Ch ch ch ch Changes!

We can barely believe that our Imagine Avenue ‘baby’ is 21 months old! When we first dreamt up Imagine Avenue on a holiday in Spain during 2022 we couldn’t have imagined the amazing things we had in store for ourselves and we are both so proud of our holiday dream-job that has become a reality.

This blog represents a largely invisible change for Imagine Avenue as our new website development means that our lovely customers can set up their own accounts, easily look at their bookings and use our new ‘chat’ feature to get in touch with us! The wonderful team at Taurus Network have supported us since the beginning of our journey and are fantastic at finding ways to drag us up to date with technology! We plan to add monthly blogs to the site that give you some insight to our business behind the scenes, share parenting/childcare tips and resources and generally shout about the benefits of play for your children!

In this initial blog we’ve been thinking a lot about growth and change. We’re looking forward to exciting things to come for Imagine Avenue as we approach the 2 year mark and have enjoyed reflecting on the differences in our lives since we began. Alice and I have had to learn about social media (quickly!), are still trying to become more like the strong business women we admire and are certainly loving the freedom and flexibility that comes with managing our own jobs. We frequently get asked how it is to work and spend so much time with a sister and I hope I speak for both of us when I say that on the whole we love working together and have found that we are now able to play to our different strengths and can find common ground on pretty much every aspect of the business; I’m the nerdy English Teacher proofreading for missing apostrophes in our emails, and Alice is choosing the perfect song for our social media posts! But we didn’t always get along quite so well… At the risk of sounding hyperbolic there was a chunk of our teenage years when our differences seemed to huge and we didn’t really like each other. Once we’d passed the angsty teenage drama however we learnt how to spend time together and became friends as well as sisters. How lovely! And would you just look at the gorgeous photo of 3 year old me meeting baby Alice? Adorable!

I know the issue of sibling relationships can be a thorny one and is not something that can be predicted or really prepared for-I am eternally kept on kept on my toes by my 3 boys who go from firm friends to mortal enemies in the blink of an eye! But I’m reassured that with lots of reminders about how we are always going to love our family (!) they will see more happy times than bad together. In fact, the boys love when we chat about their futures and what their life will look like with their brothers. Will they go to the same Uni? Will they argue over girls/boys? Will they live with us until they’re 40?! Whatever changes come our way for us or our children they are best faced with positivity, honesty and lots of reassurance. Good luck out there folks facing those big and little changes we battle through each and every day!

Gem

Changes-Ways to play

• Look at baby photos of all the family members. How have we all changed? What can we do now that we couldn’t do then?
• Have a walk and crunch in some autumn leaves! Spot all the different colours and talk about the changing seasons.
• Help children prepare for a big change (house move/new sibling) by role playing! Help them pack some boxes from the recycling and ‘move’ to another room. Use a doll to play looking after baby.