Last year, when Ebony was just a tiny baby, I was looking for things we could do as a family. Your whole lift shifts when you become a parent, and you start looking for a new kind of entertainment. Instead of looking for cheap alcohol and loud music, I started to yearn for access to clean changing facilities.
We looked at the lineups to a few music festivals and tried to decide whether we would actually be brave enough to do that. In the end, we decided not. The idea of being stuck in a tent with a sleeping baby, next to a tent full of us three years ago, really didn’t appeal.
So then I started looking for family friendly festivals. Glastonbury would have been an obvious choice, but when you have a baby to look after, ticket sale dates pass by without you noticing.
During my research, I stumbled across Just So Festival. It’s basically a whole weekend of creative fun, outdoor play, arts and sensory activities. It sounded beyond perfect. Ebony was only a couple of months old when I discovered the festival, and she would have been around seven months old by the time it was on. I really wanted to go, but it was too far to go for the day and so we would have had to camp. And, despite taking my first camping trip at a mere six weeks old, we don’t actually own a tent. Or a working air bed. Or any of the necessary camping accessories. So, much as the idea of the festival appealed to my sleep deprived vomit encrusted self of 2012, I never actually got round to booking tickets.
This year, however, I am not missing out. After months of checking the website and trying to convince my husband that it sounds like the most perfect family outing ever, I have booked the tickets. It’s only a 30 minutes drive from my house this year which means we can go for the day. Now that Ebony is older, I would have loved to go for the full weekend, but we couldn’t really afford weekend tickets and a tent and all of the other things we would need, and so we’re just going for the day.
The festival looks amazing and I know Ebony is going to love it. If you’ve ever been to End of the Road Festival, the whole of this festival looks like that enchanted wood area. Ebony loves the outdoors and seeing new things, and Just So Festival seems to be full of unique and creative activities for her to try out. They have clay wheels where babies and toddlers can get stuck in with some clay, storytelling, pirate training and loads of different musical activities. They even devote an hour a day to bubbles - it sounds like toddler paradise.
I feel so relieved that I finally got sorted and booked the tickets. August 17 can’t come soon enough!
Disclaimer: This isn’t a sponsored post, I’m just really fricking excited about the festival.
Photo credit: Just So Festival
