This afternoon I walked back into the house and was greeted with a sight that made me take a moment. It seems a fairly typical thing, just 2 scooters stood by the front door. But this is where a pushchair has stood every day for the almost 8 years that we’ve lived in this house.

This morning Henry took the last one we’ve owned to the dump. Yes, Clara hasn’t been in it for weeks as she’s outgrown it really, and yes it was broken anyway so it needed to go. But still, this seems to have been the tipping point in my realisation that our pre-school era is rapidly approaching its end.

Don’t get me wrong leaving the house after lunch today with a shopping bag in hand, keys and phone in my pocket and a scooting child was a lot easier than days gone past when I would have had one in the carrier and one in the pushchair as well as the scooting child, along with a bag or 2, 6 different toys, several snacks and usually my last nerve. But I still had a pang of sadness as I followed the scooting giant baby after walking past the missing pushchair for a second time, things really are about to change in a huge way for our little family.

And I know it’s a change that was always there looming in the distance, but it always felt so far away and now Henry has literally counted down the weeks till we can say- ‘all our children are at school now.’ I’m blotting in from my brain so you’ll have to ask him yourself how many it actually is. But I do know this last little stretch of the summer term will see a lot of ‘lasts’ before a big final ‘first.’ So, I’m feeling a bit mixed about the whole thing.

It’s also almost 8 years ago that I tentatively set foot into my first toddler group. It was up at the children’s centre and I was so nervous and really didn’t know what to expect. I just knew that I really needed to make a few Mum friends to have by my side on the next chapter of our family life. Jenny, one of the Mum’s (incidentally one of the nicest Mum’s I’ve ever met) was the first person to speak to me- turns out she was the first person a lot of us spoke to as like I say she’s a nice person who spotted an anxious first time Mum and decided to strike up a conversation. It worked. Pretty soon I fell into a routine with baby Polly, we went to a different group nearly every day- sometimes 2 in one day. And fairly quickly I had a little group of fellow Mum’s who I’m happy to say are still some of my most important friends now. We’ve raised our little ones together, watched them turn into big ones and popped our several more between us. To put it simply- I found my tribe.

As I say, these groups have been a huge part of our pre-school era and I’m nothing short of devastated that pretty soon I won’t be writing them on the calendar anymore as they’ve been such a staple to our lives. I’ve laughed, cried, given and received plenty of hugs, I’ve gossiped, felt my heart burst with emotions on several occasions, bought home enough crafts to resemble the Art Attack studio and made so many memories. Most importantly I and all the kids have made friends for life.

There are so many other aspects to say goodbye to as this door closes. The little cheeky lunch dates, the coffee catch ups, the trips to a quiet soft play, the play on the deserted beach. Yes, I know I’ll still be able to do these things- but it’ll be different. The structure to the week will shift and these things become a bit more tricky.

But, I know it’s not all sadness. Clara is so excited to start school. Henry and I are looking forward to being able to go on cheeky lunch dates where we can maybe have an uninterrupted conversation. I’ll be able to study more. And of course watching them grow up is the biggest privilege I have in my life. And there will be other exciting milestones, the next year will bring more nativity plays, Polly’s first residential trip, sports days. And yes having them at school for such a chunk of the week does make me appreciate the time when they are home so I guess having them all at school will only reinforce that appreciation. And instead of the cheeky lunch dates there might be more cheeky after school beach/ice cream trips. And the coffee catch ups might just be more me without a child in tow. And the deserted beach plays might have to be earlier in the day on a weekend instead of during school hours. And maybe we’ll just avoid soft play for a while!

So, all in all there’s a lot of different emotions weaving through me at the moment, so apologies if I seem a little off if I’m asked about my littlest baby starting school. I’m happy/sad and sad/happy all at the same time. All I do know for sure is that I’m going to soak up every one of these ‘last’ moments as it really does feel like 5 minutes ago that we bought home the biggest baby in a car seat, plonked her down in the living room and said “shit, what do we do now?”

Well, I’ve just dropped the baby for her first school stay and play session (excuse me while I go and cry into a pillow and wonder how the hell that has happened!), so I have a spare 45 minutes or so as I didn’t read the email properly and thought I would also be doing the staying and the playing, but apparently not- luckily she went in quite happily and hopefully I’ll pick up a smiling child in a bit. Things have been the normal crazy hectic the last couple of weeks so I haven’t had a chance to sit and blog so here goes.

We had a mixed half term, it felt busy but also fairly chilled all mixed into one. We started each morning watching ‘Simon’ at breakfast- Britain’s got talent, but I’m sure you can see who the kid’s favourite judge is. We enjoyed a couple of trips to the woods and the beach. The trip to the woods ended up looking more like a comedy sketch show with the amount of bumps everyone ended up with. Clara took a rope swing to the face and skinned her knee on the walk home. I was helping Polly get onto a rope swing when we both misjudged what was happening and she kneed me in the vagina, this left me bent over crying whilst also laughing as she was left hanging onto the rope at the wrong angle also laughing at the state of me. Altogether a fairly amusing series of events.

Having them home all day did make studying a bit trickier, so we usually went out for the morning and then the kids settled down with a film whilst I hit the books. It did mean I introduced them to a couple of films that aren’t all Disney songs and dances. One day I decided to show them one I thought they’d enjoy, whilst also preparing them that the ending is a bit sad- Marley and me. I was right in the sense that they laughed all the way through and thought he was a hilariously naughty dog. However, I clearly did not warn them enough as to how sad the sad bit would be. Polly was fine as she’d understood I meant the dog was going to die (spoiler alert for anyone living under a rock who hasn’t seen it), the little 2 though did not get this vibe and both dissolved into apocalyptic sobs at the last scene. They had lots of cuddles and are clearly not scarred for life as they asked to watch it again the next day- with less tears the next attempt. It did lead to one bedtime where Clara got a bit upset as she was concerned that Henry was going to ‘take the kitty cat away to the doctor and we never see him again,’ but she’s been assured that little terror still has plenty of life left in him. It did also make for a slightly darker version of ‘vets’ the next day- instead of the usual where they just colour a teddy in with red pen and pretend they have chicken pox, they upped it slightly and Sooty had a lot more red pen on him where he’d suffered a catastrophic injury that led him to be being buried instead of fixed back up. Seb then spent the next half an hour sat on a stool watching him actually get fixed whirling round in the washing machine.

We also snuck in a little trip into Exeter on the bus to run a couple of errands and visit the museum. This meant a McDonald’s for lunch which left me with the question of- why do kids need to go for a shit in the worst possible places? Both girls wanted to go in there, slightly traumatic experience when the toilets there are never the cleanest and it leaves you questioning the whole trip! Seb then gave us all a bit of a giggle with his incredible picture of the cat at a little craft area in the museum. And speaking of our delightful cat, he’d left us a nice little present on the patio for when we got home, a nice little gift with its guts hanging out across the path.

Seb is still making us giggle with his mixing up of words asking us what our ‘destiny’ is instead of our destination, he’s now got another amusing phrase. The kids like looking at pictures and videos of themselves on my phone, but Seb keeps asking for an ‘episode’ like he’s literally watching a sitcom where these kids are the main characters. He definitely would be the comedic character if this was a sitcom, especially when you get notes coming home explaining that his bump to the head was from when he fell off a bench when another child was trying to give him a hug.

The last couple of weeks has also included both girls birthdays- yes I know, we didn’t plan that very well. We got Polly a bike, but had to keep it hidden in the car till her actual birthday, this meant when I finished at midnight the night before the actual big day I thought it’ll be easy enough to get it into house ready for the morning. Sadly not. I got to find out that the streetlights in the town go off at 12:30AM, just as I parked the car in the only available space right at the very top of the hill. The 10 minute walk down the hill in the dark with me attempting to steer the thing, with my phone light doing a naff job whilst also carrying my bag over my shoulder probably looked like another scene from a comedy show, there was a lot of silent cursing happening. And no, I would not have considered riding it down the hill (even if I could have got my leg over it) after the village shop incident. When Henry and I were in the early stages of our relationship, he took me out on a bike that didn’t have proper breaks and was too big for me and I crashed into a village shop and took all the vegetable stands out outside- I have not been on a pushbike since.

The birthdays themselves were fairly chilled out which was actually quite nice, I just can’t believe I now have an 8 year old, a 6 six year old and a baby who’s not a baby but is now in fact a 4 year old- just going to do some more sobbing. Well, I’m actually going to go and pick her up and hope she got on alright- the phone hasn’t rung so I’m fairly sure it’s gone ok, let’s go find out…