us.

After a breakfast of tea and crumpets we went back down to our old house to give it a final tidy and clean now all the furniture and everything was out, so that it was ready to give back to our landlady.

Then we all took off to Banbury for a spot of shopping. Leah got some paint for her bedroom, I got a loft ladder so I can store my junk away easily and Robyn got fed up with waiting around!!!

Two of her friends came for a visit and to see the new house in the evening though so hopefully that cheered her up a bit 😂

Saturday 29th October

An early start and a busy day.

Loading up the lorry, dragging and carrying.

Unloading the lorry, installing and unpacking.

Thanks to all the help we had everything had been moved from one house to the other by mid afternoon.

We rewarded ourselves with various takeaways for supper and a very noisy sleepover 😃

Massive thanks to everyone that helped.

We were in! 🏡

Friday 28th October

And then today …

this happened. 

We got the keys to our new house 🔑🏡

After an awful lot of hard work, stress and tears – we’re moving in tomorrow 🤗

Friday 21st to Thursday 27th October

Happy Birthday to my big brother George 🍻

The troops were coming today! Julie, Hannah and Lynda. Robyn and me had the day off work (poor Leah couldn’t get the day off but joined us later in the afternoon). The plan was for us to move some of the boxes that were packed and ready over to Lynda’s house in nearby Hook Norton (she had very kindly agreed to us storing some of our things in the workshop she has next to her house, until we had another house to put them in!).

After loading two cars, driving over to Hooky, unloading everything, stopping for a cup of tea and a slice of cake, driving back and just getting ready to start the second load, I get an unexpected phone call from Leah. The solicitor had just rung her at work to ask her if we wanted to exchange contracts on our house purchase this very afternoon! What??? What on earth had happened to suddenly turn everything around so quickly? – but of course we very happily agreed.

Our jobs for today had now changed, we didn’t need to take any more things over to Lynda’s. We would hopefully now be able to move it straight into our new house 😀 So we all went down to the kitchen and started to have a mass pack and clean in there.

After all of that action I had to then call up to the doctors because a blood pressure machine had become available. I had to have this at home for a week and record my own blood pressure twice a day. And while I was there I got talked into having a flu jab 💉 which I was not very happy about 😕

Since hearing the good news, for the rest of the week Robyn, Leah and me have spent most of our time cleaning, packing and sorting with a lot of help from Julie and Hannah and we’ve also been lucky enough to have help from Tom, Jack and Gary.

Of course I have been feeling quite unwell through it all and to add to that my arm was VERY sore from the jab for a few days. I went to work one day while not feeling too great  I paid another visit to the doctors because it was looking like my Shingles type patch was a bit infected – it was hurting ☹️ She gave me some antibiotics and some cream (this treatment is still yet to be started )

Although I have been doing as I’m told and taking my blood pressure all week, even though I’m not sure the timing is very good, as I am still stressed and constantly on the go to try and get everything done ready for moving. What with doing this first thing every morning and then taking my tablets it feels a little bit like being back in hospital! 😖

And as if I haven’t got enough to do this week I have just had to attend a National Speed Awareness Course (on my way to the John Radcliffe one morning for my volunteering duties I was caught going a few miles over the 30mph speeding limit! Naughty me!) The registration for this course was 7.45 AM 😱 Can you believe that? This meant I needed to leave my house at around 7 to give me a chance of being on time. It was going to be quite an achievement for me to do this, I am not known for getting up bright and early. 

But I did it 🤗

Saturday 1st to Thursday 20th October

October. And what a month it has been so far 😖

I have dressed up as an elf for a fancy dress party, went for a wander around Banbury Canal Day and then had a nice roast dinner for Hannah’s belated birthday celebrations, visited my friend Nina (which definitely did cheer me up for a little while!) I walked along to the salon so that Robyn could do my hair (lovely head massage 💆) before she went away on holiday, the lucky thing! (She had left a little treasure hunt for me again, and when I solved the clues for each day there was a treat left there and at the end of the week a message had been spelt out – I do know that I am spoilt!) Gary and me went out for another roast dinner, Julie and Hannah came round one evening to help us sort and clean, we got the house ready as best we could for a viewing from the estate agent as the house were in is now already up for sale, went out for a cooked breakfast, visited my brother and Robyn came home safely 😀 

I have had a visit to the doctors which I almost gave up on because I waited 2 hours to be seen. I was very fed up. Thank goodness I had a prearranged meeting with my friend Jackie later that day for a much needed cuppa ☕️ 

I had been having some pains in my side and back area so I was given some antibiotics for a possible water infection (I wasn’t 100% convinced with this but we’ll see what happens). I also had high blood pressure. And the next day I also found a new outbreak of the Shingles type virus that I get so you could say I wasn’t feeling particularly great!

I have had a couple of days off from work from being ill, a few days off as holiday, apart from that I have still been working and volunteering as normal.

I have also spent quite a lot of this month crying 😰 and being just completely stressed out. The main reason for this being the dreaded house move which has just been going on for SO long now. I seem to have been having to contact all the parties concerned more and more as the weeks have gone on, chasing to get things sorted as we need to be out of the house we are in at the moment on 31st October. I didn’t seem to be getting any sensible answers from anyone, just always ‘we’re now waiting for this or that to happen’, so frustrating. It was certainly looking like we were going to be homeless for a while until the house purchase finally goes through. And knowing that I wasn’t going to be able to provide Robyn and Leah with a home is upsetting and makes me feel so guilty, that’s my job as their mum isn’t it? Instead we were all having to ask family/boyfriends if we would be able to stay with them for a short time and also trying to find some storage for all of our belongings! 

I had definitely had enough now, I was finding it difficult to cope with. They say that moving house is one of the most stressful things you can go through. I can tell you that feeling ill all the way through it too is not something that I would recommend 😖