If buttons could talk....

Today I found something which made me really smile from my childhood.  It is a button from my favourite coat which I wore as a child, about the age of 5.

It is the size of my thumb nail, and dirty from having lying around in an old button box, but it is something I am going to make into as it holds sentimental value. To think that my Mother kept it all these years just made me feel like I had gotten a little hug from her even though she has been in heaven for nearly 9 years now.

You can see the coat hanging on this chest of drawers in the background of this photograph of my Stepdad!

This button would tell of a time when I used to run in from playing and give both my Mum and Step-dad huge hugs. It would tell of times when I scraped my knees, and made mud pies inside the glass house that used to be at the front of the house where I grew up.

If this button could talk it would tell stories of me whipping worms (didn't like them when I was a child, but I now save them whenever I see them in the hope that they might put in a good word for me upstairs when my time comes!). It would tell stories of how I used to make up languages, and make believe worlds, and sit in the garden making daisy chains, and sing in a very loud operatic voice as loud as I could because it made my older sister laugh (annoying the guests that were staying in my Mum's guest house), It would tell tales of how the little girl in the pink floral coat, who could look sweet and lovely was actually really mischievous and loved to be silly, like....

...wearing my Mother's huge bras over my own clothes and stuffing the biggest grapefruits inside to pad them out and to be followed by doing a catwalk out into the front street when a bus was passing (with my older sister watching and laughing at the passengers expressions of shock from the safety of behind the window). If buttons could talk, what stories they might tell - think I will do a story and series of photographs about buttons as I now have a whole collection of them! Talking of memories, that is what photographs, (like buttons) can also do, bring back memories.

So as I am now taking a trip down memory lane, here are two that are also very special to me which to me represent Motherhood at it's best, the one above was taken on a Polaroid and is the very first photograph taken of Dexter.  My Mum was literally at my bedside as soon as he was born and she was the proudest Mother in all the Universe at this very moment when she saw her baby become a Mummy too.  The one below, her feeding Dexter with my breast milk from a bottle - I wasn't daft, expressing meant that so long as I never fed Dexter from a bottle, he would let anyone feed him, including Anders during night feeds (ha, ha, ha!).

So as I have now cleared out the house that both my Mother and my Stepfather last lived in gave me a chance to share with Dexter and Anders some of my childhood memories from little things that I had forgotten even though this was not the house I grew up in.  That said, as a result of going down memory lane, I took Dexter to the Guesthouse which my Mother owned (a pretty big Victorian house which is still a Guesthouse and run by the people who my Mother sold it to).  As a result I got to tell Dexter about the things his Mother got up to there which was also fun some of which I have told you in this post.

That is another reason I love cameras, and I found a new old lens from the 1930's to play about with on my Olympus Pen, and two other cameras (only photographed the Voigtlander which is a TLR which I am looking forward to playing with) on route to clearing out the house of the things I would like to keep because they bring back happy thoughts :-)