Rubbish.....Dreams are made of this.

My 'Rubbish' Christmas Eve was wonderful!

Let me begin by explaining that my 2 year old son has a obsession......Bin Lorries!

He LOVES them.

He gets up early on bin day to watch them. His little face lights up when they appear and he waves and shouts hello till they are out of sight.

He helps his Dad put the bins out so that HIS rubbish gets to go in the Bin Lorry.

Its no surprise then that when asked "what do yo want from Santa?", he answered "Bin Lorry".

This is where the story gets good.

The lovely lady manning the entrance the day we visited Santa in his grotto asked this very question, upon hearing his answer, she explained she worked for Serco who run the Bin Lorries in our area.
She offered to send an email to her boss to see if they could maybe send him a little something.....I didn't think anything would come of it, maybe a calender at most and would have been chuffed with this as would my son.

We got much much more.

We received an invitation from Sophia at the Oldbury depot to come down on Christmas Eve, we jumped at the chance. Just seeing all those bin lorries would make my son's year.

We arrived at the depot and i can honestly say we felt like celebrities. We were greeted with open arms. Sophia escorted us through to her office, introducing us along the way, everyone knew of the little boy who loved the lorries.

Sophia presented my son with a goodie bag packed with thoughtful little things including a picture one of the bin men had took of his lorry especially and laminated just for Niall. We were decked out in high vis gear.....how cute do my lovely boys look.

My own personal Bin Men

Then like VIP's, no walking in the rain for us, we were chauffeured to our waiting Bin Lorry.

Can you even imagine my son's excitement, he was in the driving seat of his dream vehicle, given free rein to bib the horn and was shown how the bins get tipped up at the back. HEAVEN.

He hates pictures so the fact that he is actually looking at sophias camera goes someway to showing how much this meant to him, he normally hides.

This may not sound like much to most people but to my son it was literally a dream come true! He is a very shy boy and couldn't really show how excited he was to the depot staff on the day but i can assure you, he hasn't stopped talking about it since. He was in a state of wonderment when we left.

What is so lovely about this story is that, it didn't need to happen. From the kind lady at the grotto, bothering to send an email, Sophia at the depot, getting special exemptions to allow us on the lorry and gathering the goodie bag together and even the bin man who was kind enough to give a little bit of his time to take and laminate a picture.

It highlights that there is still good and kind people out there who are willing to do something for no personal gain. Something i know i need reminding of occasionally when it feels like we live in such self centred times.


To all the people at Serco who made our visit possible, you really did make a little boys Christmas very special.


And look what Santa brought the next day............

Result? One very happy little boy.

not entirely sure why his eye looks weird on this but you get the idea
HAPPY!