Officially 30, snow and baby swimming!

Well, its been almost a week since my birthday and to celebrate turning 30 I spent it with friends and family.

We bravely ventured to Cornwall the first day it snowed!

We were crazy but the further west we went the less the snow fell so by the time we got to Cornwall, it was snow free!

We had hired an 8 seater to carry us and our kitchen sink due to having my 5 month old son and 7 year old on board!  

We were staying in Wadebridge, home of the Hustyns Spa Resort and we stayed in a gorgeous lodge.

This was a twin room where Jacob slept, a whole room to himself!

A beautiful staircase

Our four poster bed which was lush!

After familiarising ourselves with the rooms we completely chilled out as we were so tired from the 6 hour journey from Essex.

The next day involved taking Matthew on his first ever swim!

To begin with we popped him in a blown up swimming seat and he really was not sure at first!  He had a little cry as I think the water was a bit of a shock!  But he soon adapted and was better out of the seat, floating around!

His confidence grew and he loved floating on his back!

And chilling out after a hard time swimming!

Whilst Matthew had an afternoon nap by the pool, we had a chance to spend time with Jacob playing ball, and sitting in the jacuzzi, sauna and steam room.

We also explored our surroundings which was perfect as there was literally no one around!

The next day, I woke up to a wonderful surprise, my wonderful friends had decorated the dining room and living room with 30th birthday decorations and I received a very special gift which I shall treasure forever!

We went for an early swim this time and I have to show off Matthew's poses as this time he was definetely prepared for his swims!

Bless him!  He was so wonderful, I could not have asked for a better reaction!

We went for lunch by the bar which was very relaxing and calm, just what we needed after a hard swimming session!

Before it got dark, we ventured outside to play mini golf, but it did get dark very quickly!

When we got back to the lodge, it was party time!  We chilled out to Enigma (yes, this is my sort of party!) whilst Jacob played with his dinosaur set and Gavin read his book!  We then ordered pizza and I was surprised with a gorgeous mint Aero chocolate cake!

After much laughter, I had the pleasure of sharing a magnificent bubble bath with my darling Dean!

Unfortunately on the day of my birthday was our long drive back home but it was still fun and in the evening I popped out to see my parents to spend the rest of my birthday with them.

I had a very relaxing time and enjoyed spending it with my mini family and wonderful friends so thank you to them for all the effort and expense out into to what turned out to be a brilliant birthday in the end!

xxx

Photo a Day - Day 29 - Grow

Day 29 - Grow

A slushy theme today, this is the man I want to grow old with!

Aww, see what I did there?!

xx

Photo a Day - Day 28 - Through

Day 28 - Through

My bubba in his cot as I see him through his cot bars, having a good old munch on his hand!

xx

Photo A Day - Day 27 - Sun

Day 27 - Sun

A complete contrast to the snowy picture I took the other day!  The view from our back garden was a crisp, mild and sunny January just in time for the days' theme!

Photo a Day - Day 26 - Together

Day 26 - Together

This is my Mum and Dad, still together after 31 years and have recently celebrated their anniversary, am so proud to show them off!

xx

Photo a Day - Day 25 - Landscape

Day 25 - Landscape

This is the view from my kitchen window which regular followers of my blog will recognise!  I love looking out and seeing nothing, just horses and fields and sometimes on a clear day you can see the City of London.  I love hoe the snow is slowly melting away here.

Photo a Day - Day 24 - Stripes

Day 24 - Stripes

My little man conveniently wore his stripey baby gro for this theme!

xx

Photo A Day - Day 23 - Electric

Day 23 - Electric

This was a hard theme today but here is my electricity pole on my street, and taken with the snowy rooftops in the background.

Photo A Day - Day 22 - Corner

Day 22 - Corner

"Nobody puts baby in the corner!"

But I did! 

x

Photo A Day - Day 21 - What I do

Day 21 - What I Do

This is what I do, amongst other things!  i have recently taken up crochet and taught myself how to make hairbands and a bag!

Photo a Day - Day 20 - Something I Saw

Day 20 - Something I Saw

This was something I saw as I woke up the day before my birthday to this surprise in Cornwall!  My wonderful friends laid the table ready for celebrating my 30th!

Photo A Day - Day 19 - Delicious

Day 19 - Delicious

My yummy lunch which was eaten by the bar in our Cornwall spa that we were staying in, this had an unusual avocado taste with cajun chicken!

Photo a Day - Day 18 - Shadow

Day 18 - Shadow

This shadow was caught when we were staying in our lodge at Cornwall over the weekend, it has a spiral staircase leading up to a huge bedroom!

Photo a Day - Day 17 - Ready

Day 17 - Ready

I was all ready for our trip away to Cornwall this weekend!  Packed and ready to go!

Aims for the next decade...

Continuing my theme for my 30th birthday which is this Monday, I thought I would write down my aims for my thirties and what I hope to achieve so I can look back and see if I reached them!

So in 10 years time I would like to -

• Be as happy as I am now - I really am happy with how my life is at the moment, give or take losing a bit of weight!  But I hope I can still be this content with just a few more wrinkles!
• See more of the world - with my family of course I want them to experience other cultures and areas and show them there is more to life than Essex!
• Have my business become successful - having only set up my business 4 months ago, my aims are high but I hope in 10 years time that I have employed more people to help and that we are the first company people come to for our services!
• Have a craft side line business - I am working on setting up a side line project of making and selling crafts which I hope will be the fun side of business!
• Be married - Dean and I are happy the way we are but have been in wedding talks lately and I would really like for my kids parents to be married, plus I have amazing plans for our big day that I want to show off to the world!
• Have a baby girl - ooh, this is asking a lot seeing as I have just had another baby and its the last thing on my mind!  But after bringing up two boys, it would be nice to experience a girl before its too late!
• Have my home decorated - only because this is my first proper family home that is all mine and my fiance's to do what we like with so it would be nice to put our personal touch on the walls seeing as the previous owners did a hideous job!
• Still be blogging - I never thought ten years ago that the things I say are actually read by other people, often!  But here I am almost two years later, still blogging and people are still interested!  So, to have ten more years of musings and projects to log would be a wonderful achievement!
• Get my novel published - the reason I started a blog was to make sure I kept up with my writing career, but the novel faded and the blog became my main focus! Still, I will always have a passion for writing and my first novel has been requested by many people so I hope to eventually at least have it all written down!

I had better get cracking, thats a lot to cram in!

xx

Photo A Day - Day 16 - Two Things

Day 16 - Two Things

My two amazing boys are my two favourite things!  And at xmas they were given these baubles with their name on to hang on the tree, its the best 'two things' I could come up with!

xx

Photo a Day - Day 15 - An Ordinary Moment

Day 15 - An Ordinary Moment

What better ordinary moment to portray than the image of an iron?! This ordinary and boring moment happened today as it does most Tuesdays and it does not get more exciting than that!

x

10 Things I have Achieved

I thought I would write a list of things I have already achieved in my 30 years of being alive due to it being my birthday next week!  This is in no particular order exceot number one being my proudest achievement of them all!

1. My two boys - having my children has led me to be the person who I have always wanted to be but never realised it until I had them.  I cannot remember life and routines without them and they make me laugh, a lot!  Im so proud of them in different ways because they are at different stages in their lives and I am so looking forward to seeing them grow up.
2. Starting my life from scratch - after being made homeless by unforeseen circumstances, I lost everything, everything being material things but I always had my son.  I became a single mum, moved away from where I grew up and lived on benefits for the very first time.  After five months, I moved back to Essex, built a home for me and my son, found everything in my power to find a job, and was lucky enough to fall in love with my best friend.  It took about 4 years to get my life back to how it was before and perhaps even better than what it was and I am so proud that I did it where others would have failed.
3. I have brought up my eldest son to be how children should be - Now I'm going to be a little modest here but only because of what people have told me about my children and now I have started to believe it myself.  It is very rare these days to see children sitting at the table in a restaurant, or to here them speak their manners, or to see them respect their parents in the street.  But I have to say my son does all of these and more and I have come to realise that it is down to me.  Where I totally believe in the saying 'I blame the parents.' used in a negative sense, I totally blame myself for his wonderful behaviour!  Now, he is not perfect, he is very sensitive and perhaps a bit of a goody two shoes because he knows right from wrong, but I am always proud of him when he goes and stays with other people.  I never get any bad feedback about him and they always invite him back!  This is surely a sign!  He thinks the word 'hate' is a swear word and although I swear freely around him, he knows not to repeat it himself.  I am very proud that as a mum I have achieved to bring him up in an almost perfect way and I hope to do the same with his brother!
4. I have seen some of the world - I say some, I have hardly seen any of it but the places I have been totally make up for that!  I have been to Iceland where I walked on glaciers, stood near volcanoes, swam in the Blue Lagoon and took pictures of Geysers.  I have climbed the Eiffel Tower, (whilst pregnant may I add!), swam in the Med, and stood outside Edinburgh castle.  I still have the travel bug and my children will hopefully get to experience it all with me so that we can travel to many more places and see the sites.
5. I have worked really really hard! - I have ten years retail experience behind me which I am very proud of and from the things I learnt from that I have out into setting up my own business finally!  I miss the full time work side but have to face the fact that I may not be able to go back to work properly until my kids are older so working from home is the ideal option and I never thought I would be able to achieve this.  Yet, I did. I underestimate myself!
6. I have been to over 60 gigs - that is a lot of music!  Not many people have the privilege or money to go to a concert but this is almost a hobby for me, an expensive one but one that I am proud of because I can say I saw my favourite bands when they were at their prime and I will always have the memories of seeing my favourite albums played live.  It is the most thrilling experience being in the same room as someone you admire and joining in with their sing-a-alongs and I would not swap it for the world.  Even being pregnant did not stop from going to 4 gigs in those nine months!
7. I have become the woman Im supposed to be - sounds like a cliche and I am sure everyone has been bullied in some way as they were growing up but I can look back and say that I never changed just because some people made fun of me.  In fact, I am still a nerd, a boffin and a geek, just some of the names I got called at school, except now it is apparently 'cool' to be these things!  I never stopped reading books, or learning or being weird!  I totally rebelled against the bullies and so I did it even more!  I ended up being so nerdy that to this day, I am obsessed with Doctor Who, so is my fiance and so was my son at one point!  I have many, many books on my bookshelf, I am a huge Harry Potter fan and I collect notebooks!  I also crochet, cross stitch and do scrap books, I am addicted to Facebook and I love to blog.  I dress so my clothes clash, I love wearing unusual shoes and I dye my hair red and purple.  I really don't care anymore what people make of me as its their problem.  I am happy to be a geek and my friends are geeks too!  I am proud I never changed, but i got progressively worse and am definetely the woman I have always wanted to be!
8. I am proud of being engaged - I never thought I would find my prince charming because he does not really exist!  So I married a man who I pretended was my prince but it turned out I got it all wrong!  However, I am glad I gave up on that fantasy because it turns out that my prince found me, (sick bucket!) but its true! I am proud that I have him, and have what we have and he is totally the male version of me, and I am the female version of him!  I am proud to be his fiance and hopefully we can live happily ever after!
9. I am proud to have my amazing friends - who needs a huge amount of friends when you can have three very close friends who accept you for who you are and never argue with?!  Going back to my school days, I only ever had one best friend and then when we drifted apart no one really accepted me for my nerdiness so I struggled to make friends.  But I have finally found three amazing girls who are almost exactly the same as me, they totally put up with my ways and we laugh so hard when we are together that I sometimes have to pinch myself in case they aren't real!  I have aquaintances in life who come and go, who let you down or just don't get me but my real friends are just three amazing girls who I couldn't be more proud to call my friends.
10. I am proud to have reached my 30's - Ok, a bit morbid but there have been a few people I have met in my life that never reached their thirties and at one point I never thought I would reach mine.  Unfortunately, the people that have passed away have been so young and you start to appreciate life more and not take anything for granted.  Those people are always in my thoughts and in a silly way, I hope to live my life the crazy way that they would have lived theirs.

xxxx

Turning 30

Next week is my birthday and I am turning the grand old age of 30!

I am totally ready for it as I have had a whole year to get my head around it, it may not be a big deal to some people, especially to those who have already experienced it, but to me it is an important milestone.
  I feel more mature, grown up and am in a good place mentally.  My life is wonderful, I could not ask for more but it took the whole of my twenties to get there.
  In one decade I left home, had fun, became a rebel, turned into a goth, got married, had a baby, lived in a refuge, got divorced, lost some people along the way, dealt with things not many people could say they have, been made homeless, and then started my life from the beginning with a baby in tow.
  Now as I approach the next decade, I am happily engaged to the most amazing man I have ever met, my prince charming and definetely worth waiting for.  We have two brilliantly clever and amazing sons, a new home with already great memories in, a wonderful small group of friends who I would do anything for and them me and a family who are so crazy but they keep me who I am because of it!
  I have learnt so much in 30 years that I will be taking these with me through what I call, 'my mature years' and hopefully some lessons learnt and a bit more of how the world works.
  I have been very reflective as of late due to my birthday approaching and am a little sad to see the back of my twenties because I hold so many memories, good and bad, and time moves so quickly that before you realise it those memories are fading fast.  Still, I am happy to be moving forward and seeing what my thirties have in store for me.  I hope they will be more delicate and not throw too many more spanners in the works and that they leave me to live a happy life with my children and family.
  I will be writing a few blog posts about my aims and things that I have achieved so that I can share my nostalgia and wish myself a happy birthday!

Photo a Day - Day 14 - Something Yellow

Day 14- Something Yellow

I used this transfer today on the back of an envelope to send to one of my customers for work so it was very fitting for todays theme.  It has brightened up and snowy and cold day xx

Photo A Day - Day 13 - Circles

Day 13 - Circles

I was sorting out my sentimental things from under my bed today when I came acroos my old cassettes and thought they would be perfect to portray todays 'Circle' theme.  Brings back memories of the 80's and 90's for me, very retro!

Photo A Day - Day 12 - Surprise

Day 12 - Surprise

This is showing the stage for Cabaret which is showing in the West End at the Savoy hotel.  My wonderful fiance took me to London last night to surprise me with tickets for the show and I had a wonderful evening!  I felt like a posh lady all dressed up for the theatre!  The show itself was amazing, especially Will Young as Emcee and Michelle Ryan as Sally Bowles.  The show ends its run at the end of January but if it didn't I would definetely go and see it again!