Branching Out into Pastures New

Adventure Awaits

I know that my blog has been quiet for a couple of days, but I have been so bogged down with different pieces of work it would have been nice to have two lap tops and two pairs of hands. Unfortunately there is only me, one pair of hands and one over worked laptop.

As the title of today’s post suggests I am branching out into pastures new, doing something that I have always wanted to do but never had the right amount of inspiration or motivation so see through to the end, until now.

I have spent a large proportion of the last couple of days getting to grips with publishing software, tax registrations and so many aspects of rights, copyright and sales and distribution methods that my head is spinning. But hopefully…hopefully in a few days time I will have a book for sale, authored by myself and aimed at children aged between 7 and 9. Oh yes, and it’s about pirates…and sea monsters…and a curse….

I am very lucky to be in the position to go into my sons school and work with the Y3 children, of which my son is part, and to get involved with both their topic work and literacy work based around the story.

Other than expansion on the literary front, my daughter has also informed me that she will be creating one off, unique pieces for the store, most probably goblets, which I am really looking forward to seeing, and uploading for you all to see.

It’s good to have things moving forwards again!

Adventure Awaits

Camp Out

Anyone who knows me, or reads my blog, will be aware that I have a young son. He’s five, an ‘old’ five, more like five going on fifty. Sometimes he comes out with the most acute observations on life that I have ever heard, he has been known to channel spirit in his sleep and occasionally will tell us about things before they happen.

However, any normal five year old boy loves to spend one on one time with his dad and last weekend he had the perfect opportunity – camping at the bottom of the garden with his dad. Now we are not and ‘outdoors’ family by any means, we’re far too fond of indoor plumbing and central heating, but we do have a tent. It was bought originally for Glastonbury but never made it out of the bag. So daddy would put this tent up, a totally new experience for him, and to his credit the swearing was minimal even with our sons help! It didn’t help that as soon as his started the heavens split open and he got soaked so the skin, it also didn’t help that the instructions that came with the tent got so waterlogged they were illegible. But to his credit, the tent went up.

Camping With Daddy

The first night (Saturday) our son was just a fizzing ball of excitement, determined he wasn’t going to sleep. He was going to listen for owls, make shadow puppets on the tent walls and generally drive his dad round the bend. He finally fell asleep around 10.15pm much to his dads relief.  On Sunday night he fell asleep by himself without daddy being there beside him, albeit sideways across the width of the tent head and shoulders on one bed and legs on the other, which did make getting in difficult for his dad! I was watching the ‘relocation operation’ ready to zip them up for the night, as he was zipped into his sleeping bag he rolled onto his back, took a breath and said …’No Missed Calls!’ Then rolled back over and snuggled down in his sleeping bag.

We just looked at each other and started laughing. No missed calls? From where? From who?

Even though he slept, his dad had another sleepless night, as the small child asleep next to him was giggling and laughing out loud, laughing so hard in fact that he had tears streaming down his face, whilst sound asleep. Needless to say the tent was taken down the following morning and there are no plans for another camp out any time soon.