Home Grown Happiness: It's the simple things.....

For my birthday, a dear friend gave me a lovely wooden plaque with the following stencilled on to it:

"Enjoy the little things in life,for someday you will realize they were the big things".

As with all these beautiful quotes, we may read them and acknowledge them, but how do we apply them to life in this busy modern world we exist in?

This is something we have been thinking and talking about at home. Daily over the past week or so, I have been taking pictures (either on my walk with the dog, or in the garden), trying to find beauty in the everyday moments around me. This has helped me see that even though I hate living near the motorway, and would rather live somewhere more rural, there is still beauty and 'the little things' if you just take a moment to stop and notice. I upload these to facebook to share with people (in the hope it may brighten their day); I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes, but taking the time to do this makes be feel more appreciative. (If you have missed these, all that I have taken are at the end of this post.)

Talking about the simplifying life however, has got us exploring all sorts of 'bigger picture' ideas; one of which is rural living in a yurt! (If your not sure what a Yurt is, take a look at this fab website). Lily has been working on a great project for yurt living, and she has researched and designed a great yurt home for us:

Yurt pods, costings, vegetable garden and copse.

The skills included in this research were:

measuring the trampoline diameter. This enabled Lily to visualise the size of a yurt pod and subsequently work out the living space we might need, including sleeping pods and a bathroom pod.
calculating the cost of each yurt and estimating a total projected cost (including foundations, mains connection etc.)
researching a piece of land she would like to acquire through 'Rightmove' (ensuring it has its own water supply) and in an area we would like to live
searched for and found a great youtube clip of a tour of a yurt home
provided a full presentation of her findings over dinner!

Pretty cool autonomous learning covering Maths, IT, Analysis and Presentation Skills.

We're not sure of course if these ideas will come to fruition, but we are in love with the notion of simple yurt living. We are now planning some visits to yurt villages to see and experience what this might be like - an experience of learning in itself and great fun too hopefully.

When we take the time to stop and notice, it's truly amazing what we might find.

angela x