Level 2 Chi Kung.

My turn on morning, so Nick went off on one of his long bike rides. To my surprise, Katie suddenly announced that it should be baking day, saying rather accusingly that ‘we haven’t had baking day for MONTHS!’. I was a bit taken aback by this and pointed out that I have baked and baked and baked and baked. Anyway, I had other plans and, after feeding everyone, I returned to the job of tidying out the children’s drawers and cupboards.

Nick is currently in the throes of one of his periodic bursts of enthusiasm for gardening. These usually seem to coincide with times of year when it might be considered appropriate to hard-prune things, possibly unto death (what is it with men and hacking away at vegetation?). When he returned from his bike ride, he was keen to tempt me out into the garden to participate in the pruning. He was out of luck on that score: I’m a woman on a mission now that I can see the vision of a completely tidy house almost within my grasp.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Saturdays are much more cruisy now that there is only Dashi’s guitar lesson to go to and Katie seems to be enjoying her unstructured time, with no second thoughts about giving up Stagecoach. I was leafing through The Guardian cooking supplement in the early evening and had the sudden urge to make a batch of Ruby Tandoh’s breakfast muffins (recipe below). They were easy-peasy and, though Nick didn’t care for them, I loved them and scarfed down four, straight from the oven. So nice to eat a real muffin – often what passes for a muffin in the UK is more like a fairy cake or an un-iced cupcake, but these were the real, wholemeal, deal.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Having gone to bed late last night after waiting for the friands and madeleines to cool, I was then woken at 3am by Katie having a nightmare. Which made waking up again at 6:45 a little challenging… One of the school gate mummies mentioned that I looked tired and, knowing that I no longer go out to work, asked if I would have a nap when I got home. I hadn’t been planning to – but decided to do just that. After an hour’s sleep I felt much more able to return to the fray on organising the children’s rooms and had quite a productive day.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Dropped Katie at school, having secured a promise that she wouldn’t let anyone drink the potion. Managed to catch Arina’s mummy at the school gate and told her of my concerns. I was somewhat relieved to hear that the pills are, in fact, valerian root, a Russian herbal remedy. I will keep a watching brief on the wider issues.

Fighting the chaos. Another day, another tedious task… I began sorting out the children’s rooms. It is the first time I have had a good go at this since we moved to Blackheath and, as a result, there are two laundry baskets and four large boxes of accumulated crap to go through, plus loads of stuff on the floor and under the beds. For the first four hours or so, it felt like I was working and working but not really getting anywhere. Then, suddenly, just before school pick up time, I started to see glimpses of order emerging from the chaos, and by the end of the day several large bags had gone down to the recycling bin ready for collection first thing tomorrow. This kind of sorting out is one of my least-liked jobs and most dispiriting of all was finding puzzles and toys for very young children which I had taken out of circulation 3 years ago (when Katie grew out of them) and packed away in a box on top of the wardrobe ready to be used if number 4 ever arrived, or otherwise given away. I clearly recall how many hours it took to clean everything and reunite puzzles and jigsaws with all their pieces. Unfortunately, Katie’s autistic friend Agnes is a climber and got the box down from on high. I was still working at the time and didn’t have time to re-collect everything and pack it away again so, inevitably, the (beautiful, expensive, laboriously cleaned) toys, now totally age-inappropriate, were returned to general circulation and appear to have been comprehensively trashed – very annoying.

On a lighter note, some interesting finds:

– A plastic plant pot, half-filled with compost, into which several wine gums had been planted. No sign of germination.

– A lunchbox, like a biscuit tin but with a clear plastic panel in the lid, filled with composting grass, on top of which languished a latex lizard.

– A plastic grocery bag half-filled with what looks, and smells, like rotted-down cow manure (why?).

After collecting Katie, I gave the kitchen the good scrub it very much needed and then had some of the lovely courgette soup to keep me going through Katie’s trampolining lesson.

It has been on my mind that I needed to use up the dozen or so egg-whites left over from making so much custard over Christmas. I suggested to Nick that pavlova might be good but he said that friands would be better. Not sure if this is due to his fondness for friands or because pavlova is his area of expertise, whereas, with friands, the ball is firmly back in my court! After trampolining I got straight onto making the friands. The mixture is essentially the same as you would make for madeleines or financiers but is baked in a deeper tin with some fruit pushed into the middle. 12 egg whites is sufficient for 3 mixtures so, as I only have one set of friand tins and didn’t want to be up all night, I made some up as friands and some as little shell-shaped madeleines. Even so, it was after 11:30 before the final batch came out of the oven and I then had to wait for them to cool before I could put them in tins and fall into bed. Yawn!

Level 2 Chi Kung.

After the rich food of Christmas, I have been craving courgette soup. Since the end of the late summer glut, courgettes have vanished from the market but Nick had reported that they had re-appeared in Sainsbury’s. I left young Sherlock at home and went straight from dropping Katie to the supermarket. The market, sparse in the weeks before Christmas, is abundant again – no courgettes but huge bowls of tomatoes, capsicums, onions, nectarines, and 6 mangos for £1. Having filled almost the entire trolley for loose change at the market, I payed £3 for a couple of kgs of courgettes at Sainsbury’s and headed home.

Yesterday being twelfth night, I made sure to warn the children to say their farewells to the Christmas tree last night, as I would be taking the decorations down today. Before we had children, as committed minimalists, we owned only one Christmas decoration. People visiting in December would look around the flat and say ‘Aren’t you going to decorate?’ And we would respond, pointing to the single, exquisitely tasteful bauble hanging from the window-frame, ‘We have. Up there.’ and then defensively, ‘It’s from Harrod’s’. Children, however, change everything, and we now have such a large collection of decorations that it took me a good three hours to remove them from the tree and pack them all away. In the middle of the process I had to break off to go and collect Katie and, fed up with putting the decorations back in their original packaging (increasingly flimsy ten years down the track…) I took the opportunity to buy some Really Useful boxes to put them in. To my surprise and disappointment, rather than making the decorations take up less space, it has made them take up considerably more – still can’t work out why. In organising the large box that everything (no longer) fits into, ready for its sojourn in the loft, I decided to remove some items that, due to a quirk of fate when packing for one of our many house moves, have long shared accommodation with the decorations. This hadn’t ever been a problem until, at our tree-trimming party in 2013, guests, groping around in the bottom of the box for more decorations, were bemused and embarrassed to emerge holding a breast pump and various containers for the storage of EBM!

At school, Katie and her friends have formed something called the ‘Stone Age Club’, the major activities of which seem to involve: getting very dirty, making mud pies, doing ‘cave paintings’, and making potions. I have been unworried about the potions, as they generally seem to be made from grass and leaves and I am therefore confident that none of the children are going to attempt to actually drink them. On the way home from school today however, Katie and I had the following conversation.

Katie: We’re making a potion at Stone Age Club.
J: Mmm hmm.
Katie: It’s exciting because Arina’s mummy has given her some pills that she doesn’t use anymore and we’re going to grind them up and put them in the potion.
J: [alarmed but trying to sound calm] What are the pills for?
Katie: For making people sleepy.
J: [still trying to sound calm] And what is the potion for?
Katie: It’s for Arina. She doesn’t want her life.
J: [now really alarmed but taking the least alarming meaning] Who’s life does Arina want?
Katie: She doesn’t want anybody’s life. She just wants to leave life. Mummy, I don’t want Arina to drink the potion because she’s one of my best friends.

Googling ‘suicidal thoughts in young children’ yields alarming results, with one reputable-looking site claiming that suicide is the 4th leading cause of death in the 10 – 14 age group. As (bad!) luck would have it, I search my phone but Lena, Arina’s mum, turns out to be one of the few mummies whose phone number I don’t have, so there is nothing I can do until tomorrow.

Amidst the incredibly depressing news about the murder of the cartoonists in Paris, I found myself unexpectedly laughing out loud when the newsreader described one of the cartoons which caused such offence. Apparently it showed the prophet surrounded by extremists. The prophet’s expression is a bit depressed, with a thought bubble saying something like ‘It’s tough being loved by such jerks’.

It tickled me because all morning a little thread of thought had been running through my brain to the effect that, with supporters like that, who needs enemies. I’m afraid if I was a god or other assorted divine or semi-divine being, and people did screwed-up evil stuff in my name, I would be inclined towards some serious, and carefully-targeted smiting… or at the very very least, some strategically placed boils.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

With all three children back at school (in spite of Jack and Katie’s best efforts to get another day off by claiming to be ill) I spent the day on a task I have been dreading, and putting off since late-December. Ever since we left New Zealand in 1990, I have had great difficulty forcing myself to deal with issues relating to my house in Christchurch. At first I simply disliked thinking about other people living in what I still thought of as my home and, as something of a control-freak, I felt uncomfortable with having to do everything through a succession of third parties, none of whom seemed that interested in complying with my wishes! When we first left the country, we left the house in the hands of an estate agent, who neglected to tell us that the tenants he had arranged pulled out at the last minute a week before we left. I will never forget the feeling of helplessness when, arriving in a town big enough to have a post office (somewhere in Tanzania) I opened a letter from my mother, in which she calmly said that, months after we left, the house was still empty, but that she was just as pleased, as she didn’t like the thought of strangers in my ‘dear little kitchen’. The house was still heavily mortgaged at that point and I was horrified that, without rent coming in, the monthly mortgage payments were making a huge dent in our travel money. My mother had always been very hard-headed about financial issues, so it was hard to know if her apparent dottiness was a result of early-onset dementia or part of her campaign to get us to return to NZ! Years of frustration followed, with various relatives poisoning my plants (spray drift) and cutting down my trees, and my Dad (bless him) advertising the house for a rent way below what we agreed, and then complaining when the phone rang off the hook for days on end … and then reducing the rent still further in the winter (‘because it is cold and they’ll have power bills to cope with’). As a result, I have formed a pattern of behaviour where I try not to think about the house at all, until some crisis arises which requires attention. This hasn’t worked so well the last few years, partly because Chantall, the estate agent who is paid a hefty commission to look after the place, has her own dysfunctional behaviour pattern, in which she apparently does nothing at all unless relentlessly chased. On the 19th of December, Chantall emailed me to say that EQC were keen to get on with repairs to the house. I immediately felt guilty as I assumed that I must have missed the email where all the questions I raised about the scope of works (back in August last year) must have been answered and my heart sank as I realised I was going to have to trawl through months of emails to find it. Then Christmas prep overwhelmed me and I didn’t give it another thought until a week later when Chantall wrote again to say that the tenants had now given a month’s notice that they would be leaving on the 18th of January (not sure how that’s a month but let’s not split hairs) and that January would therefore be the perfect opportunity to get the EQC work done. I immediately sent a holding reply saying that I would need to trawl through some emails and get back to her, but got an out of office message saying that Chantall would be on leave for the next three weeks. Another of Chantall’s behaviour patterns is that she is inclined to contact me with urgent news/requests, immediately before she goes off on leave. Very annoying.

So, I spent the whole bloody day going through email, trawling through every communication between Chantall and I since 2012. And of course what I discovered is that I haven’t, as I guiltily assumed, missed a crucial email. The ball was left very firmly in Chantall’s court back in August, when she promised answers to my questions about the scope of works, and to get a second quote for the electrical compliance work EQC are requiring me to pay for before they start, ‘in the next few days’! It is a mark of how exhausting it is dealing with Chantall that I am only insisting on two quotes – in the normal way of things I would always want three. A few months ago when a new heat pump was required, Chantall again got only one quote, and we saved $790 and got an extra year’s warrantee by insisting on two.

Anyway, it being a new year and all, I have decided not to revert to my old behaviour pattern: I have set a reminder to chase Chantall for a response on the evening of the day she returns from leave, and weekly thereafter ad infinitum!

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Back to school for Dash, so back to early starts in order to have him ready for the school bus by 0730. Meanwhile back at the ranch… a last day chilling with Katie before she goes back to school tomorrow. Feeling quietly satisfied with the results of all my work organising the children’s clothes – it is a pleasure to put the clean laundry away into such nicely organised drawers and cupboards and easy to choose clothes in the morning, knowing that everything that is still there fits and is not in need of mending.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Made the children pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast, in honour of the last day of the holiday. Jack and Katie have one more day off but Dash goes back tomorrow. Began climbing the laundry mountain…

Over the last few days I have become mildly addicted to a very cool little language-learning app called Duolingo. My aim is to learn enough Italian to converse a bit with our Italian nanny when she arrives back from Thailand at the end of January.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Freezing cold, so a good day for a baking marathon: a double-mixture of shortbread, half flavoured with cardamom and half with caraway seeds, all heart-shaped; a batch of Nigella’s chocolate cookies (yummy – though I left off the sprinkles as no one in my house likes them); a tray of Bette’s chocolate coconut slice (iced with melted chocolate instead of chocolate icing – very good indeed).

Nice three way Skype with Sarah Alderson , so that Sarah could watch the children opening the Christmas parcel she sent (we tend to drag present-opening out over the 12 days of Christmas – it extends the excitement and the children enjoy and appreciate the individual gifts much more than if they open them all in a ten minute frenzy on Christmas morning). The parcel contained a lovely surprise for me, in the form of a late birthday present: a photocopy of Mum’s hand-written book of recipes, so lots of things I want to make asap! Joined by our brother Graeme halfway through the call – lovely to talk to him and see him looking well.