What a day!
Fiona rang me just after she had finished the first dog walk to say she couldn't get the van in gear. She only had 4 well behaved dogs to pick up so she legged it back to collect her car. I dashed over to meet her to collect the keys and go and try and retrieve the van. I managed to get it in gear and coax it round to collect 1/2 the dogs for the next walk to keep on track of time, whilst Fiona dropped off the dogs from the previous walk in her car. A SOS call to our self employed walker who is supposed to give us some flexibility was met with a very unhelpful response (we'll be dealing with that later!) so Fiona had to continue in her car to collect the other dogs and meet up with me later. Mr EG had to leave work in a hurry to collect Toby as in the middle of all this pre-school rang to say Toby was unwell. Mr EG then had to stay off work to look after Toby and Eva.

After we had done the last walk, the clutch on the van completely gave up. Whilst I waited for the AA, Fiona made several journeys back and forth to drop off all the dogs. Mr EG contacted our garage who said they couldn't fit it in until Thursday so wouldn't be ready till Friday. So we were resigned we'd have to fork out for a hire van for 2 days basically meaning that after wages and fuel etc we will barely make a profit. On trying to book this we found out Fiona would not be able to drive a hire van as she has been driving less than 2 years so I will have to work the next 2 days. So we contacted the child minder to see if we could swap days but she couldn't do it as she was full. It just felt like every time we got over one obstacle we met up with another. Massively massively stressful day. Which has raised lots of questions about the way our business is organised and will force us to make some big decisions over the next few weeks. But at least we managed to get all of the dogs walked. Grandma and Grandad are coming to the rescue to help with childcare. We collect the hire van in the morning. Tobes is a bit wheezy but had a good sleep this afternoon and seemed a bit brighter before bed. Time for a very large glass of wine!!