Choosing Joy: Photo Shoots and African Dance

The last few days have been a period of step-change for me.  After lots of sadness, challenges, feeling blue and lots of manic activity, I feel as if my world is slowing down.  I am focussing on home life and routines and looking for a new job.  My mother-in-law has gone back to Pakistan, leaving me with much less to do.  

So the last few days I have been winding down, indulging in quiet time, reading, doing very little and letting the house get into a mess.  It has given me the headspace to start to feel motivated again, to blog, to do fun things with the children, to read, to take better care of myself.

I have been making the choice to look for the good things in my day, to show graitude and to ask Allah (SWT) to make me a truly grateful person down to the depth of my soul and every cell in my body.  I have been eating nutritious food, taking time for dhikr without rushing and generally being a happy, chilled out mama.  

I feel as if the challenges of recent months have helped me grow in confidence and personal strength.  I put myself higher up my own agenda and priorities than I have done and I am less apologetic about things. 

This weekend I decided to leave everything, set aside all my niggles and anxieties and just find fun things to do with the kids.

I promised them lunch and an afternoon at the library.  On the way we found a public art project and the kids wanted to take pictures:

My middle three kids are enormous posers and the oldest and youngest won't let me take a picture at all.  We had so much fun taking pics, although Little Lady looked a bit embarrassed about the attention we were getting for posing and Baby just ignored us all in her pram.

We had barbecue-style chicken for lunch and I opted for chicken and rice.  I am trying to eat healthily and Little Lady is keeping an eye on my diet so I asked for a little extra salad and happily nearly got my whole meal covered with it.  I ended eating this for lunch and having the leftovers for dinner.

After lunch we headed to the library with our stack of books to return and were greeted with a display of African dance for Black History Month.

We stayed for a while to listen to poetry and explore objects on display - Baby and Darling just wanted to whack the drums in the middle of the poetry.

We spent a good hour reading, picking books and following babies around.  I left with a stack of flyers on children’s and community activities to look at and plans to do have such lazy afternoons with the kids more often.