This is a review post.

A few weeks ago, the wonderful people at Eurocamp kindly sent us on a much-needed holiday to their Château Lez Eaux campsite in Normandy. Having done a Eurocamp holiday in 2008 – staying here, in a tent – we thought we knew what was coming. We really didn’t.

I had made the executive decision for us to sail from Portsmouth to Caen rather than Dover to Calais. For us, the driving distance on the UK side was the same but it was going to save me roughly 5 hours driving at the other side whilst also giving me 6 hours on the ferry to recuperate. As our children are so young (Findlay is 9, Nairn is 4, Erica is 3 and Greer is only 1) when we drive down South we tend to leave late evening and drive through the night so that the kids aren’t bored the whole trip home. Generally speaking it’s a win-win situation as doing it this way means we miss any heavy traffic normally encountered around Manchester, Birmingham and London and the total driving time is vastly reduced and indeed we did our 440 mile trip in 7.5 hours.

I have to admit that with four young children who had slept almost all night, Bob and I were dreading the ferry trip. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that not only was there a small soft-play area, playroom with colouring-in station & kids DVDs playing but there was also a full entertainment programme for older children including a very energetic quiz and a magician. As I had work to do, I paid for WiFi and got on with that whilst the children played. All in all, a surprisingly relaxing way to travel.

We docked in Caen in the early afternoon and set off towards Saint Pair-Sur-Mer, getting hopelessly lost circumnavigating Granville but still arriving on the site an hour after we got off the ferry which I was extremely relieved about. Now, in the space of 10 days we had been offered the trip, put an emergency passport application in for Greer, arranged for someone to stay at our home to watch over the menagerie and got permission to take Findlay out of school for the week so I must have missed the section of the email that explained that rather than staying in a tent, we’d be hanging out in one of these for the next week:

I have to admit to feeling a little ambivalent about staying in the static caravan rather than the tent but when the heavens opened not half an hour after we arrived, I realised immediately the one difference which became massively important – the kids didn’t end up traipsing mud everywhere. Anyone who has ever been camping will relate to that feeling as if your entire body is filthy no matter how good the ablution facilities are and thankfully, in our 3 bedroom superior we never had that. Having such an expanse of space was excellent too since the boys had a room to themselves where they could escape to play games, the girls had a room to themselves and we still had a comfortably sized living & dining room space too.

We were so exhausted after our trip down that we stayed on the parc for the first few days which is unlike us -we’re the kind of family who goes out and sees things rather than the heading-to-the-beach type – but with beautifully clean swimming pools and excellent facilities on site we wanted for nothing. There was plenty for the kids to do, a shop on-site where we could get the essentials and a bar too where internet access was available.

The kids absolutely loved the swimming pool and I have to admit I was terrified at the prospect of taking four of them to the pool with only two adults but it turned out to be completely manageable. What mainly worried me was that there was no lifeguard supervision (a common occurrence in France) around the pools but the boys took good care of Erica leaving Bob and I to take turns with Greer. Although, we did see a fairly horrific accident involving a teenager, a backflip dive and a certain broken nose. Ouch.

The site had a kids club available but our brood, being quite anti-social wary weren’t too keen on being left there which was fine. Instead they chose to spend a fair amount of time in a well-designed playground. I remember thinking, “Health and safety would never allow a playground like this back home” when watching Nairn clambering up a climbing wall – it was exactly the type of place that kids should always have access to and they absolutely loved it. Look at the smiles!

The Eurocamp staff who had briefed us prior to our departure had mentioned that this parc in particular was beautiful but that didn’t quite do it justice. The site was just stunning, plenty of greenery and a little fishing lake where guests were welcome to sit and indulge themselves. One thing that really impressed me – and which I felt reflected the consideration given to the site’s clientele – was that the entry to the parc was controlled via a security barrier which opened after a PIN number was entered into it. The PIN station was available on both sides of the road meaning that both UK and continental drivers could access it. Clever, eh?

We did do a couple of day trips – to Le Mont-Saint-Michel and to Saint Malo where we visited the Great Aquarium which were both within an hour’s drive of our site – and I shall blog about these later.

All in all, this trip just reinforced how good a holiday a family of our size can have on a budget. A seven-night break in this site, staying in accommodation exactly like ours would cost £987 accommodation only and – as we did – you can book your ferry crossing through Eurocamp who manage to get it significantly cheaper than I ever found quotes for. I’ve been told that Eurocamp can also help organise fly-drives and rail travel too.

For me, the difference between this kind of holiday and a package holiday is simple – you do everything on your own time. Having our car with us meant we could leave when we wanted, go where we wanted and not have to worry about schedules and going off-plan. The Eurocamp couriers spoke English – which was an embarrassing relief as my French has never exceeded schoolgirl level – and were available at the drop of a hat to assist. As an example – on our trip two years ago I came down with a stomach bug and had to go to a Doctor. Our courier found a Doctor and came with me to translate. I get the impression that the sites are picked by people who understand what a family abroad needs, such is the level of detail like ensuring we had a travel cot available for Greer to sleep in and providing loo roll and washing up liquid in the welcome pack.We’ve done two Eurocamp holidays now and I know that we’ll be back. Thanks ever so much for a great time!

Posted under reviews

I spent yesterday at the CyberMummy conference – an experience I’ll write more about later this week – and as we mostly only “knew” each other online we had little badges to wear around our neck with the title of our blog and our name on. Of course, many of you might not be aware that the title of this blog is “Adventures of a Lady in Training” or what it means to me so after answering that a few times yesterday, I thought I’d share. This is likely to be long, intimately personal and full of emotion. It’s the first time I’ve felt that I have the right to share this element of my life in such a public manner and I hope that I can do it justice without hurting anyone.

I’ve written 700 words of this, deleted it, written 376 words and deleted that. I can’t tell my story because I have an innate fear of hurting other people, even if I’m the one who has been hurt. I had a fairly bogstandard “nobody understands me” kind of teenage experience and left home/was kicked out a month after my 16th birthday – the day after my Higher English exam and the day before my Higher Maths exam. Whether it was the less-than-stellar home life I’d experienced or simply my hormones being crazy insane I had a longing to be a Mum myself. This is something I’ve talked at length about with my friends, I have always – for as long as I can remember – been broody and even now with four children who test my every boundary I don’t feel that longing has been satisfied. As a result, when I met Findlay’s Dad it suddenly became imperative that I had a baby. Looking back we had a seriously dysfunctional relationship – one that took us both a long time to get over – but when you’re 18 you know everything better than everyone else around you, don’t you? I discovered I was pregnant with Findlay and that weekend, discovered that my parents were splitting up because my Mum had been having a relationship with someone else.

I think you can only understand the hurt and pain that comes out of that kind of marriage breakup if you’ve been a part of it. My sisters were only 14 & 13 and my brother Callum was 9 the weekend my Mum left. I’m sitting here with tears streaming down my face as I remember walking into my parents house seconds after the kids had been told what was happening. The ramifications were and have been widespread but as I have joked since it was almost the perfect time to tell our families that I was pregnant because the heat was truly off us. Selfish? Perhaps, but when you’re 18 and think you know everything you don’t quite see it like that.

Findlay was born 3 months after my 19th birthday and right from the off I felt under pressure to be better than any other parent because I was so young. Findlay’s Dad came home from work one day and I suggested that we get married to solidify our family unit and he agreed, so when Findlay was 4 months old we did. And when Findlay was 9 months old – the day before my 20th birthday – he left. We have a very good relationship these days – in fact I’d almost go as far as to say I count him and his lovely partner as friends – but I can’t and won’t ever forgive him for leaving us like that even if I have some empathy for his reasoning. I did not cope with my parents’ separation well and expended a lot of energy being angry at my Mum, supportive of my Dad and just being there for my siblings which was obviously to the detriment of our relationship. For the next three years I was 100% certain we’d reunite, which was a deeply unhealthy mindset to have when you’re getting involved in new relationships. We would fight, threaten one another with legal action and then put on a brave face in front of Findlay because the one thing I was so, so certain of was that I WOULD not and COULD not have Findlay ever feel the way I did when I was growing up. I felt like an oddity, a spare part. Like I didn’t belong – to an extent, I still feel like this – and it’s damaging. I wanted better for my son.

I started keeping a blog at Blurty and then Livejournal not long after Findlay’s Dad and I split up but when I met Bob and realised what a proper healthy partnership should be like, everything changed. Some of you will have done the maths yourself but we delivered Nairn – a pregnancy we both planned and dearly wanted – into our family 13 months after our first kiss. Erica followed 14 months later and I decided that I wanted to catalogue my “training” from being just a silly 18 year old girl who thought she knew it all to a grown up lady who could keep a house and work and parent and sew and bake and do all the things that a perfect lady could do. I wanted to prove to each and every single person who had ever wrote me off as a “daft wee lassie” that in actual fact, I was so much more than that.

Last week I wrote about making a gift for Findlay’s teacher and I also gave her a knitted bookmark like this one. I wrote a card thanking her for her work, added a quote that I liked and sent Findlay into school on the last day – not expecting to receive anything back. But I did.

I cried when I read this. I’m crying again now. I don’t doubt that Findlay’s teacher had a stack of cards to write out that day and that she perhaps didn’t necessarily plan out her thank you, but her words gave me validation and I finally feel that I’m not just a daft wee lassie anymore, I’ve graduated into the class of “doing not too bad actually”. And perhaps it’s time to rename my adventures and take the training wheels off.

Posted under me, parenting

Ask any of my friends about my timekeeping and they’ll laugh, grimace and shake their heads. I have zero concept of time, I’m almost always late and at each of my children’s birthdays I will repeat, “I can’t believe (s)he is this age already! Where does the time go?” Today being no exception – Findlay finishes school tomorrow lunchtime for the Summer holidays. How on earth is it that time already?! Two weeks ago he turned nine, and tomorrow he finishes Primary 4. He is more than halfway through his primary school experience and I simply don’t have the words to express how terrifying and wonderful I find it that my baby is growing up so quickly.

Findlay’s teacher at school this year has been an absolute godsend. Findlay’s Primary 3 experience was quite negative and I was extremely anxious about his future schooling but his teacher this year is experienced, kind and encouraging whilst managing to maintain a class of over 30 children. No mean feat! I haven’t ever done the end-of-year teacher gift before but this year I felt that I really needed to. But what to give? Long-term readers may remember my musings on handmade versus shopbought – I have always doubted my homemade gifts as being ‘sub-par’ in comparison to shop bought presents – but to be honest as we’ve had no income for 7 months I can’t justify spending money that we don’t have right now. So, handmade & homemade was the way forward.

With lots of teacher friends (like Kirsty) I’m well aware of things to avoid: bath products, chocolate etc are very thoughtful but my friend Fiona who is a teacher told me that one year she didn’t need to buy any bath products at all because she’d been gifted so many by her pupils. Mrs Lindsay has made such an impact on our family that I felt it only right to put some effort and thought into a gift for her and eventually came up with Smitten Kitchen’s Watermelon Lemonade. I trotted down to Ikea to collect some of their really nice Slom bottles, went into one of my favourite fruit shops in Pollokshields to grab a bag of lemons and a watermelon and set to work. Findlay came into the kitchen just as I was getting started and we had a pleasant time just chattering and squeezing the juice – time which I hold very dear, knowing full well that he is not going to be a child forever – so this really was the gift that kept giving.

In the recipe, Deb suggests swapping out some of the water with sodawater or sparking mineral water. Now I live in Scotland – a country blessed with the most pleasant-tasting clean fresh water in copious quantities – and the very concept of bottled water enrages me. The waste aspect of all that plastic really upsets my green thinking but recently we acquired this baby:

A sodastream! When I was a kid we had one and I remember it had three different sized bottles when we got it, all of which were subsequently lost in packed lunch boxes or under beds and so my Mum put it away. I loved the sodastream and was asking my Mum if she knew where it was recently when I discovered that they’re still being sold AND they actually look quite sleek and sexy these days too! With the amount of fizzy juice that we go through in a week, the sodastream pays for itself and I love the green credentials from using the concentrate instead of buying big 2l bottles. (Argos are selling the white one for £29.99 just now. The one we have is £49.99).

So anyway, I changed half of the water for sodastream-enhanced fizzy water and this is absolutely amazing. I made a bottle for Findlay’s teacher and a bottle for my pregnant sister who celebrates her birthday tomorrow.

Because I made so much, I’ve posted the quantities I used here and this made just over 1.5 litres.

8 fl oz freshly squeezed lemon juice (this was 4 lemons for me)
16 fl oz fresh watermelon puree, pushed through a sieve
Roughly 7 fl oz sugar syrup*
12 fl oz tap water
12 fl oz fizzy water

Mix it up and it’s good to go!
*sugar syrup – also called gomme – is easily made by mixing equal parts of sugar and water then heating until all the sugar has dissolved.

Posted under family, recipes

OKAY! Wow, do I have a lot to share with you guys today! First off, do you remember on Friday I promised you lovely lot that I’d share a tale that was so Homeward Bound-esque it would knock your socks off? Well today I’m going to tell you about it.

Let’s rewind back to August 2000. I was living with not-yet-born-Findlay’s Dad and majorly obsessed with guinea pigs and one day we went to East Kilbride to visit a guinea pig breeder whose parents also kept Jack Russells. It just so happened that they had puppies there ready to leave and even though in hindsight it was the WORST IDEA EVER, Alan & I fell in love with this litter of puppies. We picked out the weirdest looking Jack Russell you’ve ever seen in your life – she was almost exclusively brown & black brindle with a white chest and socks – and brought her home with us. We named her Penny.
Time marched on and a year after we brought Penny home, we brought Findlay home. Right from the off she was very patient with him and quickly became his greatest guardian after Alan & I. When Alan and I split up Penny stayed with me while Alan moved back to his parents house where he was prohibited from keeping a dog by the Factors in charge of the flats. Penny never wavered and was the shining star she always had been but with one single flaw – she was so protective that taking her for a walk with Findlay in the pram was impossible. Impossible. If anyone came near the pram, she’d go for them – never biting, but a dog of that size can bark extremely loudly and it’s intimidating. One warm spring day she did this to a young girl of maybe 7 or 8, wouldn’t come back to me and a passer-by remarked that if I couldn’t control the dog I shouldn’t have her. And he was right. Penny went to live with my friend and I never saw her again…

Roll on seven years to last week. I happened to mention on Facebook that I needed a filing cabinet and one of my friends suggested Gumtree. I’ve never really got into Gumtree but decided to have a look for myself, lo and behold the first advert I saw was this one. I nearly died. i was absolutely – absolutely – convinced it was Penny. I emailed Alan and asked him what he thought – he said he wasn’t sure but sent me this photo of Penny as a puppy:

I then sent an email to the advertiser explaining the story and to cut a long story short, we picked her up the next day. People keep asking me, “How do you know it’s her?” and I try to explain by pointing out her colour similarities, the fact that her age ties in with what the SSPCA estimated when they checked her over, how you simply don’t get Jack Russells with her colouring but above all – I just know. She’s gone grey around her muzzle and behind her ears, she’s older and a bit slower – but it’s her.

Photos from our trip to Calderglen park last night:

I can’t pretend that the timing was anything other than terrible for us to get a dog but as Bob conceded, knowing that Penny could be out there and not doing anything about it would have broken my heart. I count my blessings every day that I have such a wonderful husband who tolerates my whims, he is a wonderful man and I am very grateful to him for sticking around for this long!

I think I’ve babbled enough for just now anyway, I will be back tomorrow with a giveaway so make sure you pop back in

Posted under family

I know I don’t really style this as a “Mummy blog” so you’ll have to forgive me, but this post has been brewing for a while and I think it’s time to let it all out.

Do you remember receiving the chain email that talked about lead paint being used on cots and running around on your bike from sun-up to sundown all Summer and how previous generations have been unsurpassed in terms of problem solving and teamwork? I read that many moons ago with the usual click-read-delete that happens with emails with a subject line starting FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: but something within it has resonated recently.

Back in the olden days when I was but a lass my siblings and I spent pretty much every school holiday out playing with our friends, coming home occasionally for a drink or a ‘piece n jam’ and running wild the rest of the time. We were by no stretch of the imagination perfect kids but we rarely got into mischief, we were polite and most importantly we were out of our Mum’s hair.
I walked to school every day. In my primary school years it meant walking across a road outside my house, down a street and across a road outside the school. I went to boarding school for a few years but came home to start a new secondary school three miles away from home and from 2nd year to 5th year I walked to school every day and I walked home, through rain or shine. I crossed several roads and lived to tell the tale. Not only that, but I was extremely fit and healthy thanks to this regular exercise which allowed me to clear my head and listen to some music on my way.
At playtime we’d run around playing tig or ‘kiss, cuddle, torture’ or skipping or football without any fear of us impaling ourselves on railings or splitting our head open on the asphalt. We’d have ‘cake & candy’ stalls where our parents would actually make things to be sold and the proceeds sent to whichever charitable cause we were collecting for at that time. When it was snowy, we went out to play wearing a coat and maybe gloves and a hat. I don’t recall anyone dying from eating a fairy cake made by someone’s parent. I don’t recall any severe injuries in the playground (unless you count the time I threw snow at Ellen Murphy and it hit her eye which swelled up. I thought her eye was going to fall out, or worse I’d get expelled from school).
I’m not making light of serious injuries because I know they happen. A boy at my eldest son’s school had an accident whilst playing football and damaged his thigh – damage that only happened because the school spent the better part of a year like a building site while a new car park was created – so I understand that health & safety rules are necessary and important. But – and it is a big but. As parents, as products of the so-called ‘free range’ age when did we get so neurotic about safety issues?
Findlay’s school holds regular cake & candy stalls where the donated items must be bought from the shop. Now I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I’m buying a pack of penguins for my kid to take to school to buy back. What is the point in that?! It is removing every element of fun and enterprise from learning. The list of things they can and can’t do is long and varied but seems to serve more to protect the school from litigation than to protect the kids from danger.

Of course, this level of overprotectionism starts at a far younger age than school. A friend of mine recently told me that when she fills her car up at the petrol station she removes her two young children from their carseats to take them with her to pay before returning back to the petrol station to go through the rigmarole of putting them back in their seats. Now perhaps she has particularly well behaved children, but I genuinely can’t get my head around it. I can just see it now: I pull into the petrol station, fill the car up and open the car door. I get Erica out first and clamp her arm between my knees while I lift Greer out of her seat. I close the door and open the boot to let Nairn & Findlay out but I’m holding Erica with one hand and carrying Greer so Nairn will have to hold Findlay’s hand, except he doesn’t want to so we have a meltdown in the petrol station during which one of the toddlers pee themselves and a massive queue of cars are filled with impatient businesspeople staring at us and wishing a slow death on me.
Maybe I’m a bad parent but simply the thought of having to cajole the four of them back into their carseats is enough to put me off, and my car has this magic device called a LOCK on it so I doubt any sneak thief or wannabe paedo is going to manage to break into my car, hotwire it and drive off in the couple of minutes it takes for me to go in and pay.

The reason this is particularly getting to me right now is because Findlay is going to be nine years old in June this year. His Dad lives about eight miles away from us and there is a bus that goes from almost outside our door to almost outside his Dad’s house and I’m willing to take him on the bus to do a mock run so that he can do it himself, but most people I have suggested this to have recoiled in horror. At his age, I made an unaccompanied flight from Los Angeles to Glasgow with a layover in Boston. I regularly walked to the bus stop after school and got the bus to my Nana’s house at the other side of the city. I just don’t believe that our kids today are in any more danger than my generation were.
Unfortunately we’re becoming the products of a twofold attack against our civil liberties – one from the litigous society we are becoming and one from the media hell bent on reporting PAEDO DANGER – and this is threatening to kill off any fun activities which have an element of what could be construed as ‘danger’ to them. I genuinely feel sorry for today’s teachers because how difficult must it be to work with your charges in today’s climate?

I will keep you posted as to how the bus trip thing pans out but in the meantime I’m going to leave you with a rare photograph of my gorgeous firstborn enjoying the terribly dangerous snow.

Posted under family

It occurs to me that I have loads of blog fodder but I hold back on posting it for reasons known only to myself. What daunts me slightly is the aspect of permission – I have Bob’s permission to blog about him, I’m capable of making decisions for myself about what I’m comfortable blogging but a large proportion of my life revolves around the children who are not capable of providing informed consent. Part of me thinks that worrying about this is being hugely self-indulgent because nobody is going to remember what I’ve posted in five, ten or twenty years time. But. And it is a big but – is it fair to them that I make their moments so public? The kind of moments which are filed away by parents and brought out at 18th birthday parties or meeting-the-boy/girlfriend-for-the-first-time are the kind of moments that I could (and have) shared with the world without their permission.

So it’s something I’m working through because honestly they’ve provided me with some real fodder over the last few days. Plus I can’t blog about anything I’m crafting right now because it’s all for Christmas!

Posted under family

It’s Greer’s six month birthday today, and I swear with each child these milestones come faster and faster. I can’t believe that she has been in our lives for such a short period of time and yet we’d be so lost without her. She’s suddenly gone from the newborn stage to being a little person with a big personality, big smiles, big love and a big voice! Not sure who she could possibly have taken that from!

So to celebrate we got a lovely picture of the children all together.

and of course five seconds later got this beauty which I think I might actually prefer

Posted under family

LOOK!!

I posted a photo in my “A day in the life” stream, showing a project I haven’t quite finished yet and it was picked up and posted on OhDeeDoh which is one of my favourite blogs, ever. I am so honoured – thank you for featuring me!

The project featured is this table which I’ve découpaged for Findlay and Nairn’s bedroom. The kids’ Godfather, Dave, is moving out of his flat and has given me a few bits of furniture that he was going to throw out. He and I are hoarding kindred spirits, can’t see any crap thrown out ANYWAY, one of the things he gave me was an Ikea Lack table which had seen better days but which I decided could be given new life!

I used a vintage annual (the 1991 Bash Street Kids annual, for reference!) and a LOT of PVA glue to stick it down and then seal the top. I had a bit of a disaster with the top which I am hoping to resolve this week – I wanted a hard, clear varnish so that the paper would be safe if the kids were to spill something on it and when I asked someone in B&Q for clear acrylic varnish they gave me Ronseal. I didn’t think anything of it but when I applied it, it cracked the PVA. Disaster! I’ve now got some plastikote clear enamel but it’s been raining here today and I haven’t been able to get the table out to spray it.

I have also left one leg uncovered just now until I decide if I like the legs découpaged or not. What do you think?

Posted under interior decorating, me, site stuff

So, dear reader, I have a dilemma. I have been baking and cooking away lately but haven’t managed to blog it because SOMEONE had misplaced the memory card for the camera…

Findlay says, “It wasn’t me…”

Nairn denies all knowledge

Erica looks at the camera and shouts, “CHEEEEESE”

Whilst Greer looks cute

So in the meantime I’m afraid you’ll need to make do with photos from my phone. Luckily we have now located said memory card so when I’ve blogged up the camera photos we should be back to normal service. Well, I say normal because knowing my terrible children and messy house I don’t doubt that something else will go missing soon!

Anyway. Today I’m going to show you another wee taste of my childhood. My Nana and Grampa are children of the war era and so had a fantastic ability to eke dinner out on a budget. As classic Scottish weans* we’d get mince an’ tatties and if we ate all that, we might get bread an’ butter pudding after. What a treat that was! As I was the eldest grandchild it was my job to help my Nana and I can remember standing on a stool at her kitchen sink when I was probably about Findlay’s age, peeling potatoes and turnips and being allowed to help bake in return.

Thus, I decided last week that my kids should have some bread an’ butter pudding. Admittedly this was influenced in part because we were skint and had very little food in the house, and in part because I had about 20 million eggs needing used up! Nana always told me to use bread that was a little past it’s best, but bread doesn’t get a chance to go stale in my house so I used an outsider on the bottom layer.

You will need:
6 slices of bread
Butter
Raisins
Cinnamon and/or nutmeg to taste
2 egg yolks
2 tbsps sugar
3/4 pint milk (or more if it’s not enough to cover your bread)

Preheat your oven to gas mark 5 (375F). Butter the dish you’re using to make your pudding in, then butter the slices of bread and cut them diagonally in half. Cover the bottom of the dish with bread slices then sprinkle over a small handful of raisins. I really like cinnamon so at this point I sprinkle a teaspoonful of cinnamon over the top but I know my Nana prefers nutmeg – do whichever suits best or leave it out altogether. Repeat this layering again before topping off the dish with bread. Do NOT put raisins on the top of your dish because they’ll burn in the oven, and nobody likes a burnt raisin.
In a saucepan, mix your milk and sugar together and heat until the milk mixture is bubbling. Make sure you stir regularly to help the sugar dissolve and ensure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan but be careful not to let the milk boil. Beat the egg yolk quickly in a jug then add the milk, whisking gently to combine. Pour the mixture back into the pan through a sieve and simmer for five minutes, stirring regularly. Pour over the bread slices and leave for at least half an hour, gently pushing the bread into the custard occasionally before sprinkling the top with the brown sugar and cinnamon. Pop in the oven for half an hour until the top is a golden brown colour. Serve with custard or vanilla ice cream.

*Wean means child, literally “wee ‘ane” or “wee yin” meaning “little one”. You’re a wean until yir Granny tells ye itherwise!

Posted under baking, family, recipes

Summer holidays here in Scotland started at the end of June, so I’ve had to come up with entertainment not only for Haud it and Daud it* but for Findlay too. LUCKILY Cbeebies has been repeating ‘Dick & Dom in da Bungalow’ over the last few weeks, a major feature of which is their sublime highbrow feature, “Bogies“.

This is the result after one day of watching the aforementioned programme.

Most excellent. This is day two – excuse the sofa missing a cover, that’s a story for later**

To be fair, they actually seem dramatically better behaved whilst playing, ‘Bogies’ than they were the other day when we were stuck inside due to the rubbish weather. People ask me, “How do you do it with four kids?” Simple, my friends. I leave the house otherwise my living room ends up like this:

*Haud it and Daud it – a very Scottish way of saying, “Those two eejits”

**Erica decided she wanted pants on the other day and kept sitting on her potty. Unfortunately she decided to pee standing on my sofa so the cover was in the washing machine. Why didn’t I buy a wipe-clean sofa?

Posted under family