Faithful friends who are dear to us…

Scarlett was desperate to do her glass painting kit today so once I’d drunk copious amounts of tea, done three loads of washing and spent about 20 minutes hanging it all out (and I might as well have done a bloody rain dance because despite it looking all clear and bright and blue skied it was raining within the bloody hour :roll:) and got everyone dressed we did indeed break out the glass painting kit. It’s one that has a gold pen to draw outlines and then fill in the spaces with the (very thin and runny) glass paint. I did try and explain about planning out and having an idea but the lure of splodging gold paint onto glass was too strong so she did several circles before asking me to pull off the underwater design for her so she could do the filling in bit later :lol:. Davies had got out the lego so she played with that with him and they did some dancing round like crazy folk to the music on her MP3 player.

I’d been reading Pioneer Woman’s blog which in turn was linking to her Pioneer Woman Cooks blog and seen some cool Christmas cookies. We’re putting our tree up tomorrow and we usually have mostly edible decorations (you know like chicken drumsticks, strings of sausages, cubed steak seasoned with pepper and edible glitter, that sort of thing) and I usually do the stained glass window style cookies. I thought something with the whole more is more ethos of decoration might be fun though so I decided to give them a go. I have strayed from my own tried and tested perfect cookie dough recipe before with universally dreadful results so I stuck with that and just went with the egg yolk and food colouring wash on them before baking. Her’s looked great, it’s a novel idea and over and above anything else festive, worthy or culinary the chance to paint food really appealed to me 😆 Baking and art – almost worth bolding! 😉

Scarlett came out to help me make cookie dough and then having checked Ali’s ETA and ascertained we had time to get there we put the cookie dough in the fridge and dashed off to the butchers. He was in the middle of another big meat order so I left my list with him and we came home again. Ali and Freya arrived not long after we got back so the children played while I did my cutting out and painting. They had a game of snakes and ladders which despite Davies’ rather unorthodox ‘speical’ way of rolling the dice which seemed surprisingly lucky for him in getting the exact number he needed 😉 seemed to go very smoothly and be much enjoyed. We all ate, there was some hoohah (to borrow a term from Ali) in Tarly’s room with getting things down from high shelves which were on high shelves for a good reason and then I agreed to some X boxing. That kept Davies and Freya very happily occupied for the duration and as Ali and I popped into the kitchen to ‘escape’ and to finish my cookies Scarlett joined us for a while before going back off to do some drawing. There was some voice changer fun (Scarlett does an excellent dalek impression ‘The Doctor must die, exterminate, Daleks are supreme!’) and then Ady arrived home in time for me to run Ali and Freya back over to Lewes for F’s Little Ninjas session – and enjoy half an hours peace in the car on the way home again ;). I popped in to collect the meat from the butchers on the way home and am currently in the kitchen putting chicken to good use with a good old Friday night curry.

Back to work for me tomorrow after two full day shifts off (last Friday and yesterday) and I’m rather looking forward to it. It’s not always easy and I don’t always love every second of it while I’m there but it was a year ago today that I started there and I really miss it when I’m not there, which given jobs I’ve had in the past is a very rare feeling I think I might be onto a bit of a winner really. 🙂