My boy

makes everything OK!

In a rare moment, I think I have to admit to myself that I have been a little stressed. It's only when we have finished work today that I realised exactly how much it has consumed me in the past few weeks.

My morning today involved
* dealing with a little silliness; being treated with gratitude and respect from one group;
* being made to remember that sometimes youngsters don't appreciate what they have been given, but only what they think they should have also had;
* nursing a blinder of a headache;
* feeling flat as a pancake by the final staff meeting;
* feeling bad for a colleague who yet again missed out on his Secret santa present because another colleague hadn't had the foresight or organisation to get it into school when they weren't in;
* joining colleagues in the pub for end of term wind-down and feeling like the world was going on around me but I was just sat there trapped in a bubble that I couldn't get out of;
* crying all the way home with the relief of knowing that I have two weeks off;
* coming home, getting into bed and falling asleep for 5 hours.

I woke at 8 pm to find that it had been snowing - the boys tell me it was around 7pm it started.

By 10pm, we had a good three inches lying on the ground, so all three of us got wrapped up and went outside to play. Corin and James started bulding snow men (or a snow dog in James' case) and threw a fair amount of snowballs around too. We stopped for mulled wine (for the grown ups) and hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows for James. We came in at 11.30pm, with me feeling human again and feeling like a huge weight had lifted.

I am grateful for my life, make no mistake so to say that I have been feeling very low is quite a big thing for me to admit, because I don't want to sound churlish or ungrateful for what I have.

My lovely husband and son have, in the space of 90 minutes, reminded me what life is really about though - which is fun, laughter, doing things on the spur of the moment, and spending time with the people we love. So that is what I am going to do for the next two weeks. The rest of it, be damned.