The rest of the day…

Mainly cos I need to use up some of the words of the day which have been backing up as emails in my inbox 🙂

So we had our lunch (sausage rolls and mini chocolate eclairs – healthy or what?!) and then the children wanted to watch a home video from 2004 just before and just after we moved home so that was nostalgic for us and entertaining for them. As always when watching stuff like that we speculate on how amazing it would be to have that sort of footage of us as children. Last weekend we were looking at baby and early childhood pictures of me and Frazer round at my parents and even the ones taken when I was about 2 I can clearly recall, mainly because I have looked at them so many times over the years and heard my parents recount the story of them being taken so that instant has stayed in my mind and the memory is triggered when looking at the photos. My earliest memory is of being at Frazer’s christening so I would have been nearly 3 and I remember sitting with my Dad and being very bored by the whole thing, not to mention fed up about it all being about my boring baby brother too! Wonder what my two’s earliest memories will be when they are grown ups?

The children got bored of that so we played KerPlunk for a while and then I decided to bake some bread. Ady was going to dig out the breadmaker for me (there is not enough worktop space to have more than one kitchen appliance out at a time and we currently have the toasted sandwich maker using the space so the breadmaker had gone to the under stairs cupboard where all resting appliances go to recharge their batteries and wistfully recall their heyday when they were new, or indeed the good old days when we lived in Manchester with a large kitchen and all of the appliances saw sunshine every day! But I had a sudden fit of muffinicity and decided to bake it from scratch and take Davies with me to show him how it’s done. With guidance and my expert tutelage (first one in there!) we made a loaf and 8 rolls for the princely sum of about 40 pence worth of ingredients by following the recipe on the side of the flour packet. I’d love to think that we could keep that up – we are paying 40 pence a loaf for horrid value white sliced and that involved trekking to the supermarket more or less daily, whereas for the same money we can have fresh baked, yummy bread and rolls, the house will smell divine, it will have educational value (maths in the weighing of ingredients, PE in the kneading, Science in the whole rising and cooking process and is undoubtedly healthier) but I think I know myself too well and the evidence is irrefragable that I am an unlikely freshly baked bread every day kinda gal! (strike 2) The rolls were lovely and we ate half fresh from the oven, the bread has not risen as well as it could, which Ady tells me is down to the kneading – which if nothing else gives me renewed enthusiasm for kneading tomorrow 😉

It’s been a really nice day actually, Ady got to do his tidying, I got to laze around a lot and drink tea and eat all the chocolate mints Ady had brought home having collected them from his pillow at the hotel each morning, the children have stayed in pjs all day and just got changed into new ones and it’s been lovely to just be the four of us. I’ve got roast lamb and various vegetables in the oven roasting, we put the carrot and parsnip tops I chopped off in a dish of water to see if they’ll sprout (I am *so* HE today!) and COOT is on shortly – we missed it last week 🙁 And I am sure I hear the susurration of the siren call of the white wine whispering my name. (Three and I’m out!)