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it took a full ten minutes to download all of the photos we DID take off the camera when we got home, so it’s not like we won’t have anything to remember it by, is it? So, in total, I’d say we’ve taken maybe half a dozen family photos since Max was born, and all but a couple of them are phone selfies in which I have three chins, and Max looks a lot like the ‘sad face’ emoji. It’s not really about the photos, though*. No, the point I’m trying to make here ( Because there is a point to this ramble, I promise, and I’m hoping that if I just keep typing for long enough, I’ll remember what it is…) is that travelling with a toddler is hard. *It also kind of IS about the photos, though, because I would really like to know how it is that everyone I follow manages to get these amazing photos of their kids every day, and, meanwhile I have this photo of Max lying on the ground in a mutinous rage because I’d tried to put him back in the pushchair after he’d been on the swing, and he was NOT down with that plan:

there was one cunningly hidden behind a cupboard door: this didn’t stop me going out wearing an outfit I absolutely HATED on at least one of our three days, mind you, but it did at least make it easier to see just how much I hated it… 03. I didn’t actually use the hairdryer provided, because I’m a filthy slob who didn’t wash her hair while we were away, but it LOOKED decent, so I’m checking this one off the list, too. There were plenty of hangers in our wardrobe, but none for skirts: fortunately, I hadn’t actually packed any, so the hangers provided were perfect for the four coats/jackets and numerous sweaters I DID bring. Max is currently obsessed with hoovers and sweeping brushes (Seriously, at home he has a nursery full of toys, and even more toys scattered throughout the house, but all he ever wants to do is open the door of the hall cupboard and stare in wonder at the hoover within…), so this cupboard was basically like Aladdin’s Cave to him: There’s free Wi-Fi in each lodge: they do warn you that it can be slow if there are lots of people connecting at the same time, but we didn’t have any issues at all during our stay, and Terry even managed to do some work on his laptop while we were there.

We liked that it couldn’t easily be mis-spelt, or mis-pronounced, and this was a really important one for Terry: his surname is ‘Miaoulis’, and he’s spent his entire life having to spell and pronounced it for people (Only for them to still always refer to him as “Mr My-oolis’ …), and he was adamant that, if the baby was going to have a difficult second name, the least we could do would be to give him an easy first name. I wasn’t keen on any of the names he came up with, though, and he also vetoed ‘Aurelia’, ‘Aurora’ (Which, yes, also very popular right now…) and ‘Arielle’ (Hey, guess which letter I like girl’s names to begin with? ). By the time we headed into hospital for the twenty week scan, at which you can sometimes choose to find out the baby’s sex, we were still no closer to choosing a girl’s name: and, honestly, if Max had been a girl, I’m pretty sure he’d still be known as ‘The Baby Without a Name’ to this day. There are plenty I LIKE, but honestly, while Max’s name ended up being a pretty easy decision for us, if he’d turned out to be twins, I suspect we’d have just had to call them Max I and Max II

I‘m just going to begin this post by stating for the record that it was never our intention to only spend 4 hours on the Isle of Skye: and neither is it something I particularly recommend, to be totally honest. It was only when we realised that doing that was going to give us a 7-hour drive home the next day that we started to re-think things: we’d already spent a lot of time in the car on this trip, and it didn’t seem fair to Max to make him sit through such a long drive in one go (The problem with travelling in Scotland isn’t that the distances are vast We still really wanted to see at least SOME of the island, though, so we came up with a compromise: we’d go there, see as much as we could in the time we had, and then head back down to Fort William, and spend the night there, instead. This plan definitely made our drive home a whole lot easier, and while we’d have loved to have been able to spend longer on Skye, we did manage to make the most of the short time we had there.