Is this a mad way to start?

Have you ever seen those giant german bunnies?  they are humongous! Clearly you're about to be overrun by the new giant bunny overlords!

I quite fancy the idea of a bunny the size of a shetland pony

Left at 4 today and left a whole room with every available space covered in exam certificates!

The tribe are coming home today, looking forward to seeing them although the house will be trashed and full of sand as soon as they arrive.

I work in the bay (the English Riviera don't you know!) and there are grockles a plenty down our way at the moment. I guess farming and tourism must be the 2 biggest industries in Devon. Ditto for Cornwall.

When I was a kid, I didn't have an imaginary friend but I did have an imaginary dog. I also wanted to live on a farm and after holidays down here I fell in love with Devon and Cornwall. I really do hope my kids look back on their childhood and realise how lucky they were to have a whole farm to play on and a beach just down the road. I would have killed for that as a kid.

I did live on a farm in Devon for a bit Dad and Stepmum worked on it and we got accomodation. It was cool. And we got to ride horses. That was near Totnes.

Well this is it, I now have a horse I can ride any time but don't have to look after, another childhood dream. I think I'm recreating my childhood stuff for the kids

We were talking about Totnes yesterday as several of the people I work with live there

Yeah Friday! I feel I've earned the weekend this week.

Olympics tomorrow I just need to find out where the park and ride is!

We've just had some bad news. You know when you remember exactly when people died...

D's uncle and a guy that we were really close to, all of us. He upstaged the Olympic ceremony. Bastard!

I say that knowing his sense of humour, we got on so well. He made me laugh, I made him laugh.

Yeah, and all good fun. He did everything that he wanted to do and then didn't fight the end. I hope I feel like that too, but at the moment I'm so scared of death.

I'll get better at coming to terms with it as long as my kids outlast me. How any parent copes with the death of a child is beyond me.

If D and the kids were killed tomorrow in a car crash I would drive straight over a cliff.

But I've never said any different. I'm sure I'm not alone in that for the other parents out there.

Life is about your relationships with other humans, nothing else. Wanking in the toilet doesn't cut it.

YEAH OLYMPICS HERE WE COME!!!!!!!!!!!!

Huge shivers up my spine watching the men's qualifying gymnastics now, and also the realisation of how I've changed sport wise.

Gym was my first sport and my world, an escape from everything as a kid. It got to the point that I was training 6 days a week. It wasn't my body that let me down, I had no support in sports sych cos it was years ago.... And I lost my nerve.

When I go down emotionally I go down: and the same happened with climbing and kayaking... And hockey, netball, tennis...

Which is a shame because if it happens with running, that's probably my last chance gone to be good at any sport??

best not!

I think I'm looking at the Olympics with slightly different eyes. I'm celebrating the success, but am more interested in the failures. I can't feel happier for those that succeed than I feel bad for those that it didn't happen for.

This sounds awful but I know that there are people out there who feel better about themselves if other people don't achieve, it's complicated but it happens at every level of sport and yet another reason why I think sports psych should catch people at grass roots level up, not just national and beyond.

The body can do amazing things but with such a body, the mind becomes the limiting or winning factor.

I was looking at the medal table and noticed the glut of silver medals for Germany and Russia and thought of the disappointment some of those athletes will feel as often the difference between the silver and gold is slender.Both countries have relatively few gold medals. Of course I thought the same about the silver for Team GB!

It's a really weird thing and much skewed I think by a tide of Olympicmania. There is the temptation by Joe Public to think that silver isn't good enough.

I just find the whole thing very uncomfortable emotionally with the athletes who didn't make it.

Chuffed for those that did, don't get me wrong, but imagine trying to put on a brave face when you've worked for years for it. But that's sport for you.

Take it down several, well lots of notches and it's the same thing when people from here don't make IM, especially on the first (after that suck it up ).

My emotions always ride alongside the personal disappointments, I guess because I don't deal with failure well at all personally.

It was interesting to see an article in Outdoor fitness mag about Steve Peters and the 'chimp paradox'. I was talking about it in work last week (remember I work with the father of one of our winter Olympians) and he was saying that he wants him to work with his son.

My chimp is rampant and flinging poo in all directions, which I think was a big factor in my quite dramatic high, low, crash and burn gymnastics journey as a kid/teen.

I'm going to buy (or get given) the book.

So... D's uncle's funeral today. Full Cornish male voice choir turned out in Truro and lit up the ceremony.

When I told my girls that Bill had died (opening ceremony evening), the first thing Ella (my 10yr old) said was 'He was the really funny one'.

And yeah he was, and so are others on my husband's side of the family. Including D.