There’s still so much more to say about Bulgaria but right now we’re getting ourselves packed up for home.
For a long time – after I left my childhood home I never felt like I had a true home. I moved around a lot so never put roots down. Never made something my own. But then I did the thing I vowed I’d never do.
I moved to the UK. With Jamie and baby Bohan snuggled in my tummy. It felt right at the time to be close to family in an English speaking country while we embarked on the barmy journey of birth and babies.
And we just never really left. And in doing so we made it our home. In 8 years I’ve given birth to 3 children in that house, we got married in the garden, 2 out of 3 kids took their first steps in our Devon home. Every floorboard, every stain on the carpet, every nook and cranny holds a memory so real I can almost feel it when I’m reminded of these snapshots of my children’s entire lives.
This is our home and it feels so much more than a home. It’s like those memory boxes that you keep stuffed under your teenage bed with photos and ticket stubs and cringy love letters to spotty boys … but a grown up version and when I open the front door it’s every moment of my children’s lives, it’s every evening we’ve had with friends around the kitchen table, every Christmas tree Jamie lifted the children up to to put the star on top, every race around the island on whatever ride on was their favourite at the time. It’s slow dancing in the kitchen to Ben Howard and planning our wedding over ciders, it’s 10pm tea and biscuits outside on summer evenings. Bedtime stories and splashy bath times, tiny shoes lined up in the hallway getting progressively bigger as the years go by. The ever changing art on the fridge door and the always present “stuff on the stairs to take up when you go”. It’s us. Our lives. In those funny shaped walls. And I’m really excited to be back there. Comfy. And cosy. And home.
