The Best Laid Plans.

I am keeping this post private for the time being while I come to terms with our news and hopefully see things settle down a bit more. By things, I mean we are pregnant and I am 42 and E is 47 and we hadn't expected this to happen and oh MY GOD oh my God OH MY GOD!!!

It has arrived at exactly the right moment. Ha. If I had a font that signified 'dripping in sarcasm', I would be using that right there. After leaving work early when I was pregnant with Giorgio, 6 years ago, I haven't worked since - unless you are an enlightened being and recognise that bringing up two vivacious boys in close succession is in fact full time work sufficient to occupy a couple of people and then some - in which case, I have been fully employed but unpaid since then. However - all this was about to change. I have had so many offers/ demands/ cajolings since I got to Italy to teach English or do private lessons, but since I taught at the boys' nursery, I have avoided it like the plague. Even grown-ups, I hate teaching full stop and wasn't about to get drawn back into it, being uncharacteristically stubborn about it when asked. Then one day, a friend rang and said she was starting a travel and events company and would I come on board? It would be a brand new office in a lovely new hotel and sports complex just down the road and if I only wanted to do mornings so I could be there for the boys in the afternoon, that would be fine too.

So tomorrow I am going to Verona for a week with her on a training course knowing that, barring any mishaps, I ain't going to be working for another couple of years yet... I feel really bad for her, I so don't want to let her down.

Of course, we were also supposed to be moving into the new house in the Autumn. It is a new build in the country, three stories with much more room and garden than we have now. Effectively a blank canvas. I have been looking forward to moving for about a year and have been steadily decorating each room in my mind and getting more and more excited the closer it got to making my ideas reality. Like that's going to happen now... *sigh*

I have gone through broody moments over the past few years, when Edo started at nursery, when friends have announced pregnancies or babies born. Much of it was born out a need for a purpose, I think now, which the new job was set to provide. We didn't expect this at all - in fact, the last trip to the gynae, he told me I was looking at perimenopause so I got all anxious about hot flushes and hair loss. Wrong!

This blog is going to take rather a surprising turn so, bear with me as I struggle to give up the lovely predicatable happy future we had for another we just can't anticipate.