Happy Easter everyone!
Hope you all have a safe and happy weekend with your loved ones!
Please enjoy this little video of a day trip we took late last year to an island in the bay. The kids have grown so much since this was filmed *sobs*.
Wishing you lots of love and chocolate.
xx G
13/100
10 thankful posts ago I wrote a post about my best friend and today I want to write about Priya’s.
Miss Scarlet celebrated her third birthday this week and I spent a good portion of her birthday party following her and Peach around with a camera (making the video I’ll share below – if you’re a fan on our facebook page you may have already seen it). It was so sweet to see these two girls interact and I am so thankful Peach has a friend like this.
Scarlet is a character. She’s cheeky, clever and has the most hilarious sense of humour. I am finally lucky enough that I am someone she’ll want to see and happily yells out my name when she sees me (previously she’d look insulted if I tried to hold her hand!).
I have loved getting to know her and being witness to the blossoming friendship between her and Peach. It’s not often you spend so much time in such close quarters with someone else’s child as I have living with Scarlet during the last few months and I feel incredibly lucky to be apart of her life. When Scarlet moved in it was quite rough. Many tears and tantrums took place. Many afternoons of meltdowns and both girls yelling “It’s MINE!!!!” at the top of their lungs. But slowly and surely these two have found their groove and now are like two peas in a pod. I laughed at their little conversations at the party and felt so thankful that my little girl has a friend she adores so much. I know how precious that is.
The wonderful bonus of this is that I think Scarlet’s mama is pretty darn wonderful too.
For Scarlet’s third birthday present I made her this video of her party. I am trying to move away from giving ‘things’ as present and thought that, like my Peach, Scarlet might enjoy watching her party over again and again and again and again (is that song annoying you yet Heidi? ha).
Theo learns to crawl from Gregarious Peach on Vimeo.
It’s the second Friday of the month and I am so excited to share with you this little video of Theo’s progression learning to crawl. So excited because it’s been 7 months since I took the footage!
During Theo’s 7th month I filmed him every day or so on our spare bed – documenting the process of him learning to crawl. Please enjoy our little Bear enjoying his first freedom of mobility.
Okay, so. I’m posting a week early because I couldn’t wait till the 4th Friday of this month to share with you Theo’s 365 recap (who set these silly rules anyway!?!).
Theo’s first year from Gregarious Peach on Vimeo.
My sweet boy’s entire 1st year.
For Peach’s video I knew right off the bat the song I wanted to choose for her. I had given her the middle name ‘Grace’ with that song in mind, so there wasn’t any deliberation on what to pick.
Theo on the other hand… well. There was LOTS of time to deliberate and deliberate I did. I don’t know what happened but it seemed that picking a song for his first year was like picking a song to sum him up forever. I suddenly felt under pressure to find the ‘right’ one and my friends and family will attest that for the last 2 months I’ve been nagging them all on which song I should choose. As his project came to a close I felt an impending urgency to find the right song.
My poor little sister searched and searched to have every suggestion shot down with statements like “I can’t have the words ‘I am happy because I am STUPID’ in a song for him” or “This song is about SEX Benedicte!”.
I wrote emails imploring for suggestions. I sent my iTunes genius to work trying to find songs that sounded like songs that I liked that might suit Theo. I sat in front of the computer willing the internet to tell me what song to use. I asked our houseguests. I asked his godparents. I played song after song to Errol and realised that I’d really placed way too much importance on the whole thing. I couldn’t decide. His godmother suggested using Bob Marley given the Bear’s laid-back nature. I rejected that suggestion because I am contrary. But… I kept coming back to Bob and I knew she had been right (she tends to be I’ve learned).
As a halfway mark I found a cover. I knew instinctively which song was for Theo, the words his soul had been singing mine since the day he was born: “Don’t worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing is gonna be alright”.
Indeed, after 12 months with my Bear, all I can think is how blessed I am that I got him, my happy reminder every day that everything is gonna be alright. How can it not when I look down and see this little boy just bursting with happiness, curiosity and love? I feel so incredibly honored to be his.
What an amazingly brief-yet-enormous year it is from birth to one – I feel like we’ve just ridden a roller coaster through some of the most beautiful and rugged landscapes around the entire world only to be back at the begining with just enough time to grab out hats, gasp ‘phew!’ and grab on before it all starts over again. And I am so excited to be on this new adventure with him.
Please enjoy Theo’s first year of life!
It seems fitting that the first ‘episode’ I share will be a recap of last year, this is Peach’s 365 project slideshow.
Life flies by in seconds – 365 Peach from Gregarious Peach on Vimeo.
Being able to see Peach’s year flash past in a couple of minutes, seeing all those moments fly by, I feel an ample sense of accomplishment. Perhaps this is because I can see my 365 project complete – being the biggest project I’ve ever undertaken, no doubt I should feel accomplished – but it’s not just the project that’s making me feel contented. Sure, I took lots of photos, spent hours upon hours processing, uploading and narrating but more than that, so ever more importantly than that, I helped raise this amazing human being.
This year has been huge. Peach has welcomed a new baby brother, adjusted to sharing her parents, she’s outgrown nappies, she’s mastered the toilet, swapped ‘mama’, ‘dada’ and ‘MINE’ for full sentences and fully formed ideas and grown from baby to girl. Alongside all these wonderful milestones, this year has been hard.
It does seem that the majority of my posts on gregariouspeach.com have been upbeat or ‘heartwarming’. I want to be perfectly honest with you and say that is because I have taken time to find things that warmed my soul and made me happy to be a parent when quite often I have found parenting incredibly difficult and found myself so full of doubts.
I know many of my readers are parents, and I am writing this especially to you (if you’re yet to have kids, skip this bit and trust me when I say that having children is a delight!).
If you’re still reading – I assume you’re a parent or very disobedient (and as a note, if you’re the latter, I really like you!)
Anyway. What I want to say is that sometimes I find parenting achingly difficult.
Sometimes I get angry at my children because I just want to have a shower alone. Sometimes I’m angry that my husband gets to go to work and leave them behind. Sometimes I am sad about things I won’t get to do, or creative ideas I cannot explore. Sometimes I yell. Sometimes I fob off my children so I can get cleaning done, or waste time on the internet. Sometimes a day goes by and I feel like I’ve got nothing I needed to done. Sometimes when I say ‘sometimes’ I actually mean a lot. Sometimes a week goes by and I feel like the only thing we’ve accomplished is creating an ever growing pile of dirty washing. Sometimes a whole year goes by and I feel like we haven’t achieved any of our ‘goals’. Sometimes I want to break down and cry and give my children to someone who has the patience they need. Sometimes I feel like this is not want I want to be doing.
Why am I telling you this? Because I suspect sometimes, you do too. I think sometimes we all do.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I wouldn’t change things for the world. My experience of motherhood is that it flies by in seconds, both the ache and awe. Babyhood is fleeting and childhood is evanescent, I know this. I cannot slow things down and yet I find myself so busy with day-to-day things that I forget what’s important.
Seeing my little girls year lined up like this makes me infinitely proud that this is what I’ve been doing – not taking photos or cleaning or just ‘getting through the day’ – I’ve been raising a person! This is what we’re doing as parents. We’re creating the childhoods of the ones we love most.
On one of those crappy days, my son learnt to walk. On one of those days that dragged on forever, my daughter fell asleep on my shoulder and let me cradle her for hours. And somewhere, over the course of good and bad days, my baby girl grew up.
Please watch this video and remember that life does fly by in seconds and those seconds may just be the most precious and delightful you’ll ever know. Know that you’re not wasting time, the days are not a blur of mundane parenting – you are doing something incredible, you are creating something incredible.
