This is me - This is my future

My lovely twitter friend Maggie over at Red Ted Art is involved in a really great thing.  In addition, because she's so lovely she's getting her friends involved too.

You see, Save the Children have launched this to support their "No Child Born to Die" campaign.

In January Save the Children launched it’s most ambitious campaign to date, No Child Born to Die. Every year 8 million children under five die from illnesses we know how to treat or prevent, such as diarrhoea and pneumonia.

Save The Children is focusing on the provision of vaccinations and healthcare workers. In June there is a meeting in London hosted by David Cameron and attended by other world leaders. Save The Children aims to make as much noise as possible to ensure the funding shortfall for vaccinations (4.7 billion) is met by all the donor countries.

If this funding gap is met the vaccines that could then be provided would save the lives of millions of children.

This week 3 bloggers/ vloggers are going to Mozambique to follow the journey of a vaccine from the coldstore in the city right down to a rural community. They will write, make films and tweet about their experiences, the children and families they meet and the challenges of “cold” vaccinations in hot countries.

This bloggy crafty challenge is designed to support their work – to spread the word about their No Child Born to Die campaign and to highlight the funding shortfall for vaccines.

We tend to take for granted how lucky we are that our children have a future to look forward to.  With access to medical services, along with education, plentiful food and safe water our children will flourish and already dream of what they want to be when they're grown up.

Maggy's challenge therefore is:

1. Get your child to either draw or craft a self portrait of themselves now or in the future. Check out our self portrait on some tips to get the littlies interested! even a simple circle with dots and lines is sufficient for us!!!

2. Sign the Save the Children petition and then pass it onto your friends

3. Write a blog post about it as soon as possible, including info about Save the Children and the petition. We want as many people linked up AND signed up the petition by Sunday 29th May 2011

4. Tag 8 fellow blogger friends

5. Come back and link up your posts, so we can all share your craftiness

6. If you have time, visit each other posts and say hello!

So this has resulted in a really interesting chat with Ruby.  She's been quite certain for some time about where her future career lies.  Sounds to me like she's going to be a busy lady, because she'll have not one, not two but three roles.

First up, her biggest passion is with trains and has been for ages - well a long time for a 3 year old!  She is quite clear she wants to be a train mechanic and fix engines.  This is her enduring career of choice, but since our dog got poorly and we visited the vet's, she quite fancies a go at that too.  She wants to be a 'vet doctor' so she can make all the animals better, and use a stethoscope.  In addition to this, she added this morning that she'd also like to be an astronaut and fly to the moon.

I did ask her if she's have time to visit her poor old mum with all this going on, but she looked at me like I was crazy and said "but Mummy, I'll be a grown up!"

I love the fact that she hasn't conformed to gender-stereotypes

So, how to combine a crafty piece of art to encompass all this?  We decided to go for a collage, and trawled the net for pictures of aforementioned roles.  This gave Ruby a chance to practice her cutting (I guess she might need this in the animal medicine field).  She added some tin foil stars and a crayoned train picture to finish the masterpiece!

What do you think?  I'm keeping hold of this so we can compare notes in 30 years time.

Quick - get that girl an anorak

Pigs in space?

So, here's the tricky bit. I've done the craft, signed the petition, now I have to #passiton.

I'm tagging these lovelies:

@mummiafelice White Lily Green
@superluckydi Super Lucky
@helloitsgemma Hello its Gemma
@caroljs Dance without sleep
@multiplemummy Multiple Mummy
@maris_world Maris World
@cafebebe Cafe Bebe
@PippaD A Mother's Ramblings

Please don't run away! It's for a very good cause :0)

When you're done, link up here and take a look at who else has been getting involved.