Happiness (and it involves pigeons).....

I am happy. Not because i am no longer going to work due to my glorious maternity leave, nor because i have two gorgeous daughters whom i smile with love at the thought of. No. Its because just lately i have started to glimpses the beginnings of achieving some of my life long goals.

These are perhaps not your typical bucket list achievements, what to do before you are 40 etc, but they are what i really want to achieve: 1) to run a welcoming home and 2) to help the pigeons.

Ok the pigeon one might seem funny, but along with my love of massive trainers with big tongues, God has given me a love of pigeons (in the bible it says that God created us carefully in the womb, although its easy to see this as a babies organs develop, he also is choosing our character/predisposition to certain things, one of mine is pigeon loving). So i have been encouraging Starbucks to feed the birds that arrive in our garden, and we now have some regular pigeon type visitors. My favorite is the one with only one foot, as i feel especially guilty about the fact that human kind probably contributed to this (this is odd as i dont care as much about the suffering we inflict on pets). One-foot even started to fly into our windows to get our attention to feed her. I really like that we have now established ourselves as a place that these birds can come to feed, a little haven in the middle of a tarmac-ed plain. Somewhere to get easy food on a cold winters day in London. To me this is an achievement, and one i'm proud of. Odd? oh well.

The second is to run the sort of home where stray teenagers feel welcome. Having always beenthe kid   with nowhere to be as a teenager, I really want to correct this by welcoming others. The sort of place where my friends kids can come, and still feel welcome once my kids have tired if their presence and left them alone in the lounge. I love teenagers, but the welcome extends to all.

Since the addition of Cookie to our family, our house has seemed much warmer. Perhaps as I am now out numbered. People come, get more involved with my kids and then get wrapped up in family life and forget to leave. It's a loving nurturing oasis, again, in a cold harsh city. I love that recently a couple of people have said that they didn't want to leave our house and spent ages cuddling Cookie. If cuddling a small cute baby for an hour doesn't send you back out into the world a happier, better person, I don't know what will.