Sunday....and we are home!

We arrived home at about 5.30 this evening. Our lovely neighbours had put out balloons and 'Welcome Home' banners, as well as having put food in our fridge, which was incredibly kind, and we were all very excited to be home.

Our journey home was fine, but there was no getting around the fact that St Louis is over 4000 miles away from Cheltenham, so we set off from the hotel at 9.20am (St Louis time) on Friday, and after changing flights in Washington, finally landed at Manchester airport at 6.30am on Saturday morning.
 
We went back to Grandma and Grandpa's house and after a few hours in bed, dragged ourselves up feeling rough! We had a lovely 24 hours with them though, as well as having chance to catch up with James, Beth and Sam. However, the jet lag definitely set in and this morning we finally woke the children up at 11am, and even then Daniel rolled over and said 'Please leave me alone!'

This afternoon we made our way home to Cheltenham. After unloading the car we should have dealt with this.......

But in fact we decided to do this.......

We have tried to start as we mean to go on; despite Daniel's (and our) exhaustion we have imposed the rule that Daniel is banned from crawling from one room to another around the house, he has to get in his walker and walk. Therefore this evening, after finally being able to have a shower (the first since his hamstrings operation 12 days ago) he walked in his pyjamas to the tea table.  He later walked to the toilet and back.

We also started teaching him to turn himself round in his walker and transfer to his gamma chair (which goes up and down so can be lowered to the right height for him to sit down into it). Obviously at the moment he needs a lot of support transferring, but we are confident he will learn to do it and it will greatly help his independence once he can.

So, now we start our new routine, and we are all delighted to be home. Our biggest problem this evening is that we have been away so long that Rich and I can't remember where we have put some of the things we cleared away before we left. For instance Lucy will be having a packed lunch tomorrow at school because I haven't the faintest idea where we put the menu for school dinners!

I am planning to do updates every few days / once a week from now on, as I don't think there will be much excitement to report on a daily basis! I certainly intend to continue to record Daniel's progress regularly though, and we have great hopes as to what the next few months may hold in that regard.