Life, Love & Literature

When the best thing that hap­pens in your week is deliv­ery of a heated airer it is not a good week and one best skipped over.

On the other hand, those dri­ers have mas­sive queues (6000 peo­ple wait­ing for deliv­ery when I rang a few weeks ago to enquire where it was) and I am sick of wear­ing slightly damp, smelly clothes so maybe I am not absurd to be excited by it.  Although get­ting excited over a clothes horse — even a fancy elec­tric one, makes me feel incred­i­bly sad and mid­dle aged.

But doesn’t change the fact last week is best forgotten.

This one, for­tu­nately, is better.

We’ll still ‘work­ing’ but in a very relaxed way.  Jack is in charge of mak­ing sure every­thing on the timetable for this block is fin­ished before the end of the week and Sam is just pick­ing what work­books to do, a few pages of a morn­ing to keep things ticking.

And not for­get­ting we’re mak­ing lovely lit­tle card vil­lages with our colour­ings from the Activ­ity Vil­lage Advent cal­en­dar.

Mon­day morn­ing was spent work­ing and tidy­ing, before Lisa and Har­vey popped around for the afternoon.

Tues­day was the last Cubs before Christ­mas so we spent a lot of the day shop­ping for and mak­ing gifts for the lead­ers (and lots spare for us)

I will admit to being a bit lazy and not spread­ing the bis­cuits between 2 trays so they spread to one giant bis­cuit (these are ours — lead­ers got some that held their shape). They are cin­na­mon bread, although recipe there is off.  Not sure why as it is mine but… should have 150g of sugar in (I used caster this time as it came out of cup­board first, have used soft brown in the past), 125g but­ter and 4tbsp golden syrup.  And I used mixed spice instead of gin­ger but that was a feel like a change thing.

We started off try­ing to paint the details in a choco­late mould with dif­fer­ent colour choco­late to make pretty choco­lates, soon gave up and made choco­late mice (melted Dairy Milk and a dash of orange essence) which were much sim­pler.  Left over choco­late got tipped into lolly moulds.

Each leader got a mouse and some bis­cuits in a cel­laphane bag tied with Christ­mas ribbon.

And of course cards.  Which we car­ried on with today and they fin­ished everyone’s. I sim­ply sup­plied a load of pre­folded cards, some stamps and inkpads, sparkly pens, Tatty Ted die cuts and scrap paper and left them to it.  I just have to do my bit of writ­ing and address­ing them.

Cubs is only about 8 mins walk away but 4 mins into the walk there was a tremen­dous hail storm.  Really hurt and we were soaked through.  So Sam and I man­aged a hot bath (and left Pete to get Jack) and there was hot choco­late and bis­cuits before bed.

Today has all been about tidy­ing up and get­ting ready to put up the dec­o­ra­tions.  Well the ones in their rooms, not ready for down­stairs yet.  A week before Christ­mas is plenty.  Unfor­tu­nately Sam started to get unwell as the day wore on.  His asthma has been bad for a lit­tle while but seems to be get­ting a cough/infection to go with it.  I came in from hoover­ing the stairs though to find that Jack was doing a good job of look­ing after him though.

Jack does delib­er­ately wind Sam up a lot, but he is a very good big brother really

So dec­o­ra­tions never made it up as Sam fell asleep while I was doing the final tidy­ing up.  Jack and I spent a pleas­ant evening though, we played table foot­ball and Strat­ego and he had a go at some of the tunes from his new book.

He’re hop­ing Sam is on the mend tomor­row and we can pot­ter on with of Christ­mas preparations.