Skip to main content

Ha' Bir'da Do Dooo!

That's Theo's attempt at Happy Birthday To You, if you can't quite make it out.  He's got the tune down to a T, so we'll give him some leeway on the consonants.  He's had plenty of opportunity to sing it, as it was my birthday recently.  Breakfast in bed seems to have become the custom, so I was proudly presented with cereal, toast and a boiled egg.  I managed the cereal in bed but thought the rest might be safer eaten downstairs.  Toby also drew me two very nice birthday cards.


So, apart from having to figure out your age when people ask you (what year is it again?), how do you know you've reached your mid-thirties?  Well, one reliable indicator is that you are actually pleased - possibly even delighted - to receive a vacuum cleaner as a birthday present.  Graham has already been gently mocking me for enjoying my new toy so much, but look!  It actually picks the dirt up!  And my stairs don't have dust in the corners for the first time in two years!

Okaay, moving swiftly on... Just to prove I can still have fun, I also purchased Qwirkle and Bananagrams with some of my birthday money (thanks John!).  Toby and I had a go at Qwirkle, which is a strategy game with coloured shapes, and found it easy to get the hang of and quite absorbing.  He's probably too young for Bananagrams, which is a bit like fast-action Scrabble, despite protesting that he "knows how to spell lots of words".  So if you come to visit any time soon, expect to be coerced into playing one or the other - or if neither appeals, we can offer Guess Who?, Jenga, dominoes or plenty more!


For dinner we went to a local pub/restaurant which is enlightened enough to provide a children's play area.  It was pleasantly quiet, and we enjoyed the carvery and finished off with a massive chocolate brownie sundae.


Everyone enjoyed that!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Place at the Table: Spiritual Formation Book 12

"God has ordained in his great wisdom and goodness that eating, and especially eating in company, should be one of the most profound and pleasurable aspects of being human." Miranda Harris had been intending to write a book for years. She'd got as far as a folder full of notes when she died suddenly in a car accident in 2019. When her daughter, Jo Swinney, found the notes, she decided to bring her mum's dream to fruition. A Place at the Table was the result. I thought this was going to be a nice friendly book about having people over for dinner. In one sense it is, but it's pretty hard-hitting as well. Miranda and her husband Peter co-founded the environmental charity A Rocha, so the book doesn't shy away from considering the environmental aspects of what we eat and how we live. They also travelled widely and encountered hunger at close quarters; the tension between seeing such poverty and believing in a generous God comes out clearly in A Place at the Table.

Flexitarianism

Hey folks!  I learnt a new word today!  I can now proudly proclaim myself to be a flexitarian .  Yes, I wish that meant I'm in training to be a trapeze artist.  Or that I'm a leading world expert on the chemical properties of stretchy materials.  All it actually means is that I don't eat meat that much. Well, big deal.  That lumps me in with a majority of the world's population, many of whom have no choice about the matter.  So why the need for a fancy new word?  Because, it seems, that we in the prosperous West have come to regard having bacon for breakfast, chicken sandwiches for lunch and a steak for dinner as entirely normal.  But also because we in the prosperous West are starting to realise that might not be an entirely good idea. You know about factory farming, of course.  The images of chickens crammed into tiny cages and pigs which never see the sunlight, which we push out of our minds when we reach for our plastic-wrapped package of sausages in t

Hosting Thanksgiving

OK, I have to confess.  This will be a very boring Thanksgiving story.  Everything went right and it was a lovely day.  For an interesting story you need a few things going wrong.  I heard a couple of interesting stories this year - like the one about mis-measuring bourbon to go in the stuffing.  Apparently if you put far too much in, all the alcohol doesn't boil off.  Or the one about going to cook dinner at an Asian friend's house, and discovering at the last minute that she doesn't have any baking trays, and it's quite difficult to roast a turkey in a wok.  But as I said, we didn't have so much as a lumpy gravy panic. Where's my food??? We're working on it, baby! So what do you want to know?  Well, it was my first Thanksgiving dinner cooked on American soil.  Back when I was free and single and shared a house with lots of people who liked to eat, I got into the habit of celebrating the American feast for a few years, until the number of peopl