I’m tempted to do a soulemama “this moment“…

…but really this one has more of a story behind it. I just can’t let it lie.

I would love to pretend that we went for a back-to-nature stroll in the woods to spend some quality family time together, but here’s the background to this photo.

Where are the woods? They are the carefully preserved oasis of green in the car park around The Trafford Centre. We took a stroll through the nature reserve… up to the point where there were big wire fences and there was some “tree management” going on, on the other side. We’d just been shopping for a family member’s present (fruitless, I might add, but is now resolved), tried to persuade Joel to see Toy Story 3 (he thinks it will be too scary because of the version he’s seen in Joel-Land (inside his head)), watched the “ARM WARS” international arm wrestling competition going on in the food hall (there was a crazy Finn who appeared to scare his opponents into submission by ROARing in their faces (quite hard to not be in someone’s face when you’re arm wrestling them – especially when “IT’S A STRAP!!!”)), had lunch and quick play in the play centre (a less natural environment woul dbe hard to find), and were heading home having managed to not acquire More Stuff (not because Lily hadn’t tried, I should add).

But, it was a brief, green pause and A Bit Of A Find in one of the busiest places we could have been. As a waiter once said, it gave us some quiet moments of contemplation.