The Gallery: Pride

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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

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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

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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

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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: Home

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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

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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.

Here, I'm making my eledest brother better with some special medicine, otherwise known as a leaf.

They really were the golden years of childhood, I hope that The Boy enjoys his as much as I did mine.

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The Gallery: Shoes

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When I saw the tweet-out from Tara as to what the theme is this week, I was excited. Images of my baby shoes and my wedding shoes, mixed with The Boy's tiny-toed shoes, filled my blogging eye.

Only what a sodding surprise, I can't find them.

I have really got to organise this house, at some point in the not too dim and distant future.

However, today proved to be quite a fortuitous day. Opening the curtains, I saw that the meteorological situation was reminiscent of December. Autumn dropped by fleetingly on Saturday and decided to go in search of Summer in warmer climes, chillingly chased off by Winter. This morning, on only the 6th September, it was widdling it down!

I glanced at The Boy, glanced at his canvas Doodles and thought, "We need some new shoes!"

The Boy walked before his first birthday; three days beforehand. Then he didn't walk for another three weeks. I kept him out of shoes for another few weeks, and so it was August before he needed his first pair of shoes. And rebelliously, I refused to buy expensive Doodles, favouring a similar style.

The Boy's first shoes – size 5

I bought the next size up as well, and it was Autumn before I ventured into the world of Clarks. The expensive world of Clarks!

Autumn-Winter 2010 collection: size 5.5G – 6G

Sping-Summer 2011 collection: sizes 6G – 7.5F

Autumn-Winter 2011: 7.5 E!

In the 13 months that he has been wearing shoes he has gone from a 5G to a 7.5E. The gap between the last pair of shoes was 6 weeks! Now when they were only costing £15 then it wasn't too offensive to the bank balance. However those snazzy brown Stomposaurus shoes from Clarks (on the left above) cost…

He's only got little feet!

(If I don't find my baby shoes, my mother is going to kill me!)

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The Gallery: Animals

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The theme this week provided by the lovely Tara is animals:

I'm sure we're going to see a lot of photos of pets, but try to branch out, be a bit different. Test yourself. Go off in search of a cow or a ladybug or something a little more exotic.

Tara will be pleased to hear that I'm not even going to touch the idea of pets. We haven't got any and I don't want any until I can no longer avoid it with The Boy. Although before he was born, we had some gorgeous fancy goldfish including a Bristol Blue Shubunkin called Bob who was stunning. Absolutely gorgeous! He originated as a classroom pet along with Daphne, Derek, Clive and Cynthia. Daphne and Derek were sent home with two children, who adored them, at the end of the school year. Clive and Cynthia came home with me. Unfortunately they didn't cope with the move very well and turned up their fins. But Bob was indestructable. I almost killed him twice through keeping him a plastic box which, it transpires, was slowly poisoning him in the sunlight. However, I managed to save him and from then on in (for three years) we were inseparable. Until I had The Boy and couldn't face cleaning him out regularly. So he and Betty, her with the deformed mouth, were dispatched to a good home.

I've waffled on about pets when I wasn't going to.

We've had a summer of animals!

This last weekend, we have been up to Manchester with the initial purpose of seeing Mr. Fletcher at MediaCity, but ending up socialising instead. On Saturday we went to Blue Planet Aquarium, Chester with MammyWoo, AddyWoo and the Irish One. I've long wanted to take The Boy to an aquarium to show him fish, this is a really good one as it has an aqua tunnel which is 70 metres long and takes you into the world of sharks, rays and stunning tropical fish.

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Earlier in the summer, we had another tweet-up with some other fabulous bloggers (Wendy and family from Inside the Wendy House, and Helen and family from The Crazy Kitchen). Here we joined the traffic jam which is normally synonymous with Birmingham, but this time relocated to West Midlands Safari Park. As amazing as it is, two and half hours driving around a load of Safari animals who are mostly asleep in the trees is a tad frustrating. That was until we came to my favourite animal of all time. I'm not saying anything else on the subject…

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The Gallery: A Photographic Moment in Time

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When Tara announced that the theme of this week's Gallery was in celebration of World Photography Day last Friday, I smiled to myself. I love photographs, I love what they capture: the moments, the emotions, the memories, the treasured times.

It must be a photo from today (or the weekend). Make it a photo to treasure for generations to come; family life, a moment, a precious family member frozen in time, a day out.

Well I did take a cracking shot on that day, only I used it for my Silent Sunday before I'd read the above prompt. It completely epitomised my week with The Boy; something I feel was the biggest mile-stone in his little life so far. It's changed him from a baby boy, passed a toddler, into a little boy properly. Leading up to this event had been a huge emotional roller-coaster, and as much as he was ready for it; I also needed to make sure that I was so as to not put him off!

However, I also took this photo that day; a moment to treasure.

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The Gallery: Black & White

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The lovely Tara has set us a challenge this week of 'Black and White'.

In my mind straight away popped two photos that I wanted to share for this post and I can't find them now! They're stunning photos as well, one is of my nan when she was approximately twenty years old and was a formal studio photo. She looked so young and happy in it, anticipating the joy of her entire life. The other photo was of my bampi in his army uniform in Africa, he was in the Desert Rats. A few years ago I had the small snapshots blown up and edited to remove the creases, then framed for my mum. The minute she opened them, she did something that I've never seen before, she cried with nostalgia and affection for the parents who died years before.

Unfortunately they are still packed up from her move so I can't even scan them in to show you.

In the meantime I want to share a selection of other gems from the past. They're photos of my mum, my dad and his brother, my brothers, my nan and her sister. All show the simplicity of black and white, the innocence of youth.

Wait! I've found them, so apologies for editing this post to add them both in but they are the ones I originally wanted to show.

Both were taken in the Winter of 1943 while bampi was serving in the Desert Rats. Bampi was 26 and already looks like life serving in World War 2 has taken its toll. Nan was just 21 and still fresh-faced. They married six months after these photos were taken and a year later my mum was born (their only child as my nan suffered a still-birth at 8 months pregnant).

1923 – 1994

1917 – 1980.

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