One word? When seven would do…

I decided this morning that we really should see my parents. Aside from the odd afternoons childcare over the last few weeks I don’t think we’ve seen them at all for ages so keen not to perpetuate their opinion of me as all take and no give (still can’t quite work that out even if it were true really, I don’t think I’ll ever begrudge Davies and Scarlett ‘taking’ from me) I thought we’d try and spend some time with them with no ‘agenda’. So I rang and invited us over for lunch and offered to bring whatever was required. My Mum is a bit crap at coming out and asking for stuff (I don’t get that really, if you want something, ask for it, don’t beat around the bush) but mumbled about cakes and how she’d like to start making them because shop bought ones are so crap but she didn’t have the time, or the recipe, or the ingredients. This made me laugh most because I don’t recall my Mum making a cake since about 1982 and the family joke is that her idea of cooking is ‘pierce film lid and place on middle shelf of oven’, but also because of it’s very thinly veiled disguise as a request that I bake something to bring over.

We’d planned on starting the Operation Playroom Sort Out Project today but having looked round it without really knowing quite where to start and then going up to B&Q to get some shelving units but drawing a blank as to just what to get and then coming home and deciding we’d go to Ikea tomorrow instead we decided not to do anything to it after all and ended up sitting on the floor in there discussing where we’d like to live instead and whether Ady should start job hunting or not while the children brought us in ‘post’ of pictures of dinosaurs and kept interupting one of the most key and potentially life changing discussions we’ve had in ages 😆 – was all a bit surreal really. We came to no real conclusions and then I went off to make profiteroles.

We headed over to my parents and had a very pleasant few hours with them. Davies talked to my dad a bit about war but I always feel like a very bad matchmaker between two reluctant singles trying to get them to start a conversation really. I remember listening to my Dad talk for hours as a child about all sorts of things and I wish he would open up to Davies like that as I think they’d both get so much out of it. Davies would get a different adult ‘teaching’ him stuff, Dad would get an appreciative audience and to pass on some of his stories and memories on to yet another generation and they would both benefit from building a proper relationship with each other. Dad seems far more comfortably with Scarlett, which I now recall being very obviously the case with me and Frazer when we were little and actually he is probably more at home in the company of women rather than men generally – he seems to project this odd macho expectation onto boys and men which certainly Frazer, Ady and Davies don’t really live up to and then he starts to struggle. Odd creatures, people, aren’t they? 🙂 So I did some stage managing for a while until I got bored of it and stopped bothering and they sort of drifted out of their chat after that :(. My Mum is equally bad actually, she either patronises and babies the children or she places way too high an expectation on them behaviour-wise. This isn’t really a criticism of my parents specifically, more an observation at how bad adults are generally at interacting with children. How they struggle to ‘make’ conversation, know how to pitch their tone without being patronising or standoffish. I too am guilty of this often but am at least conscious of it and manage to overcome it with children I see regularly and know well.

The children went off to play while the adults chatted but they are in that stage of recovering from being ill where they still feel rough enough to be whiny and a bit sensitive but well enough to be boisterous and want to play. So I feel like I’ve done a fair bit of refereeing today. We brought them home around 4pm ish when their pitch started to raise above what we could comfortably talk over :lol:. I’d managed to confuse myself with the hour thing and had thought a 6pm dinner would be fine as it was still feel like 5pm to the children when of course what it would actually feel like is 7pm. They held out well though – thanks to a late lunch. After listening to way too many arguments while they tried to play together with the toy animals I set Tarly up on starfall while Davies played x box and I emptied and dismantled one of the big units in the playroom, desperate in the end to have achieved something in there this weekend. I’d earlier gone through the rail of dressing up clothes with the children and we’d weeded out around half as too small for them so that can all be ebayed now. I was quite gratified to notice how well played with most of the dressing up stuff is actually – it will all have to be very honestly listed on ebay as most of it shows plenty of signs of wear and tear, which tells me it’s paid for itself which is good. :).

I cooked roast beef, which Davies came into the kitchen and helped me serve up with Ady teaching him how to make gravy. He’d love to do tasks like make cups of tea but he is just too short to do it safely still. Scarlett has a (small) burn on her hand from taking something out of the oven earlier this week which my Dad commented unfavourable on (small children shouldn’t be using the oven etc.) I think my take on it is that if they want to do something aslong as it is not seriously neglectful for them to try or guaranteed to end in injury then I would let them, with supervision. Clearly Davies couldn’t take a whole tray of roasted joint of meat, vegetables and boiling fat out of the oven but as someone who was shooed out of the kitchen at that age when I was interested and never really ventured back in again I am really keen that anything they do want to try or show interest in is made as accessible to them as possible.

So we all had dinner together while watching a nature programme which took me right back to watching that sort of show on a Sunday evening while having roast dinner as a child, then the children gradually went off to bed (late by the clock tonight so even later by their body clocks still really), we had baths and then I returned to the kitchen to make some hallowe’en themed biscuits for MM Hallowe’en party tomorrow. This is the first time in several years we’re not doing much for Hallowe’en actually – last year we were at NicCamp and had a party, the year before we had our big party in the hall and the year before that we threw a smaller party at home with about 6 guests. This year we’ve only got MM tomorrow on our agenda. We’re supposed to be taking pumpkins to carve but as Tescos didn’t have any yesterday unless I can get a couple on the way there tomorrow we might have to pass on that. I tried to make some biscuits this morning while making the profiteroles, using a recipe that came with a tub of I can’t believe it’s not butter that also had two free cookie cutters. They came out very wrong – they spread hugely and morphed into a tray of cookie rather than individual shapes and had a cakey texture rather than a biscuitey one. This could be because I used butter instead of I can’t believe it’s not butter as I didn’t want to open the new tub as we still have some supermarket own brand I can’t believe it’s not I can’t believe it’s not butter already open so I didn’t want to open another tub, but I also have no idea whether I used the right flour. I’m very lax about flour, we use value brand and I never bother to check whether the recipe calls for plain or self raising which possibly accounts for my occasssional kitchen baking failures but I doubt I’ll bother anyway. So I had another bash with my own fail-safe cookie recipe and turned out some very respectable looking ghost and pumpkins shapes. I was pretty tired by decorating time though and they are not my finest specimans really – the mixing of red and yellow food colouring in the icing to get orange was a bit hit and miss and they have the look of embarrassed blushing pumpkins or even carved tomatoes as they are rather vibrant 😳 :lol:. Ah well, they’ll all taste fine.

Tomorrow is back to Beavers so I’m planning on a quite chat with the Beaver leader woman if possible – not making too much of it to Davies as I don’t want to build the whole refusing to go a couple of weeks ago thing up into more than it is and hopefully Ady will be home in time for me to leave Scarlett here with him so I can do it properly or even stay there with him tomorrow and monitor what goes on for myself.