Since becoming a parent I’ve been acutely aware of the passing of time. When you have a small person growing before your eyes you have this constant reminder of the transience of things. Tiny hands and tiny nails growing bigger with every passing day, to a distant tick, tick, tick. Strangers telling you, “Make the most of it – they don’t stay small for long,” as you battle through tantrums. Even the most grim of parenting moments seems to be a reminder that nothing is forever.

I remember, in technicolour detail, folding my daughter’s outgrown newborn clothes and putting them away safely in a box to be stored in the loft. I cried as I did it, a mixture of raging hormones, sleep deprivation and the dawning realisation that time was passing too quickly.

I would cuddle my newborn tightly in my arms in cafes, sniffing in that new baby scent – a mixture of milk and magic baby perfume – and feel secretly sorry for mums cradling a bigger baby. My baby was still tiny, I was behind them. I still had all this time to enjoy.

And then the daily desperation to hold on to the slipping sands sort of faded. As the physical changes in my baby girl slowed down, so too did the incessant reminders that she was growing. It all became more gradual in a way, until we’d be surprised by a first word or a newly acquired skill like clapping or pointing. And then it would be a cause of celebration, rather than a moment to mourn the loss of time.

As the firsts rolled in – smiles, steps, Christmases, toes in the sea – that tick, tick, tick was drowned out by life. We were too busy enjoying, battling, LIVING to notice how quickly time was passing us by. Until a last – and then we’d be hit BOOM with that realisation of what had gone.

When we relocated from Berkshire to Devon last summer I spent much of the month prior to our move in a state of lost limbo. Every day would be a last. A last trip to our favourite pub. A last cup of tea in my friend’s garden. A last day at nursery. It was a long goodbye – and I’ve never been very good at goodbyes. I get emotional and sentimental and nostalgic, forgetting the bad bits and viewing the past through a rosy haze. Like an Instagram filter that skews the real life and makes the ugly bits pretty.

And so, this time, I’m choosing not to focus on the lasts, but to enjoy the idea of the firsts instead.

Tomorrow will be my daughter’s last day at pre-school. The place that has been fundamental in our feeling content and settled in our new home in Devon. The source of new friendships, new skills and many, many happy memories.

But the last day of pre-school means the first day of the summer holidays. The first day of a summer spent by the sea, scrambling around on Dartmoor, rock-pooling in Cornwall, visiting beloved family up north, seeing wonderful friends get married, making plans and painting walls in the first ever home we can say is truly ours.

It’s our last summer as a family of three. The unit we’ve grown so used to over the past four years, full of shared experiences, memories and “in” jokes. But after the summer comes the autumn, when we’ll be a family of four, with a whole lifetime of new memories waiting to be made.

With every last there is a first. And the firsts are just as worth celebrating as the lasts, in my book.

(PS. I may not feel this way as I collect my daughter from her last pre-school session tomorrow, a blubbering, pregnant, hormonal wreck.)

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One of my biggest regrets of the past three years is that I wasted so much time worrying. I was a worrier with a capital W. I worried about where we were going to live, what we were going to do for work and what school my daughter would eventually go to. I worried about all sorts of things but, mainly, I worried about the future.

I am a planner you see. I wish I wasn’t but I am. So there you go. This means that, although we lived in a pretty little cottage in a lovely village in Berkshire not far from London, I couldn’t relax. It was all so… temporary.

We rented our house and lived on a rolling short term tenancy contract. Buying a house was on our “To Do” list, not because we aspired to owning property particularly but because tenants in this country hardly have any rights or security and, after 6 years renting we’d had enough. We wanted to put down roots properly but knew the chances of affording anything bigger than a shoebox in that part of the UK was nigh on impossible.

I can vividly remember getting so panicked about the future when Frog was six months old that I was in tears by the time the (self-proclaimed) Northern Love Machine returned home from work. Having had no one to talk me off the ledge of my own worry I’d wound myself up into a complete state.

Other mums at the baby and toddler groups would discuss optimum age gaps between siblings, planning pregnancies and school start times, while I fretted. I knew I couldn’t afford to return to my old job – I’d barely break even once I’d shelled out for petrol and childcare fees. Work woes took over house woes at that time. I was fixated on setting myself up as a freelancer on the first step towards our Master Plan.

Everyone told me to “live in the moment” and “enjoy this special time” while my baby was small. And I tried to. I really did. But it’s easier to live in the moment when you know your future is secure. All the time, at the back of my mind, was this vague sense of unease as a big knot of worry tangled in my stomach.

Photo credit: CP Photography

“Things will turn out OK in the end,” my mum reassured me. I wanted to believe her but I couldn’t.

When I got a new contract we decided to save everything I earned and try really, really hard to get a deposit together to buy a house – even though we didn’t know where that house would be.

We only had the luxury of saving because I was basically working two jobs – around 80 hours a week – and the NLM earned enough for us to live on. If we earned less there’s no way that would have been possible.

18 months ago things were coming to a head. The house we lived in was owned by a lovely family in the same village. They’d decided they wanted to move back in, meaning we had to move out. That was OK – we’d told them we wanted to move out in the summer anyway. But it gave us an added pressure to actually get a Plan B in place.

I used to lie awake at night worrying that the NLM wouldn’t get a job in a different area before the cut-off point for teaching posts (if he didn’t have one sorted by May half term we knew we’d have to stay in the area until Christmas). Until his job situation was all sorted we couldn’t make any house plans. That made the planner in me feel a bit sick.

And then it happened. It turned out my mum was right all along. The NLM got a new job – 200 miles away in South Devon. It meant we could move to an area 45 minutes from my parents’ place. We wouldn’t be so isolated from family and, another bonus, houses were far, far cheaper there compared to Berkshire.

One year on and here we are.

We’ve been in Devon for a year now. We rented a house for six months while we got our mortgage sorted and found a house to buy in a little village on the edge of Dartmoor. Within a month of picking up the keys for that house I became pregnant. Frog will start at the village primary school in September, just before the new baby is due to arrive.

Life is calm now. That ball of worry disappeared nearly a year ago. We are settled, happy and enjoying life properly, finally.

The last three years have taught me a few things. To trust my mum when she gives me advice. That being a planner isn’t always a bad thing. That worry about things you can’t control is pretty pointless. And that working hard isn’t always enough – you need a fair amount of good luck too.

It’s not that we weren’t happy before. I have hundreds of happy memories from before our Devon days and many friends who I still miss. But this is a new type of happy. It’s a contented happy that, as a family, is still pretty new to us.

So here’s to one year in Devon. And hopefully many more to come…

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We’re currently living in a rented place, while we go through the whole house buying process (I don’t want to write anything about that yet for fear of tempting fate).

Our rented home is in a little town called Ashburton, nestled against the edge of beautiful Dartmoor, a 20 minute drive from the coast. Ashburton is a pretty place, full of independent shops and bunting. It’s a town, but feels more like a village really.

It’s funny how quickly somewhere can feel like home, even if it won’t necessarily be home for very long. Already the butchers and grocery shop feel familiar. As do the flurry of antique shops in the town (I’ve never seen so many antique shops in such a small vicinity).

There are a few cafes, but one in particular that I love. Full of teacups and tea saucers, shabby chic decor and glossy magazines, Tea at Taylors is the kind of place that feels utterly indulgent. And the cake is AMAZING.

If you like the kind of shop you can get lost in, rifling through vintage treasures, then Ashburton has an abundance of these.

This one is my particular favourite.

On the other side of the road there’s a charity shop which is BRILLIANT. I got two dresses for Frog for the princely sum of £3.25 for both. One’s a yellow cord number for the autumn and the other’s a pretty little summery one that she already loves.

There’s also an Artisan Bakery (I’ve yet to venture in there but I believe it does particularly posh bread), two delicatessans and a specialist “wine merchants”. It’s a foodie heaven.

All in all, Ashburton’s a lovely place, even if it is just for a few months.

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Do you ever feel like you need to turn down the noise?

Yesterday was one of those days. As my To Do list reverberated around my head, pestering me with taunts of jobs and tasks that I barely had time to complete, I managed to forget about it all for a while as I visited a pretty special place.

Nestled down a narrow country lane near Dartmouth, The Fast Rabbit Farm Gardens lie waiting to be discovered.

With 30 acres of secluded land in the Strawberry Valley, it’s so peaceful you can (quite literally) only hear the bees hum. Of course my three old changed that with her usual loud chatter, but still.

I’m no gardening expert, but I can appreciate a pretty flower when I see one. The Fast Rabbit is full of them. But it’s not like your usual garden centre. In fact, this place is so quiet that we were the only ones there, wandering through the beautiful lines of flowers and watching the bees at work.

Once we’d taken in the pretty specimens, we strolled out into the woodland, down windy paths shaded by huge canopies of trees.

We found a lake, complete with picture-perfect lily pads and lazy fish gulping at flies. It was the perfect spot for a picnic.

Sometimes turning the noise off for a while is the only thing to do. I highly recommend it.

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A few days ago I had a wobble.

I worried that we’d uprooted our three year old from everything she knew and that she wasn’t happy. I over-thought everything and, rather than just cracking on with the business in hand of settling in, I panicked.

Tantrums are exhausting, but tantrums every ten minutes are MIND BLOWINGLY exhausting. I was tired, unsettled, still living amongst boxes and not entirely sure we’d done the right thing by moving 200 miles from Berkshire to South Devon. 

Turns out I was wrong to worry.

The house is unpacked. The tantrums have abated (mostly) and the area is starting to feel familiar. Funny how quickly we become normalised to things once we wake up to them every day.

We have made the most of the NLM’s school holiday no-working hours and my flexible working hours, to get out and explore where we live. I have a post coming up about the brilliant day we had today near Dartmouth.

We had another trip to the beach yesterday and then a few hours in Totnes along with a picnic by the river on Tuesday.

It’s starting to feel like home.

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Which is why we left our two year old (one more week of calling her that *gulp*) with her grandparents on Saturday and went off in search of our ideal temporary Devon home. We found it. Tucked along a windy country path, nestled into a valley overlooking fields and a lake, with a pub within walking distance and a pretty market town less than 2 miles away.

Then we lost it. Bugger.

Apparently a couple without kids were a more attractive option to the landlord, so yesterday saw me driving across Devon with my parents and toddler, minus the husband.

A last minute viewing on a previously disregarded property turned out to be OK. With a bit of a clean and all our own stuff inside, this could be the perfect house to tide us over until we find that long-awaited home that we will call our own later this year (hopefully).

Sitting at the top of a beautiful little Devon town, nestled into the edge of Dartmoor, the house has views across fields and is just a short stroll to a deli, pub and pre-school. I hope we don’t lose this one too, or we’ll be living in a tent within the month.

It turns out house hunting with a grumpy toddler isn’t such a bad activity after all. Especially when there’s cake and a short stop to see some miniature ponies involved.

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I’ve been writing this post in my head for weeks. I kept hoping that things would fall into place to bring me to this point, right now, where I am sitting at my computer and sharing plans for an amazing new future.

These plans have been a while in the making and, right up until a couple of weeks ago, we didn’t think they would become a reality. But they have. And I keep pinching myself to believe it.

We are moving. Not just down the road either. Not even to a nearby town. No, we’re going a bit further.

We are moving more than 170 miles away, to begin a new life in Devon.

Wow, it felt good writing that!

While there are pieces of the puzzle I can’t yet share, it feels good to know that all those elusive bits have finally slotted together, so that we can begin a life we barely dreamed possible just six months ago.

A life near my parents, near the sea, amongst beautiful countryside and a slower, more normal pace of life.

I’m looking forward to some amazing new work projects, including getting stuck into my role as Editor for the brilliant parent blogging network that is Tots100. I’m looking forward to choosing paint and picking out colours for the very first home we will ever own. And I’m looking forward to spending more time with that delicious, diva-esque child of mine.

Bring on the future. Here’s to the summer!

Now… any tips on moving / Devon / house-hunting / packing / not having a relocation-induced panic attack? Much appreciated, thank you.

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It’s been a weekend of snapshots. So many moments I’ve tried to savour and keep. But, as with everything, each one has slipped through my fingers like sand, leaving me with nothing but a delicious memory.

A trip to the beach, an Easter egg hunt, a (few) cold gin and tonics, a hot bath in a rolltop tub, a snooze on the sofa in the middle of the day, a book… these are the things I’m holding tight to as normal life resumes. These are the photographs in my head.

If I close my eyes hard enough, they’re right there before me.

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She took these photographs. I thought they were too lovely not to share. You can find more of Caroline’s work on her professional site at CP Photography.

My dad. “Dadaz”.

Puddle loving.

Rainy sandcastles and a glamorous coat.

“Dadaz”. Again.

More sandcastles. The girl’s obsessed.

The NLM getting some quiet time. (About ten minutes after this photo was taken he got a wave in his boot and had to walk back to the car with a welly full of water. Moaning.)

***

I’m linking up this post to Country Kids at Coombe Mill. Head over there for more outdoor inspiration.

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So these moments – snatched with grasping fingers and held close – are ones to treasure forever.

The sense of anticipation on a Friday evening, as a long four day weekend stretches ahead of us. The excitement as we arrive in Devon, on the way to see my parents’ new home, taking in the Jubilee bunting strewn through various villages.

The inevitable tears and glee from an over-excited child, aware that something is different on this night. It is not a usual bedtime.

Waking up to a sunny morning in the Devon countryside, with no sound except the birdsong outside the window.

Eating breakfast in a beautiful kitchen, as sunlight streams through the open doors, taking in the endless possibilities that this day may bring.

Discovering a new birthday present for a child, soon to be two years old. Watching the delight on her face as she “drives” around the spacious garden on her gleaming tractor.

Taking a picnic to the beach, tucking into roast chicken sandwiches and apples, as the waves crash onto the sand. Making castles and burying feet. Witnessing hesitant, toddling, steps towards the water, turning into confident strides and, eventually, a fully fledged run.

Discarded clothes, a nappy, a perfect peachy bottom covered in sand.

A cold glass of Pimms in the garden, as the afternoon turns to evening. Serene in the knowledge tomorrow will be another day packed with moments to pinch between the fingers and stuff into bulging pockets full of memories.

Moments like these make life slow down.

I love them.

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