For Grandma...

Adventures At Home is One year old - Happy Birthday!

My writing here during the past 12 months has been a brilliant and important experience for me. I would like to thank my friend, textile artist and writer - Ruth Singer, who encouraged me to go for it last Spring.

Adventures At Home has given me the opportunity to reflect on my personal endeavours to be a creative mummy to my two darling children, and to share some of my experiences as a professional museum teacher and creative facilitator. It's been great to have a place to put my thoughts and ideas.

Even though I've worked in education in some shape or form for nearly twenty years - oh my goodness, that makes me o.l.d. - I don't want to use Adventures At Home to analyse or theorise. Rather the opposite in fact; I want it to reflect what I wish for my children - a kind of modern-day Milly-Molly-Mandy/Billy Blunt-type existence that cherishes and nurtures the most simple things in childhood and above all, gives them oodles of time to play.

In my professional work I am very fortunate that I, like my children, also often get to simply do lovely (as one of my oldest friends Bronwen once so eloquently and Welshly put it). I get to work on gorgeous projects in museums I absolutely love. I meet the sweetest, cleverest, most enthusiastic children and teachers, carers and parents. This work is taking up an increasing amount of my time as my little ones have grown from babies to tots to children in full time education. The busier I get, the less time I have to write. But this is a good problem to have, I suppose.

I would like to dedicate this first year of Adventures At Home to my wonderful mum who, as those of you who know me personally know, died a couple of years ago.

Adventures At Home has seen me through a year of evenings. This is when I miss my mum the most because it's when I have time to myself; the children are asleep and my husband is usually out working. It has been so comforting to write about all the lovely stuff my family has done, and then realise it's time for bed; an evening has passed with neither tears nor wine. And my mum always loved to know about the brilliant things her grandchildren said, made, did and played. So, I guess I'm just keeping her posted.

We certainly haven't run out of adventures yet and so, as I said a year ago in my very first post, this blog will [continue to] be a record of them all.