Back from a blogging break

I must admit I lost my blogging mojo over the past few weeks – so I’m sorry for my silence. Since we got back from Wales, things have been rather mad with work, we’ve been decorating the house so we’re living in chaos and I’ve had a bunch of choir rehearsals and performances that are eating up the rest of my spare time. I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on my priorities and have made some pretty major life decisions.

After 16 years at Imperial College London, I’ve finally resigned. I’ve been thinking about my next step for ages, but an opportunity recently came up that I couldn’t pass up – so at the end of June I’m going to become Managing Director of a fab communications and social media strategy agency, Pickle Jar Communications. It’s going to be a massive change – going from an organisation of 8,000 people to one with just eight. But I am so up for the challenge! I’ll be working from home, so can hopefully achieve a better work/life balance and be at the school gates a bit more often. But I know I won’t be lonely, as I’ll be visiting my Newcastle-based team often and also hopefully clients across the UK and beyond – something I am super excited about! I miss travelling!

So, I hope you’ll forgive the blogging break – my mind has been working overtime on these big life changes. But I’m feeling much calmer now, and 100% sure I’ve made the right decision – so I need to catch up with Herne Hill Mum! I’ve still got to tell you about the rest of our Pembrokeshire holiday and also share photos of my beautiful niece’s 2nd birthday – but for now, here are a few pictures of a wonderful visit to an old school friend of mine, Marie, and her gorgeous family at their home near Woking. Their house overlooks an amazing country park where you can get lost amid woodland – so we enjoyed a relaxing wander with the children in the Spring sunshine.

Alex, Sophie and their friend Harry ran and ran, and climbed on roots and logs whenever they found them.

Here’s the gang! I love Harry’s tongue – this is his concentration face (I also love the toy weapons that the boys insisted on bringing – it ever fails to amaze me how much boys seem to enjoy toy guns and swords, no matter how much we try and avoid them!)

Alex and Harry did some brilliant jumping from really high up!

And they all did some brilliant balancing on the logs that were scattered all over the woodland.

Pete took us to see a massive ancient tree – it took all seven of us linking hands to reach around the circumference! Here are the boys inspecting it, trying to calculate how many people it would take to measure it!

One person who couldn’t quite join in was beautiful baby Lucy! But I can’t leave her out, so here she is – she mostly watched the older children looking quite bemused by their antics!

Back to my babies – here’s a very grown up Alex in his favourite Darth Vadar jumper.

And Sophie looking completely gorgeous hiding amongst the tree trunks!

We had such a lovely visit – it’s always such a pleasure catching up with an old friend. But that joy is compounded when our children get on so well. I tried to get a photo of the three friends, but they were in a silly mood so this is what I ended up with!