Was thinking tonight ( somewhat bizarrely) about my reactions to defrosting the freezer. I am now living in a house that belonged to my mum, who died in 2008. It's where the kids and I moved to, to get out of the marital home. The disintegration of my marriage and the loss of my mum were quite close together, and I found it quite tough to deal with things. Taking over a house filled with your mum's things, in itself is quite difficult. I left, just about all of my worldly possessions at my marital home, and just drove away. It felt like the only way. So I never came to an empty house, but to

I have found this last week or so difficult, and although I knew it would be hard to basically choose to be a single parent (by telling my OH if he didn't move out I'd just file for divorce and we'd all lose out), but oh boy it's like having a newborn baby in the house again. Which is something I know about, having had four of the *ahem* cherubs.

When you have a newborn it's vitally important you just go into basic survival mode. The most important thing is to get adequate sleep, adequate food, and be basically living in a stable environment. Nicities, like ironing (!) or baking a cake, or

He left today. The day went well. The children were fine, treated it as a big adventure, and were heavily involved in the whole day. We had dinner at his, then he came back with us (he's only a few streets away) to pick up a few things he'd forgotten, and he read the kids a bedtime story while I settled the youngest, then he went.

I sat down and did a reflective writing exercise that I'd been explained yesterday, and basically sat and wrote furiously for 6 minutes exactly, just emptying my mind of the chatter. Then I sat and thought about how I felt and what was on my mind. And I wrote about