The Ordinary Moments 2017 #29 – Soft Play…Village style!

I am no stranger to a soft play, they are an ordinary moment of any preschooler or mum’s life, and love or hate them, they are a great place to catch up with mum friends and ditch the kids to let off some steam! With our initial years raising our family in the City, we were surrounded by them and had several at our finger tips, and whilst I rarely went in them with the kids (they gross me out) I loved to see them having fun and going nuts whilst I had a sneaky hot chocolate and lots of chats. We would spend hours at them, especially on rainy days and even now in school holidays we can occasionally be spotted at the ones for older kids!

Now Alice is 1 and toddling around, I guess we go full circle and start that all over again. The difference however for Alice is that she is on her own, and we are now living in a village!

Here in East Yorkshire, aside from family and school friends that I have to travel a little ways to, I don’t know as many local people as I did back when Ethan and Megs were younger, or even where the local soft plays would even be with out the help of a little google, so I was super excited to find out when we moved in that the village has their own soft play (yes really). I was kindly invited by a couple of childminders in our early days here, with instructions that it was a mile down the road crossing several fields to get there, but it runs twice a week, is cheap, and well…just perfect!

It is far different to what I have been used to but I love all the more so. Soft Play village style involves a mile walk across fields, through woodland and past some goats and chickens. It is a beautiful walk that I have enjoyed taking each week which leads you out over some tracks and finally to our destination of “Soft play” at the local sports grounds. It is a pop up one and therefore half the price of that in the city and has far less kids there too. It is super chilled out and everyone talks to each other over a free cuppa and is clean and easy to watch the kids at. It is just a cute little space for kids to have fun with the other kids they know from all of the other groups we all go to for a couple of hours twice a week! Its more of a club/playgroup than a business and I have thoroughly enjoyed going along each week with Alice.

I love our walk there and back with its stunning views, and I love to see her toddling and crawling with the other kids.

I love that such an ordinary thing as that of going to soft play has now for us become an adventure – A 2 mile round trip of little country lanes, horses, old windmills, fields and new friends.

The village soft play is now part of our weekly routine that we look forward to… an ordinary moment in our week to meet up with the other weekly soft play goers to have chats, drinks a little play!

I love that for Alice her ordinary will be this cute pop up soft play. It will be walks through the countryside to get there and it will be those little kids from the village that she sees at everything else. I love the slow and chilled pace of life here, our new ordinary and the little moments of quaint traditions that we can now be a part of together in this new chapter and stage of life…