Crossing the Blues
I took my youngest into school, not without incident though. He's been wearing a cycle helmet since he was put on a bike, at less than a year old and the whole family wear them as a normal thing to do. So why was it this morning that our little darling started to have an issue with the straps? They are not tight but he pulled them too loose, so that the helmet might come off his cranium if he were to fall off his bike or be knocked off. I tightened them, not overly so, just so they stopped the helmet slipping, and a huge paddy ensued! Oh the joys of parenthood! I just love it!

Gill is still unwell with toothache and yesterday fell down the stairs so she spent some of the morning in bed.

However, during the afternoon she got up and made some pastry for a pie for tea, I did a small amount of leafmould removal from last year's pile, digging it up and crumbling the lumps into garden refuse sacks where it will reside for another year before riddling and adding to potting media. All I have to do to know it's worth it is to eat a tomato from the vines in the conservatory... so tasty and delicious, and the only financial cost is the seeds, and they come cheap due to my having an allotment and the lottie holders can make an order for seeds, onion sets and potatoes.

I picked up our little one who had forgotten his weird ten minutes of hating the straps on his cycle helmet and came home via the logpile. I did some chainsawing whilst the kids played 'Spore' on the computer, making creatures and engaging in online battles with other Spore users... However they fell out for some reason, probably as they are sharing an account and disagreed over whether or not to spend or save some 'Sporebucks'. Gill and I threatened to prevent them using the computer over the weekend if the fighting didn't stop... and predictably they started to get on!

Gill made a veg pie for tea with home grown potatoes and tinned sweetcorn. We all watched Mastermind and Gardener's World, and then I went to get a bag of electrical flex which I'd pulled out of a skip a few days ago, as I wanted to strip the insulation off to retrieve the copper wire for recycling. I do this with a craft-knife blade which can be carefully run down the length of the wire, which enables the metal to be pulled out. Both boys were intrigued by the growing pile of copper wire and asked if they could play with it and make sculptures... so the rest of the evening til nearly 10pm was spent with copper wire sculpture making. Gill made a dragonfly and the boys made glasses, funny animals, an umbrella and several others. It was lovely! Even after the sculptures were made there was still lots of wire left for recycling, and I hope the boys will keep one creation each as a memento.

A busy evening followed.