Beaches in January

Once more, I shall bore you with tales of my son. Soemtimes I would love to get into the mind of a 2 year old. For a while now, every time he sees a picture of the Fat Controller, he says 'Daddy'. It makes me giggle every time. I, on the other hand, am Peter Pan, apparently.

Also, Daniel is just getting into imaginary play. He needs a bit of encouragement but then there is no stopping him. Last night, we were looking through his photo albums and saw pictures of the beach from holiday. So, at 6.30pm in JAnuary, he declared that he wanted to go to the beach. I tried to explain the impracticalities of this, so he said 'beach later' as if we would be going in the next 10 minutes. Which was when I had a genius mummy moment.

Using 2 blankets, I created a 'beach' in his bedroom. We used sticks and his plastic snooker cue for spades and we were soon having a whale of a time on the beach. He pretended to splash in the water and kept saying 'cold.' This morning, he went on a boat to see some ducks with his grandad, apparently. We even had ice cream (a wooden whistle) which he kept licking and saying chocolate ice cream! He does get quite bossy and demanded that I 'dig castle, mummy.' Every time I stopped I was ordered back to work.

The funniest moment came last night when we put him to bed. A couple of minutes after putting him to bed, he poked his head around the door, made a dash for the snooker cue and ran back in his room. Neil went to put him back to bed and he just said, 'more digging!'

It is wonderful to see his imagination and creativity awakening. It is something I want to encourage throughout his childhood and into adulthood as it is such a precious gift. Sometimes God feels very close in these moments. I am pretty sure he likes our beach as much as Daniel.

Love is...

I am still recovering from an excellent but exhausting weekend away at Halls Green. We took away 8 11 and 12 year olds, which I know is some youth worker's worst nightmare, but they are a lovely group. They are really funny with bags of potential and loads of fun to be around. It was VERY cold though. I did ok considering that the baby is due in 6 and a half weeks!

The theme of the weekend was love, focusing on Mt 22:37-40. They got to do their own take on things by putting together a short video on the freak banana man finding love and being accepted, surreal in that special way that 11 and 12 year olds manage. But for me, a really special moment came when we were praying at the end of the weeknd and an 11 year old said something along the lines of 'I know how great your love is God, becasue we have had an ace weekend without any arguments or anything and it shows how special your love is!' A brilliant bit of applied theology and lovely to see God's love having an impact. I love those small, but significant youth work moments.