Jessica journeys around the country

It has been a busy couple of weeks for Jessica as she has been away enjoying her first holiday and travelling all over the country.   Over the past two weeks, we have travelled nearly 1800 miles in our journey around Great Britain as we decided to take up goddaddy Bryan’s challenge to visit all the Olympic golden postboxes (provided Jessica coped well with the travelling!)

We started off our holiday with a brief stay in Keighley in Yorkshire to help celebrate our friends Mark and Ria’s wedding where a few of our friends got to meet Jessica for the first time. 

A couple of days later, we were off to Sunderland as Michael was working at a family fun day and Jessica enjoyed having a go at GT5 and racing a car around a virtual track (assisted by Daddy and later by Mummy).  

After Sunderland, Jessica left England for the first time as we headed north into bonnie Scotland (or more accurately, very wet and windy Scotland!) and Edinburgh.  Thankfully the sun came out for our day trip to Edinburgh Zoo where Jessica got to see giant pandas, koalas, and penguins, not to mention lions and tigers and bears (oh my!).  

We then continued further north to Aberdeen and Lossiemouth where we were treated to a fantastic display of fast jet training by the Tornado GR4 squadron at RAF Lossiemouth. We then  made our way back south again to Glasgow via Dunblane (where we experienced flash floods) and we had a lovely couple of days staying with godmummy Gillian.

The last few days of our holiday were spent taking a somewhat interesting route back home via Bolton and Manchester, north-east Wales, the Peak District and Towcester, where our friends Chris and Emma got to catch up with Jessica.

So far we have been to 26 out of 57 Olympic postboxes and 2 of the Paralympic ones – whether we’ll manage them all remains to be seen!  Jessica has coped amazingly well with all the travelling – she has generally been very happy throughout it all, particularly when one of us sits with her in the back of the car to keep her entertained.  It has also been lovely to spend such a long period of time together as a family – this is the first time we have spent so long together outside of hospital and it has been wonderful.   

Jessica is becoming increasingly chatty now and has started ‘singing’ as well – which is delightful to hear, although we were not sure other people shared this view when Jessica decided to sing at the top of her voice in our hotel room one night at 11.30pm!  We are also seeing more and more different facial expressions – mostly very cheeky-looking ones!  She will now put her feet down and try to hold her weight when being held in a standing position and has just started to work out how to pull herself into a sitting position from lying down.