Ruth

A place close to or in nature, with the space to watch our beautiful family grow up. We're a family of four humans and two pets — two parents, two children, and two cats. I'm grateful every day for these humans I get to live with.

- Off road parking - Not too close to a busy road - A garden, preferably with trees - 2 decent sized bedrooms and a space for a home office - A log burner - A place that has a strong sense of community - Pram accessible

Everyone waking up slowly, time spent snuggled together — perhaps someone watches cartoons, followed by relaxing music as we make a delicious breakfast together and chat. Then a walk in nature to a stream where we paddle and look for treasure. An absolute ideal would be a country path leading from our house so our cats could join us too and our children could wander free. What a dream!

I sing in a threshold choir, and I'm very curious about training to be a doula for births and deaths. I love taking my time with creative endeavours — right now that looks like visible mending and a "stitch a day practice" on a big embroidery hoop. My husband wishes he could run more, and makes absolutely beautiful videos. He loves quiet time to play video games, and we used to play board games before we had our two children — we cannot wait for family board game days. We absolutely love nature and bird watching. My daughters LOVE animals — our cats, and my eldest would watch chickens all day if she could. We go to Longleat as a family often.

I'm an artist and mama, and I work for a local charity as a governance administrator. My husband is a video producer for an international company based in Bath.

We were on holiday this May during one of the first heatwaves of the year, and we'd headed to the beach in Eastbourne. My eldest daughter, who is two, and my husband were queuing up for ice creams — a queue that felt like it took quite a long time. I had my youngest daughter on my lap and was sat just off the path on the pebbles, because we had our big double buggy with us and couldn't venture very far onto the beach. When my husband and daughter finally made it back to us, he was doing an impressive job of juggling three melting ice creams while helping our toddler navigate the pebbles. As he reached out to pass me my ice cream, the scoop took a tumble and roly-polied onto the floor. "Oh no!" he exclaimed, already turning to head back to the queue. "I'm going to have to go and get another one." "Nooooooooo!" I said, and in what felt like slow motion, I transferred our youngest daughter into his arms. "It'll be fine." I scooped the ice cream up off the ground, quickly grabbed my water bottle, and poured a bit over it to rinse off the worst of the gravel. I popped it back onto the cone, and honestly, it was perfectly fine — I only found one tiny stone. It made me realise that since having children, I just don't sweat the small stuff so much. Before, losing an ice cream would have really bothered me, and I probably would have insisted on queuing up all over again... actually, who am I kidding, I would have made my husband queue up all over again. But in that moment, I just cared about saving the treat and our time together as a family. I had to chuckle to myself imagining what it must have looked like to onlookers, seeing me basically ditch my baby to rescue a melting scoop. It made for a lovely, funny memory — I've even immortalised it in my stitch-a-day practice, with a little embroidery of an ice cream falling off its cone.