Almost daily diary!

Friday, October 14, 2016

Here we are

It's 4ish months since we all moved in here. At first it felt like a holiday home as all the teens had finished GCSEs and we all hung about the house happily together. Now the school and college year has begun we have slipped into a pleasant routine but it seems more hectic than ever!

So I'm sitting here tonight, thanking my lucky stars. We had Big Als mates around for dinner last weekend and they commented on how all the teens seem to get on well together, and they do. How did that happen? We are truly blessed.

And the new house? Well, it's just perfect. I am starting to see it as a creative house; Tall Girl has picked up on her drawing again, as well as baking, Josie is baking, I am baking, we are all baking - well, maybe not all. And Small Sprog I hear you ask? He's taken to brewing Mead! Well, why wouldn't he?!

Sunday, October 09, 2016

Lost in translation

It's nearly the weekend and Tall Girl has 'volunteered', or perhaps been press-ganged, into making chocolate and ginger mouse for the Dinner Party on Saturday evening. "Have we got all the ingredients?" I ask. She checks. "We just need Ginger Nuts" she replies.
"OK" I say "I'll just catch Big Al before he goes into town and I'll put them on his list".

Big Al is fiddling about with the recycling outside, he struggles with recycling. His inherent nature is to send it all to landfall, but we are addressing that instinct gradually. I catch him before he heads out and scribble on his shopping list.

Meanwhile my Mother is 'having coffee' on my sofa, she is regaling her taxing day and is currently in overdrive relating the story about being trapped in her trousers in the bathroom at home, when she needed a wee! There was a happy ending but a warning for the future issues which may occur in public toilets with an eye on buying elasticated versions in the future.

While all this going on my phone rings, it's Big Al "About the Ginger nuts?" he asks, I immediately put the phone back down, thinking he is being lewd, knowing my mother is in the room. I tut inwardly.

Sometime later he returns home.

"How did it go?" I asked
"Terrible!" He replied "I got to the supermarket" he regaled "and thought - peanuts, walnuts, brazil nuts, and then I looked for 'ginger' nuts but couldn't find them anywhere, so I found an assistant and asked her if she knew if they had any ginger nuts - she was Polish so we both had English as a second language" - Big Al is Scottish and tends to shout when he can't be understood, in a very British way - "so the conversation didn't really flow and there didn't seem to be any nuts anywhere that were ginger so we had to involve a third party" he continued seriously "who seemed to know what I was talking about and ... lead me to the biscuit aisle" by this time I was laughing so much I was crying and mum almost wet herself (again!) "You never told me they were biscuits!" he complained.