As soon as Max started crawling around we realised that living right on the water was very stressful! We decided to sell the lovely Marina home we were living in at the time as it’s not practical with a toddler. The agents warned us that these homes take time to sell but ours sold really quickly and we ended up renting in Gerrards Cross for 6 months whilst we decided where to live.

I was going to pay a bit more attention to my business and found it quite tricky finding help as I didn’t know many people in the area and cleaners and baby sitters were very expensive so James suggested speaking to a friends au pair that used to baby sit for us and do the odd bit of ironing and cleaning.

She had recently gone back to the czheck republic so I contacted her to see if she wanted to spend a few months helping us out, it would give her a chance to live close to London and we knew we really liked her and more importantly so did Max, she agreed and it made life so much easier. We were very lucky to have her, Lucie, she loved Max, was hard working, flexible, patient and very conscientious. We knew we could trust her and she was a great addition to our family. We found a house in Cheltenham that we loved and so decided to move there, we gave Lucie the option of coming with us and thankfully she accepted, she was a tremendous help with everything. Lucie ended up staying with us for another year and then moved back to her country to get on with her life, I stay in touch with her to this day and will always be grateful for her time with us, we realised how lucky we were and how special she really was when we tried another Au pair, disaster! She didn’t last long and we wouldn’t try another one!

I didn’t enjoy my work as much as I had for various reasons, my attitude had changed as had the company I was with and so I enjoyed my time with Max and made the most of Portugal before we would be committed to school schedules etc………….., we would go out there for a month or 6 weeks with Lucie and we all had a lovely time,I also got to know Cheltenham and we love this town and the surrounding area.

When Max went to Nursery aged 4 I found I had more time on my hands and looking back on what I had done with the flat and the house in Portugal I decided I would like to learn more about Interior design and discovered that I could take an HND in Spatial Design locally so embarked on my life as a mature student for the next 2 years!

A friend decided to join me at the last minute and that made it much more fun as we would drop the boys (her son was at the same school) in the morning and then car share, it was an interesting time, getting the old grey matter going again was exhausting at first.  It was a full time course and I found it a bit hard at the beginning but soon got in to the swing of things and thoroughly enjoyed it. I discovered that it was something I wouldn’t like to do for other people but used the knowledge to re design the house we are in at the moment and therefor at the end of the 2 years I found myself at a bit of a loose end again!