We never had first days at school photos. I had vague notions to take first day of not going to school photos over the years but always lost track of when it would have been a first day.

We often used to go to Home Educators ‘not back to school’ events on the first day of autumn term / start of the school year when we would reclaim the parks, beaches, museums which suddenly felt quiet again during the day times, but there was never any real official marking of it because we why would you officially mark something you were not doing?

But a first official day at work feels very much worth marking and this week that is exactly what Scarlett had. Two days of induction and training, health and safety and risk assessments, payroll forms and uniform ordering and official changing of status from ‘home educated’ to ‘in employment’.

We dropped her off for her first day, took a ceremonial photograph and then I went for a swim and spent the whole time pondering about ends of eras and quite how my little baby was suddenly a grown woman with a job!

Here she is on her first day at work

And as only seems appropriate I’ll hand over to her to share what that has been like.

I’ve had my first two days at work doing induction and training. I’m working alongside someone else who has just started which is really good as we can learn together.

I also went along to a forest bathing / nature walk which the croft run at the weekend where we took a group of people on a guided walk around a local woodland.

Lots of the first two days have been about policies, paperwork, health and safety and necessary stuff like that but we’ve also been able to spend some time meeting the animals. There are goats, sheep, chickens, cows and a horse. I’ve been around chickens for as long as I can remember and we had sheep on Croft 3, but there are lambs at Darach croft which we never got to have on Rum.

There is going to be a fair bit of practical work like fencing and helping to put up a polytunnel along with getting the animals used to us. Particularly the goats as part of my role will be doing goat walking. The croft has a licence to walk the goats along certain paths so we have walked some of the route and done risk assessments for potential issues such as what we do if a dog is off a lead, or people / horses are walking towards us. Where would be suitable places to stop for rests for the people or the goats, checking locations which may have evergreen trees which are toxic for goats.

Mostly I am looking forward to getting started.