Who’s Normal Anyway?

I think just about everything I’ve tried to do in the kitchen today has gone wrong! The first major thing was at lunchtime when i realised I hadn’t put the stew on in the slow cooker for tea. I got meat out of the freezer yesterday and even prepped some of the veg, but then completely blanked it this morning. So I set it off on the high setting just after midday, but it was nowhere near cooked by tea time. I eventually transferred it to a big pan and simmered it to death. So we had beans on toast for tea (to put us on) and then A went out for a work’s night down the pub so he’ll probably have chicken and chips in a basket or something and I had stew as a meal while M had some supper before going to bed.

I’d decided to try making a pumpkin pie with the pumpkin we got in the veggie box last week, and roasted pumpkin pulp has been sitting in the fridge for a couple of days now waiting for me to get organised. Theis afternoon I thought I ought to get it sorted so we had a walk out to the shop to get cream and eggs and evaporated milk for making the filling. The shop didn’t have eggs so we drove to the place we usually get eggs from, someone sells them from their front garden with an honesty box. They had none either, so we stopped off at another corner shop on the way home and bought half a dozen.

I started making pastry and decided to just follow the recipe on the card I’d printed out, but didn’t read it closely. So by the time the mixer was almost full of flour and I’d already added sugar and salt I realised the recipe was having me make 4 times as much as I needed with the rest to go in the freezer. I decided to plough on anyway but got something wrong in my conversions for the margarine, because it was far too thick and greasy. I binned all of that and started again with my trusty Bero recipe book. L was sat with me on the side in the kitchen but was determined to dabble in the washing up bowl, so I moved him to the other side and then carried on mixing not looking too closely at what he was fiddling with. Then there was a crash and 6 smashed eggs on the floor. Serves me right. Eggs are really hard to clear up too - resorted to scooping them into the dustpan in the end. So I finished the pie crust and baked it blind but couldn’t do the filling.

L is at the stage of loving emptying cupboards and we’ve sorted the bottom kitchen cupboards so they don’t have anything dangerous in. He particularly likes the baking cupboard with the plastic bowls and sieve and weighing scales in it. He’s distributed some of the weights around the house somewhere (unless he ate them, we can’t find them at the moment) so I sorted out just the 2oz, 4oz and 8oz weights into a plastic tub for him to play with (bigger but not too heavy) and put the rest up into a drawer. Unfortunately he came toddling in to the living room with the 8oz weight this afternoon and dropped it into my (cold) cup of coffee that I didn’t get round to drinking and had left on a low table. So that made a nice mess. But I don’t learn because this evening he brought the same weight through again and then dropped it on my foot - ow! So maybe I’ll put them all away after all. He does enjoy carrying them around in the plastic jug though and transferring them back and forth into some plastic cups - very Montessori. Don’t think I can face rice everywhere though.

What else have we done today? M’s done some more 6 times table practice, some spelling, discussed stories within stories (FIAR Finest Horse in Town) and done some art work on foreground, middle and distance, tried adding and subtracting with decimals and found it’s quite easy really, completed 2 new chapters of his Lego Star Wars 2 game and interviewed our next door neighbour about his job for a Beaver badge. I’ve done loads of laundry, some cleaning and made lots of mess in the kitchen!