I have put this off for far far (far) too long. I had planned to have a blog up and running for when we went on our adventure as a family to Japan. Last year. In October… It obviously didn’t happen. And to be fair, I’m glad it didn’t happen otherwise I think I would have spent too much time feeling that I had to write a blog post or find something worthy to write about instead of just being there in that moment soaking up our first holiday as a family.

So here we are, about 6 months later and despite only having a couple of our videos up on YouTube from our trip I decided enough is enough. I can’t keep staring at a blank page any longer and at least with something down on ‘paper’ it will be a start at least.

Taking imperfect action! I keep fiddling around with the website too and I think I’m just putting off having to write and post an actual blog. I can play about with settings and so on any other day.

On with the part everyone hates, talking about yourself!

Hello! I’m Nicola, I’m a 30-something award winning paper florist located in Scotland and mum to my amazingly brilliant 10 year old daughter W, wife to my exceedingly patient husband Paul. A happy chatty introvert that is slowly building my army of cats and quite like things to do with Japan, foxes, books, Anime, coffee and food in general.

We are a family of 3, well 5 if you count our 2 cats, Mia who is 16 and Luna who is 5, we did have another cat called Tonks who was 8 and who sadly and unexpectidly passed away the week before we left for Japan. I honestly still expect to see her slink through the door as she was my little shadow. We live on the West Coast of Scotland, which you know is beautiful, I can’t deny that Scotland is beautiful. But we are so done. We were already getting to the ‘done’ feeling before Japan and since we’ve been back it has been our main goal to get out of dodge.

We are a somewhat geeky introverted family, Paul and I have been together for like 19 years now, we’ve essentially grown up together. We all like a lot of anime, we’re not keen on busy crowds and noise (although we felt more at home in Japan than here at home, we think it is down to the order of things and different culture – you know when something just feels ‘right’), a lot of 80s rock music thrown in there as well, gaming and honestly just keeping ourselves to ourselves. I do like to read, when I get the time but that seems to be less and less lately as it never seems top of the to-do list.

I’m trying to guage how much to actually write here, I do tend to waffle a bit so honestly, be prepared for that. I’m actually much better behind the screen than face to face as I stumble over words a bit and honestly sometimes just, urgh people.

This is our first blog together as a family, it will be mostly me writing it with the input of Paul and W. We’re going to cover not only everything from our family trip to Japan, our local wanders and also our plans as a family for our future as we realise what it actually is that we want from life. We will also touch on the topics of home education for W as well as eventually worldschooling (but that’s well into the future thinking there).

I think I will leave this here for now. It isn’t perfect, but it is something and a rough beginning is better than no beginning at all.