Leona Macken

As much as we loved our nights out and we loved being with our friends, we kind of hunkered down as well for a few years and we were like, right, we need to buy a house.

And we ended up actually buying his grandmother's house.

So like Alan's sister's the first house, his mom's the second house, we're the third house.

There's literally a corner of us.

And yeah, we had Quinn in 2017 and we drew in 2019 and everything was just...

I don't want to say like we had the perfect life like we didn't we obviously but we the life we wanted and the life we worked hard to create and I was like so appreciative of everything I had like I've always like even if you go down to my Instagram past all this you'll just see how much we just loved being with the kids and

Just a simple life.

All I wanted was just a simple, simple life.

My house, my husband, my kids, our little, you know, going to the park the weekends.

No, I never wanted anything too major.

I loved my job.

I was Peter Mark in Stevens Green for like almost 10 years.

And then they closed that down in...

during the lockdown and I went to Mary Street and I loved it there and I was there till 2023 till all this kind of happened but I worked part-time there and like I had I had such a happy balance of like home and work and you know Alan is a postman so he was in on post and he'd be finished early and we'd you know on my days off we'd go down St Anne's Park and it was just

Like, it was just a nice life, small, happy life, you know, and I think things kind of turned really in 2020, like lockdown happened, Alan's dad passed away from COVID and like I said, we all lived...

like we all live right by each other so we're all so close so when that happened we were all devastated like obviously he passed away in hospital and we didn't get to see him it's like but you know and it happened so many families at the time unfortunately and then I think Drew then kind of started taking seizures at about one so she'd seizures for about a year or so so that was a very scary time

And then about a year later, all this happened.

So I just feel like we've been kind of on edge the last few years.

But this was like what kind of just blew a huge hole in our lives, like, you know.

I think as well, we kind of thought in 2023 that it wasn't going to be anything too major.