Will Dig Life

This is the yearly roundup post - as I've done almost every year for 2021 ,  2020 ,  2019 ,  2018 ,  2017 , 2016 seems to be skipped as I got to grips with mothering two little ones, and  2015 . What a busy year we've had, after Covid... much did happen, even more almost happened but didn't, life was full here and we travelled again.  Travels We started the year with a week in Spain in February - getting back to travelling to sunnier climes in the darkest days of the year felt wonderful. That's how I met Mr. so many years ago, going to Fuerteventura in December! This year, we used an Easyjet flight I had booked before Covid and re-booked many times. All we needed and wanted was a few days in the sun, so I booked the cheapest available destination and got an Airbnb there. And as things sometimes come together, my sister (the van dweller) just happened to be in Spain at the time too and spent the week with us. That was a fantastic treat, as we knew we would...

Man, we're busy again! There's our regular activity schedule - Co-op every other Monday, Gymnastics on Wednesday, Grandparents Thursday and Lego Club Friday - but since we've had Cody, we've also been forced to be out and about a lot more than we did with Fred. If Cody doesn't get out for a really good run at least once a day, nothing at home is safe from his mischief! We are blessed to have a wonderful nature reserve literally behind our house, which is a bit of a best-kept secret: it's really rare to meet anybody there. And while we did know of it ever since moving here, and did visit the tadpole pond in it almost daily during lockdown 2022, it's only now that we are really exploring it and trying different paths. I often go there on my own, when the kids aren't around, just me and Cody: a good hour of walking, praying, enjoying nature. Never thought walking the same area so many times could feed my soul like that - but it's really become something...

With N(8) we are very firmly in middle childhood right now. Her birthday was about six weeks ago and I didn't say much then, so I felt it's time for an in-depth post about life with this eight-year-old girl. A long time ago, before I had kids, an acquaintance in passing mentioned that her mother, when asked what was her favourite phase in her children's childhood, said: I loved every phase. At that time, hearing that, I couldn't quite wrap my mind around that... apart from thinking that kids are hard work in one way or another throughout, I was sure there were easier and harder times and that correspondingly, any sane mother would say the easier times were the best. And yet - now I've been through a few phases with them myself - I have to say the same thing: I've loved every stage. The wonder and cuddliness of the baby. The discovery and insatiable curiosity of the toddler. The preschoolers' wondrous ideas and imaginative play. And their kind hearts and inno...

Note: The “Get to know me” tags are mainly intended for my kids to read when they’re older, a way of getting to know me better, answering questions they may not think to ask. Everyone’s welcome to read, of course, but it may not be terribly interesting to you!  My family or origin was dysfunctional, there’s no doubt about it. But looking back, I’ve been incredibly blessed with mentors coming into my life at just the right times to support, teach, and form me – I owe them an awful lot. Here are a few of them.  My first real job: Siemens / Martin Fischer  I had a summer job at Siemens in Vienna, in the office. Martin Fischer, the department head, really saw me and appreciated my work (this was in a sometimes rather uncomfortable environment, all middle aged males apart from myself who was barely out of my teens, and I distinctly recall one co-worker having a very explicit pornographic image of a woman’s private parts as his screensaver) and he offered me a project managemen...

Going away for six weeks - the entire summer - cuts the year into before and after. A lot like summer holidays do for schoolkids. After all that time (plus the week in Germany) I was positively craving our routine again - weeks that looked similar to one another, regular activities, home life .  One of the first things we did, this year, is to have the kids official 'not-school' portraits done! We love how they turned out - each child got to choose an item to represent them on the photo. N(8) chose a book she had written and illustrated, whereas D(6) picked a Lego invention he had come up with, a trimaran: It actually took us a number of weeks to shape our routine this side of summer. Partly to blame was that I lost my main client, whom I was working for all day on Thursdays; because of that work, Thursday was usually the kids' day with the grandparents. For a few weeks, I had no replacement work on the horizon, and we played with various schedules for the week, but eventua...

Two weeks after returning from Vienna, the kids and I were off again, this time to Germany. Not a holiday for me but work: I was asked to provide live subtitles for the biannual conference of IVSS Churchear , a Europe wide initiative to challenge and support churches to fully include people with hearing loss. Because this organisation started in Germany it's very heavily German dominated (and this conference was held in Eisenach, Germany - Luther and Bach's town) but these days they're so international that they need to offer everything in English too. So my role was to provide on-the-fly translated subtitles in real time - that was challenging, though fun to do!  The organisation had invited my entire family to come but after two weeks in Vienna, Mr didn't feel able to take another week off so it was just me and the kids. We flew from Bristol to Frankfurt, then took a two hour train journey to arrive in Eisenach. A small, very picturesque town, and our hotel could have...