Whilst we're talking about tractors, Simon has become the very proud owner of his own tractor. It's a Massey Ferguson 135 made in 1968! He's loving having something to tinker with. It hadn't been used for some years so Simon's had to deal with seized brakes and filthy fuel filters. "But thats all part of the fun!" he says.
Anyway, he hopes to restore it fully and buy extra parts for it so that we can use it to look after our three fields, to transport logs, mow the orchard and even help with the building work once we've bought a tipping bucket that attaches to the back.
Boys with their toys, eh!!
Spring 2007
Well the first thing to announce for this year is definitely the safe arrival of our daughter Emilie, which will no doubt come as a complete surprise to some of you as we hadn't told many people that Sabina was expecting (apart from our friends in Normandy of course as it wasn't something we could hide!). After the bumpy ride that both Sabina and Archie with the last caesarean we decided not to worry anyone, including our parents!!
Eight months into the pregnancy, during the few days where we were literally stuck at home due to the snow Sabina went into labour one month early! We had a very eventful evening trying to get our car up our own driveway and our poor friend Kevin walked nearly two miles to our house in the dark and the snow to look after the boys whilst we went to the hospital as he couldn't get his car out of his driveway either!.
We arrived at the hospital around two hours later than planned (we'd even contemplated calling the fire brigade to help us at one point) and one hour and seven minutes later Emilie was safely delivered by caesarean section by a fantastic team at Saint Lo hospital.We can't praise the French health system enough for the care and time that you are given when staying in hospital.
The following morning Sabina had a fantastic time phoning her parents with the surpise of their lives!! For her, the safely carried out caesarean, arrival of Emilie and bringing such a wonderful surprise to her parents has made it the most memorable day of her life.
The only major change we've made so far this year to the property is that we've had a new lawn sown on the new large area that we levelled and created last year when we had all the earth dug out from behind the barn. It's a large expanse, probably two thirds of an acre so with the help of Patrick our neighbour (the dairy farmer), his family and three tractors the area was ploughed harrowed and seeded one afternoon in March.
We haven't as yet started any great things with the barn as we've been extending the workshop to creat more space to work in and more storage for materials. It was quite a job as we decided to take the original fireplace, dated 1624 out as it was large and taking up a lot of space in the workshop. It's a beautiful granite surround and we're going to move it to the barn to be the main feature of our sitting room.
We're hoping to put in the plans for the barn for permission soon (once we've redesigned them to allow for a bedroom for Emilie!)and then little by little we can hopefully make progress on our future (...a long time in the future!!) home.
Not in the same catergory of importance as our baby girl of course, but in addition we also had five new lambs this spring!
Return to Lorkin Antiques Main website
Email Sabina, Simon, the boys and Emilie!
We hope you like the new style newsletter page. Feel free to give us feedback. We have left some of the photos larger than normal so that you can see more, so hopefully it doesn't take to long to load. We're presuming that more and more of you have broadband including us at long last!!