Proud baker

The boys slept well and didn’t surface till 6.40 am. I had a disturbed night with James coughing a lot but it didn’t wake him. Unfortunately the rain chucked down all day.

They were a tricky pair before breakfast but things improved when they’d eaten and I suggested James might like to be with Grandad swimming and Thomas and I
would amuse ourselves in the house. He goes to cookery club after school so was happy to bake some buns. He did the weighing and mixing. Then he did his reading homework. What he really enjoyed though was writing in a notebook he’d found in my desk. He headed up some pages with “Amphibians”, “Reptiles,” “Mammals”, “Marsupials” etc then we looked up the definitions which he wrote down. Then the fun bit was thinking of different creatures to list under the appropriate headings. This led to him asking what would happen if he got swallowed by the biggest mammal. We were relieved to learn that the blue whale had no teeth and could only swallow something no bigger than a golf ball. We even had time to play knock out whist before Mr C and James got back.

After lunch they watched a film made of the family trip to Kenya and Tanzania in 2001 and then we took them home as they had a party to attend. James fell asleep in the car.

We have settled down to watch Simon Reeve in USA. He’s in California and it’s depressing. Climate crisis causing more forest fires, Illegals cutting sugar beet- same story as here - no US people will do the work. When they are deported who will feed the country? Then the homeless in LA. We are heading that way. No money spent on maintaining bridges and dams. Shocking and depressing. I’ll have to get a grip - November is a dreich enough month.