Today begins with a very strong coffee beside a very smiley Natalie. We look at pictures of moons for the room and she approves!

My walk around the corner to Hope Home.

The children are getting ready to go to nursery.

Here’s little tour….

The kitchen, always good smells coming from here

The dining area for staff

The garden

The washing area for baths and showers after a hot day

The resident cat

The ducks, no eggs yet!

Time for a little drawing

Any requests? The truck that takes them to nursery, Yoot in his wheel chair and a bycicle that I use to go to get the paint

And so to my blue and the last stroke of base coat on the wall.

You may ask why I am doing this, what is in it for me? It is of course for the children and for an ethos that reminded me of my own. It is also in celebration of a strength found in the possibilities we create when we work as a community. I may be painting, blogging, but a team works to enable this to happen in so many ways, and your support is its life line. it’s a sense of completion and achievement just in the last brush stroke. A sense of something finished and yet just beginning, I am hot, tired and so painted out, but still, a joy.

And so I find myself painting Raising Hope and Joys tree of life, echoing the tree of life Sarah and I painted in the children’s bedroom in August. An experience in August from which so much has grown.

And now after feasting on mango and rice, its time for those moons and stars……

xXx