Back to reality...nearly

views the best pictures

After a whole week staying with my parents, I am back, home alone with kids and dog as the husband is back over to west Wales. There's still a week left of the holidays, but it feels like the end of the holiday already. In some ways, of course, it is. As always after a stay in Yorkshire, where I don't have to organise meals or child-entertaining activities, or do any housework, but just get on with work and then slot in as necessary with mum and the kids, it's always a big back to reality bump the first day back at home where I am juggling everything.

Things were going OK this morning. I managed to motivate the kids enough to get dressed (pink insisting on wearing her tiger outift, but really, things like that just don't bother me any more) and have breakfast then to do some reading and, for blue, a couple of pages of his scrapbook before watching a bit of Mary Poppins then off to the church holiday club that is running every morning this week. The dog was looking thoroughly depressed so I took him for a good walk and managed to fit in another hour or so of work before getting the kids home for lunch, but then it has all seemed to go down hill.

I didn't have any bread for lunch so decided to make pancakes with cheese and ham, but realised that I didn't have enough milk, so made them with half water instead. All things considered, they weren't too bad, I suppose. Having promised an action-packed afternoon at the park and the school swimming pool. I remembered that my Sainsburys delivery was booked to come so we had to wait in for that. It arrived, and in about 5 minutes flat the kitchen looked like a disaster zone. I managed to put away the chilled stuff, but then realised that if we were going to do anything that afternoon I was going to have to leave the rest of it for later. Once again, I'd forgotten that I was going to make turkey meatloaf for supper tonight (double portions, as mused on last week), but decided that really I couldn't be bothered, and went and rooted in the freezer for a batch of turkey meatballs. Meatloaf can wait. In the meantime, however, on the basis that I was going to be baking the meatloaf, I decided to knock up some bread dough to make the most of the oven being on, but - oh yes - the oven wasn't going to be on any more was it - because I couldn't be bothered with meat loaf.

We didn't have time for park as well as the pool so we headed up to the pool which was fine, then the kids had their hair cut and it was back home for the meatballs which hadn't defrosted so I had to do remedial heating (don't read, all those with higher food hygiene standards than me). We don't have a microwave, having binned it for complicated reasons when blue was diagnosed with Leukaemia, so in these circumstances, the only way to go is gentle heating on the stove top. Except when you really really want to feed the kids really really quickly because you want to get them in bed and get on with all the work you haven't done yet... Grr. Having put the oven on to bake the bread, I did at least remember that I could bake some of the apple samosas that I'd made a few weeks ago and frozen for puddings, so I didn't feel quite so profligate with the electricity. These samosas are great - the recipe was in a Good Food magazine, and you basically stew up some apple & raisin with lemon juice & cinammon, then make little samosas using strips of filo pastry - you cut a sheet of filo into 2 or 3 strips, put a spoonful of the apple mixture at the bottom and then fold the pastry over itself to make a samosa parcel, then bake in the oven.

After tea, we took the dog for a quick walk, pink managed to get bird poo on her foot, and we all went home. And now it's 8 p.m., I have another couple of hours work ahead of me, and I bet blue is still reading upstairs.  "Tomorrow is another day" I tell myself...