Pausing For Breath

...between processing, picking and packing orders, meeting deadlines and trying to get everything else done. Work seems to have exploded this weekened yet again. Just as well, as we need to keep that cashflow buzzing. On the good news front, though, Jon had confirmation the other day that having done well over 100k worth of business with one of our wholesalers last year, we've moved up to a higher discount tier and won a retrospective rebate for 2005, so that'll certainly help :-))

Emily has been battling hard to stay sweet, loving and helpful in the face of a snarly, snappy Mummy (I **hate** Sundays, the workload just gets too much), bless her, and has largely managed it. Certainly better than I have, anyway. She spent the morning doing secret arts and crafts stuff, making me and Jon Valentines cards and an anniversary card and present for our forthcoming anniversary on the 6th. This afternoon she's done more yoga, gymnastics and tai chi and played lots of card games with Daddy. I don't know what on earth the game actually was, but the level of giggling was enough to wake the dead, so I can only assume that much fun was had ;-)

Forgot to mention that yesterday Emily "set free" one of the big helium snowflake balloons she had at her birthday party (still inflated nearly a month later, not bad!) - she wrote a lovely note to attach to it with our email address, asking whoever finds it to email us and let us know how far it went. It certainly shot up when she let go in the garden, and was last seen extremely high up disappearing into the blue-ness of the sky, heading towards Goole if my sense of direction isn't completely wrong. I don't suppose we'll ever hear back from anyone, but you never know...

Big news yesterday from ballet - they're doing another show! Yay! They're supposed to do one at the Plowright Theatre every two years in the autumn, but they couldn't get the theatre for Autumn 2006 so they've brought it forwards to June. Emily had only been going to ballet for a month or two when they did the last show in November 2004 and she was completely bowled over by the whole experience. Three nights performing to a packed theatre full of several hundred people; she can't wait to do it again. At the moment we only have the dates of the show (which is a much longer run this time round), we haven't been told what the theme is or anything, but it looks like we'll be running around like lunatics to extra ballet rehearsals as the ballet exams are due around that time too. Before the last show we seemed to be attending rehearsals every five minutes, and because Emily's group is now that bit older their parts are bigger, so given that plus the extra exam rehearsals which were already scheduled....should be interesting!

Right, well I'm off to force myself into a better mood and carry on with some work. At times like this I try to remember that we *wanted* to be self-employed, and that better this than trotting off to work every day for someone else.....hmmm, the pep talk doesn't always work though.