Signs of spring

You can keep your cherry blossom. Yours is lovely - and yours - but still.

For me, the most glorious sign of Spring is the huge space in my bathroom where the clothes airer has been standing since Autumn.

Hello, old friend.

The power of the pan

Did I forget to blog? I did, didn't I? It's just there's been so much going on, what with buying another new pan, and picking up a second-hand cookbook in Oxfam, and doing the child's physiotherapy and having a man with a chainsaw come and lop lumps off the garden.

Hmm. Doesn't seem that much, when you think about it.

You know as a blogger when you wander round composing blog posts in your head? And then you forget to do it for a bit? That's been me.

Still. I can always rely on a good new pan to get me out of a funk.

Let's do lunch

Sue at The Quince Tree posted recently about how she used her freezer. You know when you've reached a certain age when you are fascinated about what other people put in their freezers. When Delia Smith suggested putting fresh ginger in there, I swear, my life completely changed.

My freezer, mostly, looks like this.

You know those chore charts you see drawn up for children? "How your children can help you round the house?" I'd challenge you to find one which suggested chores for children who can't walk unaided or make themselves a sandwich. One of the challenges in bringing up a physically disabled child is trying to encourage an age-appropriate amount of responsibility in a child who needs help with most daily tasks. Other 11-year-olds might make up their own lunchboxes - my solution is to pre-freeze sandwiches, yogurts and bite-sized bits of cake so at least she can easily pack her own box. Also, at 8am, it's just quicker.

(When I was at University I shared a house with a girl who liked to spend her evenings avoiding coursework with 'time-saving' activities such as freezing a whole terms-worth of sandwiches. She is a very glamorous woman now, who would probably not like to be reminded about this - but there is perhaps one reader of this blog who remembers her, and who remembers me complaining about how I found myself stuck, late at night, with a solidly frozen ham sandwich on a broken-down train to visit my boyfriend in Cambridge.  (My children assure me that the sandwiches do manage to defrost by lunchtime.))

My only twinge of guilt about this sandwich and cake freezing is the excess of packaging: but let me tell you yet another traumatic story from my childhood and you might forgive me. My grandmother packed my lunches when I was a child, and taste was not top of her agenda. I have a horribly vivid memory of one particular lunch - potted meat and pickle sandwiches with a handful of Maltesers tossed into the box. Potted meat is bad enough, but anyone who has opened their lunch to find it full of Maltesers coated liberally with Branston pickle will take extra care to ensure that nothing similar ever happens again.

Also, I cut the crusts off my children's frozen sandwiches. I shall just sit here now and wait for you to gasp and mutter about how wasteful and mollycoddling I am. My children don't eat crusts, and to be honest at their age neither did I. Give them a sandwich with crusts on, and they will nibble away at an area iin the centre of the sandwiches, measuring roughly 1cm square, and then throw away the rest. Cutting off a sliver of crust means they actually ingest some food.

See all those little foil packages? They're cake, they are. Come back another day, and I'll tell you all about them. The twin excitements of cake and freezers will surely have you on the edge of your seats.

The Forest

 Last week, Eldest and I jumped at the opportunity to review The Forest, a contemporary dance piece for children and adults by Fevered Sleep.

There are lots of family theatre shows around that are aimed at children. Quite often they have people dressed up in bright costumes, doing comedy smiling. There are few that I have seen that manage to capture the experience of being a child: of exploring, of playing, and of being amazed.

The Forest takes place in a hazily-lit, golden-floored forest, with trees stretching up into infinity with the help of some cleverly-placed mirrors. Mist hangs around it; lights hang in droplets from around the trees. Three performers run into the space, and begin to play: to tangle themselves up in red elastic, slide themselves with enthusiastic shoves from tree to tree, and watch as amazing new things - pine cones and conkers and leaves - fall from the sky.

All kinds of things can happen in the forest. You can lose your friends - in an attempt to find them, one performer climbs another believing he is a tree, and stands on top of him, calling his name. You can fall asleep and turn into a grumpy bear. You can turn into a falling leaf, tossed by the wind.

It was a gorgeous production - dream-like and full of wonder. And the playing was real - each new performance, we discovered later, was ever so slightly different: the performers continued to experiment and explore even after dozens of shows.  Though the show was aimed at the over fives (Littlest was lucky enough to go with her school class), it's entirely fair to say that both Eldest and I got completely lost in the performance. As the lights went down towards evening, and the dancers sat and gathered around a single amber light which floated around them like a firefly, we wanted nothing more than to light a campfire and bed down for the night.

There's still chance to catch this show if you happen to live in the right places - details of the tour are here.

The Wise Teachings of the Littlest Latte - an occasional series

Lesson 3

Littlest teaches us about being careful what we wish for. 

"Mummy, I've been worrying about something."

"What's that, sweetie?"

"You know my special box that the fairies left, for me to keep my wishes in?"

"Yes?"

"Well... I accidentally wished I was a blueberry."