Whizz bang pop!

Today was baking day in preparation for NicCamps. I had a plan to make parkin to take too (double portions infact, one for tonight and one for NicCamps) but I couldn’t find my loaf tin and then got bored looking for it so gave up. I did make a couple of trays of flapjacks, rice crispie cakes, chocolate chip rock cakes, snickerdoodles and some cheese scones. Ady and Davies played with the brio, looked up some clips of things on youtube and then went to Tescos to get fireworks. Scarlett helped me with the baking.

Predicatably Scarlett woke this morning as though she had never been ill at all and has had a busy and full day with no signs of the feverish child sitting up on the sofa til gone 11pm last night. So that’s that then, Davies has already had it and I seem to have some sort of immunity to illnesses caught from my own children so I guess we’re safe (ha! famous last words!).

Scarlett was, as usual not just good company while baking but actually quite helpful. We listeded to music so did some kitchen dancing as we baked and plenty of singing into our wooden spoons – how nice to still have a young enough child to not be embarrassed by her mother just yet ;). She did lots of weighing and measuring and out loud but working out in her head maths including stuff like ‘you wanted five, that’s three so I need two more’ mumbled mostly to herself. We then worked out together that if we wanted to double a recipe of 8oz flour and I accidentally put 9oz in the first time we’d need to do one less than 8 next time to make up for the one more than 8 that time and therefore needed 7oz. I overheard Davies later tonight dealing out glowsticks between four children and casting just a glance at them before deciding everyone got two each and when someone asked for three saying ‘no there aren’t enough for three each – just two each and two left over’. 🙂

The bakefest took about four hours with various clearing up inbetween, Scarlett did some washing up (I rewashed it again afterwards, she’s good but can’t have the water hot enough to clear flapjack saucepans effectively), then I prepared potatoe gratin and slow cooker chicken to be put on ready for our dinner later tonight and had time for a sit down with a cup of tea before we were needing to leave for Chris and Julie’s.

We called into the farm supplies store on the way and got more layers pellets for the bantams, passed by the legs rings on the basis that they are too feather-legged to wear them, ogled the coops for ideas – I’m planning a supercoop build in the spring – and then got to Chris and Julie’s. They’d requested balloons on the basis it was a ‘fireworks party’ and ‘you can’t have a party without balloons’ according to Jack – gotta love that 5 year olds logic 🙂 so Chris and I blew up loads of balloons while Julie made apple cake and Ady went out to get some milk cos they’d run out. The children played while we all sat and chatted and then I made some jam tarts (scoffing at having to use readymade pastry although the jam was homemade) and some spiced fruit juice and Julie tidied the kitchen. It got dark around 5ish so Chris and Ady cooked up some sausages and burgers outside which we brought indoors to eat and then all headed back out again for fireworks. Maisie isn’t a big lover of noisy ones so they’d got some fairly tame garden ones and we had sparklers. I did a health and safety chat about the sparklers which had Maisie in tears and both my two insisting on using Chris’ bamboo cane sparkler holders once Jack and Maisie had finished with them. To be honest I thought these were more dangerous than simply stating ‘this end is hot, if you touch it it will burn your hand’ which was all my chat consisted of as when waved around the sparkler was prone to fly out and let’s face it what are sparklers for if not waving around? I think my patience with everyone and everything sort of wore out around then and my good spirits didn’t really return until after we got home and the children had gone to bed. I can’t bear unwarranted hysteria :rolls:.

Anyway…

We went back in for apple cake and jam tarts before coming home when all the children showed signs of needing to be in bed and not in polite company anymore. We drove home firework spotting and promising more big and noisy fireworks tomorrow night. Davies and Scarlett went off to bed and were both asleep very early, we had baths and dinner and now I’m thinking I should probably head off to bed too in honour of not expecting to be in bed at any sort of early hour any time for the coming week. 🙂