Plans

Suddenly, we are in the last few days of term. The school website has a ‘polite reminder, school closes at 1:30pm on Thursday 4th April’. I always look forward to and dread the holidays in equal measure.

I look forward to them as I love having Jessica home with me, and dread them because it feels like an awful lot of time to fill well.

It doesn’t help that I can’t drive, or that I also have Alice to consider. A lot of local places such as the farm put on Easter activities but I can’t get there. Other times there is an activity I can get to, like The Tiger Who Came To Tea stage show, but I can’t manage keeping Alice quiet.

So we look for mainly homespun fun. We are lucky that our local United Reformed Church always does a lovely drop in day. The morning is crafts and free play, then you can stay for lunch if you would like to, and in the afternoon they show a children’s film.

I have bought some oval silicone soap making moulds that I am going to use to make flat chocolate eggs with Jessica. She is going to pour in some melted chocolate, swirl in some melted white chocolate, and then top with some sprinkles, maybe popcorn and so on. It wouldn’t be Easter of course unless we made shredded wheat chocolate Easter nests!

As far as crafts go, I thought we could have a go at making daffodil suncatchers for the window, and getting out the watercolours to paint some daffodils too. I am going to make a nice new batch of playdough, and thought we would also try potato printing.

We have a little list of family and friends we would like to meet up with, and Jessica will also be having a sleepover with her grandparents.

Hopefully with all of that, and the dailyness of life, our time will be well filled. I want her to have plenty of time to her own devices too, to play with her toys, draw, look at her books, and just unwind.

Just now I am trying to feed Alice in Jessica’s bedroom while she watches The Worst Witch on tv. We’ve been reading the books at bedtime and the series seems to have captured her imagination, which is lovely as it was a childhood favourite of mine (the books, there was no series back then).

It has been a grey day today, intermittantly rainy and glum. The kind of day for pot after pot of tea, and a Miss Marple on tv. This evening I am cooking a roast dinner for tea. There will be roast chicken and mashed potatoes, stuffing, peas, sweetcorn, and gravy. I can’t decide if I shall do brussels sprouts or runner beans as the third vegetable. I have this wonderfully large serving platter that it will all go on, and then everyone can serve themselves. I like family dinners like this. Warm and cosy.

There feels like there is so much uncertainty politically just now, and my recuperation is certainly taking me longer than I anticipated, so filling oir home and lives with cosy seems to be the order of the day.