Martha's Marvellous Munchies

It felt like a busy Easter holiday this year - a nice mixture of household jobs, time in the sunshine, and family celebrations. Here are a few highlights. Birthday cake Graham's mum had a big birthday, so Graham and his sister secretly organised a few friends to come to dinner with her. She was surprised - and pleased! - when a small family meal at the pub turned out to include fifteen extra people. Theo baked and decorated this amazing cake all by himself. My sole involvement was cutting it up at the end. The event was a big success. thanks to my mum for the photo Days out We had a family day out at Peak Wildlife Park , in the Staffordshire countryside. It's been a few years since we last went; the penguins and lemurs were familiar, but the zoo has acquired a couple of polar bears. Believe it or not, these two are only half-grown. They're about three years old. playfighting polar bears lemurs penguins otters   I persuaded Toby and Theo to come to a garden with me with the ...

"Suddenly Jesus met them and said, 'Hello'." Hello? Hello? OK, my Bible translates it as, "Greetings!" which sounds marginally more impressive, but really - you've been dead for several days and that's the best comeback line you can manage? That's not an isolated instance, either. He looks so understated that Mary takes him to be the gardener. He walks along with a couple of travellers on the road as if he's any old stranger. He stands among his frightened friends, and the first word out of his mouth is, "Peace". It made me think how we totally take for granted that Jesus didn't rise from the dead and say, "Right! Now you're all really going to find out who's boss!" He didn't even say, "Well, that showed me who my real friends are, didn't it?" He didn't hunt down Pilate and Caiaphas and the others who condemned him to death. None of those. As the Lectio 365 reflection for Easter Sunday pu...

Nine weeks in.  It kind of feels like it's gone quickly, and it kind of feels like we have been doing this forever.  The sheer repetitiveness is probably one of the hardest things.  Having said that, we generally seem to have plenty of stuff to do.  Here are some of the highlights. Physical The trampoline features A LOT.  The boys can do front flips, back flips, any-way-around flips... I just bounce.  Gently. Also cycling along the canal towpath, hitting tennis balls around at the local playing field, and - for me - exercise DVDs.  I might even have tummy muscles by the end of all this!  We've occasionally jumped on the bandwagon and joined in with Joe Wicks , but the poor guy always looks like he's making such hard work of it. He's had a wrist injury the whole time. Educational A recent survey found that middle-class children were doing 6 hours of school work per day, while lower-income kids did 4.5 hours.  From which I co...

The rest of my eco-Lent flopped badly, I'm afraid.  Life has an annoying way of not stopping so that you can concentrate; in fact, it usually gets busier!  However, saving the environment was always going to take more than 40 days, so at least there is more incentive now to carry on. But for all our failures, and our fears for the future, we still need hope; and for that, there is Easter. And we did manage to do Easter! Here's our decorated mantelpiece: crafts by the boys, banner by me, flowers from the Co-Op and foliage from the garden. I made a Simnel cake (11 marzipan balls for the disciples, omitting Judas), and some 'empty tomb' bread rolls (a marshmallow inside melts in the oven, leaving an empty hole - ta-daa!) On Good Friday we did one of the Cadbury/National Trust Easter egg hunts at Calke Abbey.  It focused on looking for signs of spring rather than following clues, which disappointed Toby ("an egg hunt ought to have proper answer...