Time for a change

There is another reason why I bought some hanging baskets a few weeks back, and that was to help spruce up the appearance of the house, as this week we put it on the market!
Olga and I have been working together at home since March, and we've decided that we would like some more space, especially so we can separate our working and living environments. Because we work from home, we're not tied down so tightly about living close to a particular location, we just need to be within a couple of hours drive of Heathrow and the Reading area, where some of our bosses live for the odd time when we need to meet up. This means we can cast our net quite wide when it comes to looking for somewhere new to live. We like the area we are in now, the countryside is lovely and only a few minutes drive from home, and it's very easy to get to London and Heathrow, but we have an opportunity now to get "more for our money" by looking for a place further away from London. We're in no rush to sell up, and we're not going to give the house away for silly money, so we're content to let this drag on if needed. However, if someone was to come along and really like the place and offers us something sensible, we'll take it. Our chances will be helped because we're going to rent for a while, to remove the concern of a long chain in the buying/selling process, and give us time to look for the "perfect" next house to buy, and then we'd not be held back in our own chain.
It also makes sense to do this now while Luda is here, she's brilliant at keeping the house clean and tidy while Olga and I are working, and can take the dogs out during viewings! Should it drag on past late September when she has to go back to Russia, hopefully by then Olga and I will be in the habit of living in a clean and minimalist house! We've rented a storage unit and have moved a lot of the unnecessary "stuff" into it, and will continue to do so until we're left with the bare minimum at home.
Personally I expect this to take some time, but we live in a desirable location, the house is in good condition and we've made a lot of improvements to it, and we'll have no onward chain, so you just never know, we might just get lucky and it could be sorted in weeks :-) 

Need to get back in the habit of posting!

Wow, I am really out of practise with posting on here, I apologise!
Olga has been away in Kazakhstan for a week, and has another week to go. This has meant Baba Luda and I are busier than normal with the house and Lara.
Lara has a friend at nursery who only lives a few doors up from us in Wycombe, and the girls have been visiting each other's houses to play, and last Sunday Lara and I, and Zoe and her mum went fruit picking at a local -pick-your-own farm. It was the first time I've done that, and whilst the fruit is more expensive than buying it at the supermarket, it was a lovely way to pass a few hours with Lara and it supports a local business, so we'll definitely do it again once Olga is back. I even made my first ever jam from the strawberries we collected! I don't  like to blow my own trumpet, but even I noticed how tasty it is, and probably by luck more than skill the consistency is about right.
Lara is, well, Lara. She makes me laugh with the things she says (on the way home from nursery: "Papa, when can I get a tatoo?") and her intelligence, particularly her memory, astounds me. Today we visited Homebase in Wycombe after having a little picnic in the park, and she remembered that we'd been to that same Homebase two weeks ago, and that we bought baskets of flowers (I'd bought some hanging baskets for the garden, aren't I the softy type!). Maybe it's normal for a three and a half year to remember things like that in detail, but I'm still impressed.
She's waking almost like clockwork at 6.40am now, and sometimes she'll lie in bed and shout for someone to come and get her up, but more and more she's getting up herself and coming into our room. We can send her back to her room and she'll get herself dressed, which makes our mornings easier!