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The Children's school holds regular 'afternoon tea' for each class in turn. The idea is that parents bake cakes for it and then buy the cakes to have with their tea. So, yes, it's a money-making con!! ;-) This term the Head decided to try a 'fruit and healthy snacks' theme for the tea instead of cakes. I made some sugar-free jellies with fruit set in each: red grapes in blackcurrant jelly, green grapes in lemon and lime, mandarins in orange jelly, and peaches in raspberry. They were a great success :-)

For dinner that evening the recipe jar told us to have mushroom-stuffed chicken pastry parcels. I had a go at making potato and carrot rosti to go with them but I should maybe try a recipe next time! It all tasted good though :-)

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On May 20th The Doctor and I went car shopping. Our old car was - well - old.... It had reached the stage where things were starting to go wrong with it all the time and it was costing us regularly. Thanks to a back-dated pay rise and even more so to the generosity of The Doctor's parents in offering us an interest-free loan (and I should add that The Mother was also willing to help us out in this way, though it wasn't necessary in the end) we were able to find a newer car with more space for The Children and the paraphernalia we seem to take everywhere we go....

For dessert that evening I had a spoonful of creme fraiche with the seeds and pulp of a passion fruit and a bit of honey. YUM! (This is great for a dinner party, by the way - very quick and easy, but it looks fab and tastes great! I add a spoonful of extra thick double cream on top for dinner parties, though - extra luxury and the layers look even better.)

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The downside of the nicer weather - hay fever :-(

For dinner I made pasta with bacon and cherry tomatoes; I usually add basil leaves but this time I stirred in some pesto (and that was the pesto used up at last!)

Happy Half Term Holiday!

It's half term next week - The Children, The Mother and I are spending the week in Wales :-) Sadly the poor The Doctor can't spare the time from work right now so has to stay home :-( I'm hoping that having us out from under his feet will at least give him something of a break....

This week has been stupidly, crazily busy and I've fallen really behind on reading all my favourite blogs and returning your visits, please don't think I've forgotten about you!! I'm unlikely to have internet access while we're away so unless I have any time this evening (and with the amount of packing and sorting I have to do, I frankly don't expect it!) I probably won't be able to catch up till we get back. As far as my own blog goes, there are plenty of Project 365 photos all set as autoposts, but I won't be doing any other blogging till I return from my holiday. I look forward to catching up on everyone's blogs, including my own, some time in June....!

Have a great week everybody :-) I hope you see plenty of this:

Maybe a few of these:

And definitely none of these!!

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May 18th was a beautiful day :-) So lovely to see blue skies!

You know how when you get to the end of a packet of cereal there are lots of 'crumbs'? For breakfast on May 18th I had a bowl of Shreddies which was mostly crumbs!

Weekly Wordle: 21 of 52

A quick post during another very busy day so I won't highlight the combinations I've spotted but leave you to find your own :-) (I will just say that I was surprised at how many different foods appear though!!)

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The Year 6 pupils have been doing their SATs - we weren't one of the schools which boycotted them! Now that the tests are over we're able to have a lot more fun with the curriculum; on May 17th I looked at the maths behind some magic tricks. In the card trick above I correctly identified the card one pupil had secretly chosen :-)

Still eating my way through the nut-free pesto! Lunch was sandwiches of left over roast chicken with cucumber and pesto on granary bread:

Scrap Your Day 5 of 12: The day

Why does the 25th of each month always turn out to be such a busy day?! Here's what I did yesterday:

Weetabix and a kiwi, apple and lime smoothie for breakfast, and took my hay fever medication.

Then I took The Children to school.

The Boy's class was doing a special assembly as part of Healthy Living week. They performed sketches, poems and dances and showed a Powerpoint presentation, all on the theme of bullying and loneliness and how you can stand up for yourself and how you can be a friend to others. It was beautiful - they'd written and choreographed it all themselves - I cried!

As the assembly finished I had to dash off to my German lesson. I grabbed myself a coffee on the way in.

I also had some Red Cherry Go Ahead biscuits during the break.

After class I called into the library to drop off a couple of books The Boy had borrowed.

Home! To discover that my new laptop bag had arrived, yay :-)

We had some rather overripe bananas hanging around so I made a banana loaf.

While it cooked, I unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher and then phoned The Mother. By the time I'd dialled I'd forgotten the reason I'd called her but we managed to chat for nearly 25 minutes anyway!

I've somehow mislaid my Bible study notes so till the new ones arrive I'm reading through Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon. Yesterday was reflecting on Psalm 38:21.

And then lunch - tuna salad with olives and some cherries, and some water.

The banana loaf was ready now. (I haven't actually tried it yet - I was making it ahead for next week, so it went in the freezer when it had cooled down - if it turns out well I'll put the recipe on my recipe blog.)

In the afternoon I went back to school for a parents' workshop and presentation about healthy eating. We heard all about the new healthy tuck shop that The Boy's class will be running next year - it will then pass to the next year group and so on in turn. We got to sample some of the snacks and rate them (today the class will be doing the same and making decisions about which ones to stock).

Then I had a spare hour before a meeting, so I tidied my cupboard in the staff room and ate some leftover popcorn samples!

And then the meeting. I'm on the curriculum committe of our school governing body and we get together termly in addition to our full governors' meetings. I had a cup of tea to wash down that popcorn...

I picked the kids up from the after-school care then rushed them home and cooked them some pasta for tea, reading through the healthy eating leaflets I'd picked up from the workshop earlier as it cooked.

Then I took The Girl to Brownies.

And then I cooked my own dinner! (The Doctor was out playing golf, he fixed himself something when he got back.) I had some leftover risotto inside a tortilla which I toasted in a frying pan - I want to call it a quesadilla but there's no cheese in it so I don't think it is! I had a few oven chips on the side because there wasn't enough risotto to make the two 'quesadillas' I'd intended. Dessert was just a few grapes. And I managed to drink my way through two 750ml bottles of water yesterday!

Time to collect The Girl from Brownies. To my delight they'd had a cartoonist in and each brought home a portrait he'd done of them!

Once The Children were ready for bed I settled down to catch up with my favourite blogs, watched a bit of TV, and gave some thought to a course outline for a craft class I may be able to teach locally next year.

Then I read a little, drank some minty hot chocolate, and made The Children's packed lunches.

And then to bed!