Changes in Plans
Barney’s coming home. We don’t know exactly when, but it will be within the next week or two.
and 
His exchange dad is going to be in hospital for three or four months, and his exchange mum is travelling to the hospital most days to be with him. It’s about a three-hour round-trip, so between time spent at the hospital and time spent on the road, she hasn’t a lot of time at home - and she’s exhausted. She feels it would be better if Barney came home now, perhaps returning to them for a couple of months next summer, when X will, we hope, be fully recovered, or close to it.
We’re not completely surprised by this; we’d said right from the day of the accident that we would completely understand if she felt that having Barney there was too much, and that we would go along with whatever she felt was best. I spoke to A this morning, and then talked to Barney and explained what was happening; he cried, not wanting to come home yet. He feels that the problems he and Henry have had in the last few months were finally resolving, and he’d promised his friends in his French school that he’d see them in September. I reminded him that he’ll still be able to talk to them on MSN, that he can invite any of them to visit, that he’ll be able to return to France for visits, etc., and he came around a bit, though he was still upset about the exchange coming to a premature end.
Obviously this isn’t how anyone wanted the exchange to go, and the timing isn’t good, in that Barney seems to have settled in better recently, but of course his French family has to do what is best for them right now. And Barney will benefit far more from a few weeks next year when the family can be doing things than he would from a few weeks of sitting around playing on a Playstation now. And there are other benefits: he’ll be here for Toby’s second birthday, which he’d been sorry about missing, and he’ll get to read HP7 sooner rather than later (though I’m pretty certain I’ve read it already ;-))
And of course I am delighted that we’ll be seeing him soon! 
And icebergs and tips and all that… I’ve got four teenage boys from Japan arriving on Tuesday… if Barney gets back before Friday, there’ll be some musical bedrooms going on 
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Lovely for you to see him so soon
It is great he is coming home tho I am sorry over how it has worked out.
Sounds like that’s the right choice. Why the teenage boys?
Too much to explain in a comment; will blog tomorrow…er, later today!
glad and not that he’s coming home. and how come you think you have already read HP then?
Well there were lots of fakes available for download, but not everything available for download was a fake… and I now have a copy of the book in my hands, and I was right, I’d read it
Sounds like the right thing for Barney to be doing, bet you’re glad in a way, although obviously no-one would have wanted the accident to happen.
and no telling about the book, I couldn’t stay awake until midnight so I’m going to get it this morning!
so you have the entire book as an e-book and you are holding out on me??? It oculd be days before I prise the copy of Duke!!!!
There are lots of copies in the shops, y’know
Not as an e-book, but photos in a zip file. If you want it, I’ll send it - but honestly, now the book is out, it’s not worth it: it’s not very easy to read, and if it hadn’t been four days before the publishing date, I wouldn’t have bothered…but it was four days, so….
ah, I’ll skip then. Can’t easily get to the shops this weekend but hten Duke will have finished it by the time I’ve finished my OU homework and now I think about it, I’d better just do my homework!