Expected event always occur when you least expect them to! You would think that 9 months would be enough notice that your wife is going to give birth to a baby, but when your child arrives two weeks early, it is still a shock! I am very please to say that there is a new arrival in the Booth household. Bailey Nicholas arrived on 23rd June.

Having attended a meeting of the WINGS Steering Group on Thursday 21st, I was anticipating a weekend of WINGS related activities, but is was not to be. Five weeks on, I am still not sure how you combine fatherhood, WINGS and full time work, but as I write this, I am sat in the dining room with a baby on one side, a pile of washing and my laptop, frantically typing whilst he is asleep!

Since my last blog the Joint Agreement between Berkshire Guides and Scouts has been finalised, the Delivery Team have started developing the outline plans for activities and facilities that will be available for participants and staff. These plans will help us to prepare our budget and set the fees. My aim is to have some programme information and the fee available by October so that we can share it with interested units and potential staff.

The Participant Experience and Staff teams are working hard with the data experts to establish an initial registration system to capture your interest in attending WINGS. This will be available by October also.
All of this will be launched on our new website by October and with luck some of it will appear earlier.

I have also been picking up followers on Twitter, which is excellent, except I am a bit behind on how exactly I am supposed to use Twitter!! I think I need to get some lessons from the Marketing and Communications team. Perhaps I can ask my son to help me!

We are now 2 years away from the start of WINGS 2014, and by now we would be almost completing the build of the site. I know I speak for the whole team when I say that it is really starting to become real for us. And that whilst we are on track against our project plan, time does seem to be speeding up.

Until next time, have a great time now that we finally have some sunshine. For those on summer holidays get outside as much as you can, but also try and see some of the Olympics. It is a very rare event to host the games and we should all be very proud.

All the best,

Brendan