Even though I wasn’t at work today I left the alarm on. I spent an hour lying in bed listening to the Today Programme on Radio 4. When it shut off I got up and made coffee. Tracy was working on the ward today, so I was at home with Alexander and Lucy. Breakfast was pastries and doughnuts that Tracy brought home yesterday. So a pretty decadent start to two weeks of school holidays. Not that it felt hugely different.
Reading
Lucy and I both spent the morning reading. She finished a Dork Diaries book, I’m not sure of the exact title. I think it was Drama Queen.I finished off Polgara the Sorceress by David Eddings. It was the last of those books that I’d not read, and I chose it as a sort of comfort read. The first fantasy novel that I read and enjoyed was Queen of Sorcery by David Eddings, it was actually the second in the series, but I enjoyed it so much that I bought all ten books in that series, the later ones as they were released. So it was a little nostalgic, and also filling in some of the gaps in the story.
Food
I’ve already mentioned the pastries for breakfast. After lunch Lucy made some chocolate chip cookies. It was her choice of activity, and she chose the recipe from Nadiya’s Bake Me a Story. I let Lucy do as much as she could and mostly kept her company/supervised. She got all the ingredients out of the cupboard. She decided she didn’t want the hazelnuts in it, and that she could use margarine instead of unsalted butter. We had a short discussion about swapping the plain flour, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder for Self-raising flour. She didn’t quite believe me that it was okay. But she did the swap when it came to measuring out.I helped a bit with getting a couple of things that were up high, but she knew what she needed. I also chopped the bar of dark chocolate up for her, but only after she’d had a go and realised she didn’t quite have the strength for it. I also took the baked cookies out of the oven. Everything else she did herself, including halving the measures, weighing them, and cracking the eggs without getting any shell into the mixture. The only thing we didn’t do was the marshmallow filling, and that was only because we didn’t have any marshmallows.
After we’d done that I put a small ham in the oven to bake. I covered it in honey, brown sugar and powdered mustard. Then it went in the oven for a couple of hours. To accompany it I cooked some red cabbage with apple and also did some roasted potato slices. It was a pretty good dinner.
Gardening
When I got up this morning it had been raining and it looked pretty grey. So I didn’t think I’d get any more gardening done. That’s why we had a relaxed start and did some reading (except Alexander who was building things in Minecraft).Once we’d baked the cookies it was a nice afternoon. So Lucy and I went outside and did some things together in the garden. To start with we pulled up some grass and weeds growing over the paving under the washing line. There’s a lot of compost and container soil that’s been spilled there that we need to relocate to our raised beds at the back of the garden.
So the next step was to clear a couple of the raised beds (there are five in total). We need to do this because there are some seeds that we ought to plant about now that ought to go straight into the ground and not start off in pots. So we took some trowels, a rake, a spade and the pickaxe to the back of the garden. It took about an hour but we cleared one bed completely and started on the next. We had to be more careful in the second one because there are some strawberry plants we want to keep in it. We also found half a dozen carrots in the bed while we were pulling out weeds by hand.