Goodbye from Four Little Seymours!

Four Little Seymours.

Every time I type that it feels less and less relevant. The biggest one is coming up for twenty one, and the smallest one is headed for teenagerdom. As much as I don’t want to admit it, they are no longer little.

It is taking some adjustment, but I have to acknowledge that my kids’ needs are changing and I cannot control everything in the same way that I used to think I could. I am a bit of a control freak, and so this is a hard pill to swallow.

As for me, I remain in a constant flux between being joyful that they are more independent, and terrified that they are out in the big world, which is both wonderful and scary. All the grown-up activities like driving, new people, travel, work, adventure… they’re all  full of excitement and also of peril. Yes, it is the next phase of parenthood that I am most worried about!

With my Four Little Seymours all quite spread out age-wise, this is not new to me – but I have been hanging on. Hanging on to the notion that with Mini Seymour still quite young, I can just carry on as before; just do what I always did. But even she, as the youngest of four, is more sophisticated than she would be if she were a singleton (what a word!) and in this age of tech, there is no hiding the world from her.

It is a far cry from the days when we used to go shopping to Tesco on a Friday and choose a DVD to watch with pizza for an end of week treat. Now, they’ve seen all the films they want to already, and DVDs are a thing of the past. Back then, I remember often lying in bed thinking about the future and how hard I would find it when my kids were NOT under the same roof as me. I still dread this, but with Number One at university, it has eased me in gently, and there have only been a few nights when I have scoured my location apps at 4 am to try to make sure she is safely in bed. But oh Lord! What will I be like when they are all off in different directions..?

What I am trying to say is that I can lament the passing of time ’til the cows come home and add in more and more clichés to prove this point until I am blue in the face, but I have to accept – and embrace, even, that fact that children have to grow up, and IT IS A GOOD THING.  It is normal, and what’s supposed to happen, there is nothing else they should be doing and I just have to like it or lump it. Change is inevitable  and writing about it will become repetitive.

Which is why this blog must come to a close. I can no longer casually discuss my (or their) embarrassing anecdotes without risking upset. Toddlers are hilarious in ways that teenagers just are not  – namely in the way that they have a delicious lack of self-consciousness. And a toddler Mummy can do silly things without being mortifying. I simply can’t tell all of the stories I would like to tell and get away with it any more.  I can’t regale you with my antics as Mini Seymour’s Science teacher – (oh yes I am!), and how that goes down with her peers. I can’t tell you about Boy’s burgeoning business empire, or the fact that he has a burner phone for reasons unknown. (Er, put those facts together and I think I might have to investigate further!) I am not going to update you specifically on Number Two’s driving lessons, and how we got pulled over by the police in the early hours of last Friday morning. And I will only very briefly mention here that Number One is going to be in a Cameron Mackintosh-endorsed production of Les Misérables in Brighton in August at The Theatre Royal, no less. There are always stories to tell, but they are no longer mine. The Four Little Seymours own them.

So, I am going to sign off from this blog. It has been really wonderful, writing about our lives over the last ten years, and I am pleased I’ve stuck with it. Reading them back, the posts bring up loads of memories, and they have also given me a creative outlet. The blog was never going to go viral – it’s not got a wide reach, but it has enabled me to write in a way that I could manage, and therefore feel just slightly accomplished as a “writer”. Slightly.

Thank you to everyone who has read about our adventures! I will update you soon with my next project – I haven’t finalised the format yet, but the focus will be more on the renovations we’re doing at the current Funny Little Bungalow. I may need to embrace Instagram and find some kind of theme, but it is time for a change. An evolution, no less!

Here’s to the next phase!

Au revoir,

Big Seymour, Little Seymour Number One, Little Seymour Number Two, Boy Seymour, Mini Seymour and me. x