The Gallery | TheBoyandMe

The Gallery: Christmas of Yesteryear

December 21, 2011 by TheBoyAndMe 17 Comments

Due to the fact that it's a rather festive time of the year, Tara has got all Christmassy:

So, in keeping with the time of year and all that, this week's theme is: Christmas of Yesteryear.

This is a chance for you to dig into your dusty old albums and air those embarrassing old photos!
It can be last Christmas, one from your childhood, one before children, one from your mum's childhood even.

I knew the picture to use straight away.

Flashback 32 years and this photograph was taken at my second Christmas. Like my dress and socks? Can you tell I was a child of the '70s?

In my childhood home, we had a landing halfway up the stairs which over the years served many purposes. At one point, it was even my elder sister's bedroom when she was a young girl, and the house was still in flats. After this it housed a cupboard with a mirror-tiled wall behind it. This was the natural place for our Christmas tree every year because the fairy lights twinkled off the mirror and it looked completely magical.

I was captivated with it from the first time I saw it, and then as I grew up I would sit on the stairs and stare at it for hours over the Christmas period. Losing myself in the lights and the ornaments, my imagination would run riot and I'd create different worlds.

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The Gallery: My Awesome Photo

December 7, 2011 by TheBoyAndMe 24 Comments

This week's theme is quite simple:

My awesome photo

I'm late to The Gallery this week because I've been cogitating on the theme. I've got lots of photos that I really love and so picking one is really hard. However, as I opened up a browser this morning, one image caught me eye:

Visitors to my blog will recognise this as my header image, The Boy sat on a shingle beach playing with some pebbles. It was taken by me last year on holiday in Dorset and is one of my favourite pictures of him. I love the way that he stands out against the neutral tones of the shingle and the big pile of stones in front of him. I want to stroke his hair in the photo and I love the way that he is knelt down in the way that toddlers do, with his little Doodles: his first pair of shoes. And yes, I loved those dungarees as well!

It was our first holiday with The Boy, we had gone to Dorset with my parents for a week's holiday staying in a cottage on the coastline of Lyme Bay. It was a fab holiday and we had a great time in one of my favourite places in the world. The beach was a two hundred yard walk along the coast and down through the sand-dunes amongst sea cabbages and abandoned bonfires.

What you can't see in that photo though is that he's sat at the start of the 26 mile Chesil Beach, and far away in the background is Portland Bill with the most amazing storm brewing. Here's the photo in all its glory:

What do you think?

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The Gallery: My Kitchen

November 30, 2011 by TheBoyAndMe 15 Comments

The theme for this week's The Gallery requires visiting an area of the house that's going to get a lot of use over the next month, more than normal and culminating in either catastrophic chaos or a calm culinary corner away from glitz and sparkle:

This week's theme is: The Kitchen.

It can be food, or your corner of the kitchen, or something you particularly love in there, your apron, your favourite recipe book.

Growing up, we had a tiny kitchen. Little more than a galley, there was just about room for two people to stand either end as long as they didn't want to pass. For a household of six people, it was far from ideal, but as it was located in the first floor extension of a four-storey house which had been converted into maisonettes, there was little room for expansion.

When we bought this house I sighed wearily when I saw the size of the kitchen. We live in a 1950s ex-council, three-bedroom, semi-detached house and the kitchen, again, was woefully inadequate in comparison to the remainder of the house. However, we were lucky because we needed to do a fair amount of structural work to the property and so were able to create more space by knowing the hall cupboard and pantry out and joining them onto the kitchen.

I love the room now. It's big enough for several people to stand around in and chatter while I cook, there's plenty of workspace and cupboards, and on a day like today the sun streams through the south-facing window and sets the walls alight with am amber glow.

My kitchen is the place where this happens:

It's a place to show off these:

And, despite me always maintaining that I hated things on the fridge, it is now The Gallery in this house:

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The Gallery: Pride

November 22, 2011 by TheBoyAndMe 29 Comments

And so this week's theme from the towering inferno that is Tara is:

Something I Am Proud Of.

It can be a person, something you've created, a photograph you've taken, a time in your life you're proud of, an achievement, your home, your car, your kids.

At a time when there is an awful lot of bad news emitting from whatever media you choose to watch/read, it's time to look closer to home and appreciate the things we have.
So show us all what you're proud of and let's lift this gloom.

As I rapidly approach my first bloggoversary, I contemplated a snapshot of my blog but decided that was too much like tempting fate for me. Instead I am going with this image:

Now before you assume it's another cute picture of my son (which of course it is), read the writing on his chest.

The Boy has really good manners, I mean really good.

He always says 'pwese' and 'thank you'. Always! And it's not something that we've had to teach him, he just says them without prompting, without reminding, without chastising. He has obviously just picked it up from hearing those around him asking politely for things, and it highlights to me how important it is to watch what is said in front of children because they learn through osmosis.

Recently, his confidence has soared and he is now no longer so shy around strangers. He's perfectly happy to start chatting to cashiers in the supermarket, the vicar at the playgroup I'm considering enrolling him in, the old dear who stops and admires him. "Huwwo lady, how are you today?" or "Huwwo, what's your name?" (learnt from aforementioned vicar) are regular phrases coming from his mouth.

And it makes me smile, to see his growing confidence, his friendliness, his courtesy and caring attitude coming forward. It gives me a little inkling of the man that he will one day be.

The Gallery: The Letter T

November 2, 2011 by TheBoyAndMe 25 Comments

This week's theme is: The Letter T.

Oooo, toughie!
It can be a 'thing' (tomatoes, tent, tarantula, tongue), a person, a feeling, a place, a time.
It's time to get those little grey cells flexing again!

Of course, the obvious one is the drink (but I don't like it), or my favourite 'tea' (as in dinner). However, having had three and a half seconds sleep last night due to a vomiting child, my imagination and inspiration has buggered off and left me floundering.

I wandered around the kitchen looking for ideas. Why doesn't Cadbury's Dairy Milk have a 't' in it? Or Haagen-Daaz Vanilla ice-cream. It's a conspiracy I tell you. I was just beginning to give up hope when a cheeky little swirl caught my eye.

Ah old faithful, you never let me down.

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The Gallery: Faces

October 26, 2011 by TheBoyAndMe 20 Comments

That Sticky-Fingered minx Tara has done it again! Yet another theme to fox and baffle me:

I adore some of the portrait shots on there (Pinterest) – kids, grandparents, families, friends, strangers. People whose faces are steeped in history or children whose faces show potential and a lifetime ahead of them.

So this week's theme is simply: Faces.

And the reason it baffled me is because my photos for 'Inspiration' were photos of The Boy's face, grrr!

So for most of the day I've struggled, I've seen a few posts here and there and thought "oh, I wish I'd come up with that take!"and in all honesty I've been gutted that I couldn't think of some photos to use. I post so many every week with my 365 project that any I could use would have been seen before.

However, I've just been synching the iPod and came across some classics from my treasure pot. The Boy is rather fond of the front-facing lens on the camera function, and this is what I'll often find on there if he's been left alone with it:

It always makes me chuckle to look through the camera roll and see 4o-odd shots nearly all the same but with a changing facial expression, normally him laughing as he's realising what he's doing!

So I asked him to pull some different faces for me, and this is the result:

Which expressions do you think he's pretending to show?

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The Gallery: My Inspiration

October 11, 2011 by TheBoyAndMe 27 Comments

And so the tricky Tara is back to giving us testing tasks:

Inspirational People.
Who has inspired you? A relative, your own mum, your dad, a close friend, someone famous, a stranger even.

The obvious one for me is my mum; she's amazing and has been through so much. However, she'd hate the thought of me writing anything about her on my blog, so I'm going to honour that.

While she has been the wind beneath my wings (thanks Bette) for many years, and Mr. TheBoyandMe is my rock, my new guiding light is none other than this being:

Is that not the best inspiration of them all?

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The Gallery: Colours

October 4, 2011 by TheBoyAndMe 21 Comments

This is for The Gallery where the theme this week is Colour. The tremendous Tara asked us to choose:

"Just one colour, whichever one you like, just pick one. There is a whole load of beautiful colours out there just ripe for the snapping."

However, who am I to stop Mother Nature from adding a dash of sunset peach?

This was taken on Saturday when we ate pizza and chips on the pier overlooking the Bristol Channel. Beautiful isn't it?

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The Gallery: Home

September 28, 2011 by TheBoyAndMe 33 Comments

I've lived in four different properties in my 34 years, but up until August 20th last year only one of them was 'home': the house that was my childhood home.

My parents' old house was the home that I was welcomed into by my elder siblings when I was brought home from the hospital at a few weeks old. The four-bedroomed Victorian property was quite large and suited the six of us well. With my eldest brother being twelve years older than me, there was a hierarchy of bedrooms as and when people moved out. Eventually I had the prize possession: the room with the balcony down to the garden, with the original coving, picture rails and skirting (from 1889) and the huge wall of windows looking out onto the garden.

I moved out of that house when I was 23, the day after I found out the results from my degree. My (then) fiancé whisked me away up to Reading to start our new life, and four months later we were married. Our first home was a two-bedroom rented flat which was lovely and spacious. After being there a year, we bought a three-bedroom ex-council house nearby which was cwtchy and we were both very fond of.

However, the yearning for my home-town was kicking in and I was getting more emotional each time we had to leave my parents' house after visiting them. We took the decision to move and start again back here, in the town that I grew up in with friends and family nearby. Three years almost to the day after I left, we moved back into my parents' house, this time with the contents of our three-bedroomed house.

It was hard-work living back with my parents after three years of independence and 'growing up' but I'm so grateful to them for giving us the opportunity to stay rent-free for a year and a half while we set up our new house. We've owned this place now for nearly seven years and have lived in it for six years. However, it wasn't until my parents moved out of my childhood home last year that this really became 'home'.

My parents' house held many happy memories for me over the years, some not so great, but the vast majority were magical. I could look at any room, any square foot and a wealth of memories would come flooding back to me: play-fights, real fights, birthday parties, Christmases, etc.

These photos were taken on the day that my parents moved out. I was the last person to leave and shut the front door, and I sobbed.

What I've realised since is what so many others may know; home is not a building, it's the love that is shared and memories that are made within.

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The Gallery: Happiness

September 13, 2011 by TheBoyAndMe 19 Comments

This week, we've been ordered to be happy! Tara says:

Let's shine a bright light.
This week's Gallery theme is: A Happy Memory

I could be predictable and show you a photo of The Boy when he was first born, or playing on the beach, or even when my 12 weeks scan, but I've decided to rewind further than that.

I'm going back to 1980.

Get your knitted cardigans and flared jeans out now.

I was only three years old and the youngest of four children; two boys and two girls in that order. My eldest brother (incidentally the only one of the three who knows the name of this blog and therefore might read this) is twelve years older than me, and was great fun to play with. He's good with littlies.

The four of us used to play for hours and hours in the garden, it was a real treasure trove of imaginative lands. Obviously with such a big range in ages between us, there was only a small window of time when this play existed. A year earlier and I was still a toddler, two years later and my eldest sibling had discovered the pub! However, during those few golden years we would race around in go-carts, splash in our paddling pool, chase each other with the hose-pipe, build tunnels in the snowdrifts, get tied to the cherry tree by our plaits (although that might just have been me) and make marvellous mud pies.