Train travel with small children – fantastic in that they are not strapped into a seat, they can colour and draw as they have a table, can get up to go to the loo and there are interesting things to look at out of the window. Drawbacks? They are not strapped into their seats (!) and I have a horror of impinging on other people’s peace and quiet.

We travelled from Chester to London, arriving around lunchtime – dumped our bags at the hotel and made our way to the Natural History museum. Brilliant, but unfortunately the entire under-13 population of London had chosen the same day to visit so although we spent time in the fascinating geology section and saw the whales, some of the mammals and some ichthyosaurs, there was a huge queue for the dinosaurs. Of course, with hindsight and post-disney, a 45-minute wait is nothing and we should have just queued and looked on it as good practice and getting our eye in.

The next morning saw us trundling cases to board the Disney Express! (more…)

c.f. full term with Tamsin – not so much smaller, is it! (Is obviously not a mega-baby this time, is rather more to do with pies and the consumption thereof, and exercise, a dearth of.)

This picture is the reason I wanted to fix my blog. Though it has taken me so very long to do, and I have been hiating for so very long, that I don’t suppose anybody will see it who isn’t friend or family. Hey ho: I will pretend to myself and post it anyway by way of an announcement.

Maggie came home from school with this card that she had made for me, the day after we told her there was going to be another baby. If you can look carefully you can see, peeping out of my tummy (for that is me, the funky smily lady in the cool purple frock), and tiny, smiling, waving baby. Inside, the card reads “to my littl baibee I love you” and it is quite one of the sweetest things I have ever seen.

I am feeling very hibernatey (yes it is a word thank you very much) which is the perfect opportunity to start knitting a doll for Maggie’s birthday (or next Christmas if I don’t get along as quickly as I hope). It is nearly 20 years since I knitted anything – I am so old – but so far* it has been ok, despite requiring me to learn from a book a new method of casting on. I hope it will turn out like this one.

Apparently it was -11 degrees in Chester last night, and it certainly felt icy this morning, so I feel no guilt about staying in. I can hardly insist Tamsin digs in the sandpit. I have lentils boiling, flapjack baking, T asleep on the sofa. Also nothing for tea and dust you could write your name in, but I never claimed to be perfect.

*4 rows and counting.

(Sorry Karen, I know you are fed up of Christmas already – but people have Asked, so there.)

The recipe for these lovely Jewel Biscuits is taken almost un-fiddled-with from the lovely Scheherezade Goldsmith’s lovely Christmas book (subtitle: how to have a really lovely jolly eco Christmas; chapter 1: first acquire an enormous amount of money and several hundred acres of Herefordshire. Add staff to do the menial stuff while you footer about with felt and oranges, and find friends of the sort to appreciate a galvanised bucket of salt as a present.)

Ahem.

Cream 100g butter and 275g caster sugar. Add 1/2 tsp vanilla extract and 2 large eggs, then sift in 525g plain flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 2 tsp ground cinnamon and a pinch of salt. Mix it all up with a slosh of milk until it is nice and doughy, then wrap in clingfilm and rest in the fridge for 30 minutes or so (NB Sheherezade does not specify clingfilm as it is not very eco. Use whatever you like.)

Preheat the oven to 190C. Roll out the dough on a nice floury surface, to about 1/2 cm thick. Cut shapes – I did a Christmas tree, a star and a bell – and use a smaller cutter (or the lid of a  screw-cap wine bottle) to make holes. Fill the holes with crushed hardboiled sweets* (S says they should be organic; I used Foxes). You could sprinkle some caster sugar over now, for a glittery effect, but I found I preferred a snowy dusting of icing sugar once they were cooled. Don’t forget to make a hole if you want to hang them – and you really do, else you can’t appreciate the stained-glass centres. Put in the oven on baking sheets covered in baking parchment, about 10 minutes: move the entire bit of parchment onto the cooling rack and leave until completely cold. Icing sugar; ribbon (cellophane bag for school fete).

Oh, and the book says this makes 12 cookies…mine were reasonably large (palm-sized trees and stars; slightly smaller bells), certainly as big as you would want, and I got about 30, plus another 15 toddler-sized plain stars when I ran out of sweets.

*My entire kitchen is covered in minute shards of hardboiled sweet. Ignore at your peril Sheherezade’s top tip of putting them in a (clean, recycled) plastic bag before bashing with a rolling pin: the individual plastic wrappers Do Not Do. Or, as I found rather late in the process, if you get your hole the right sort of size – say the size of the wine-bottle top – you don’t have to crush at all, just bung an intact sweety in. They melt just the same.

Maggie is a very lovely big sister and came home from school yesterday with a card she had made for Tamsin. Unfortunately she also brought a Lurgy, so all birthday activities have been called off in favour of sitting for an hour in the doctor’s waiting room at lunchtime (then for half an hour in with the doctor – luckily we were the last appointment – as we discussed cider-making, pig-slaughtering, local vs organic, and the keeping of chickens. And allotments. And lurgies.) Still, Tamsin doesn’t seem to have minded. I suppose a day at home playing with one’s new toys and big sister is probably preferable, at two, to trawling round Liverpool in the rain: I am disappointed though. (And I had intended taking advantage of my mum and dad being here to hit Ikea tomorrow, which I won’t now be able to do.)

You may remember me previously bemoaning my inability to make a good flapjack. They taste good (great, even) but never fail to fall to bits – or they are so hard as to extract teeth. When Mia came to visit she and Maggie made flapjacks that were very tasty and nearly stayed together, kick-starting my quest again. They were good, but definitely towards the thin and chewy end of the flapjack scale (for reference: 3 oz butter, 3 oz brown sugar, 4 oz oats and 10 min at 180 C* I think, perhaps Mia will correct me if I am wrong. She blamed their slight crumbliness on me having the wrong sort of sugar.) What I really want is thicker and chewier, and last night I made it! (Hoorah, I hear you cry.) As follows:

Melt 8 oz butter and stir in 8 oz brown sugar (soft rather than demerara). Beat in an egg then add some nutmeg, 10 0z porridge oats and 4 oz sultanas. Push into greased (and lined) tin and bake for an hour at 150 C.

I know you are dying to know the secret and I believe it is this, as explained by Mia: no golden syrup (and the egg probably helps). I am going to revisit my delicious yet intractable apple flapjack recipe later,  and see if I can persuade it to stick together.

*One hundred and eighty what? Elephants?

It rained 10 years ago, too! (I was a child bride.)

and when did she get so grown up?

She finally has enough words to warrant a list for the record, though we are still mostly at animal noises and made-up (yet consistent) words. It’s quite interesting to compare with M’s list, which was much longer at much younger and did not contain television characters or junk food:

baa – sheep
dawdaw – dora (the explorer)
ssh – fish
(dog noise)
dog
(pig noise)
(monkey noise)
no!
bi – (scuit)
gokgok – chocolate
toast
js – drink
cake
mummy
daddy
car
key
whee
clip clop (horse or high heeled shoes)
rarat – rabbit
boo – nappy (“poo”)
dododo – hen (cockadoodledoo)
moo
spoon
buzz
bee
bear
teddy
cot
clock
rah – (lion noise)
beebies
baby
gok (sock)
duck
owl
ba – marmite
sss – snake
book
uh-oh
hiya
allgone
ball
moon
tea
up
there

Guess where Cameron and I went on Sunday?

Go on, guess.

No, not the garden centre (we did that Monday instead ha ha ha).

Nope, not B&Q.

Not even Borders for coffee-and-a-book.

We spent the day at the Lovebox London Weekender, and very good it was too. Mum and dad had the children and very kindly dropped us (and picked us up) at a tube station. We saw lots of bands we had never heard of, ate surprisingly good food (jerk chicken was fantastic), did lots of people-watching (Londoners dress so well compared with people in Chester! Though I do think non-spring-chicken girls should think very carefully before adopting the Kate Moss short shorts and wellies combo). The Howling Bells were not my cup of tea and we wandered off halfway through; Roni Size had a good sound but again, not my thing. When it started to rain we sheltered under the overhang of one of the smaller stages and caught the beginning of Rachel Unthank‘s set. Which was so fantastic that we stayed for the whole thing even though the sun came back out on about the third song: I even bought the CD afterwards. And got it signed.

Goldfrapp were (was?) good, and pleasingly bonkers with a stageshow that included dancing angels in bikinis, a maypole that turned into a pole-dancing pole, and dancers in bikinis and wolf heads. Oh, and costumes made out of what looked like the plastic recycling bin.

At last it was time for the Flaming Lips, the reason we had gone – this was their only UK date this year. Who completely out-bonkersed Goldfrapp (she must have been a bit miffed) with a giant bubble, balloons, streamers, smoke, dressed-up people and inflatable aliens. Brilliant. Had everybody singing along and dancing. I have some photos here, though we took the small camera for reasons of lightness so they are not that fantastic.