Sleep Interrupted

One of Jessica’s favourite books at the moment is the “Thomas Weather” book. This is a really simple book about Thomas The Tank Engine, his friends and various weather conditions. When we got to the snow page the other day Jessica turned to me and said, “We play in the snow… yesterday!”. She was clearly referring to when it snowed a few months ago. So she’s not quite cracked exact time-spans yet but the idea of “the past” is there. I wonder if this is when lasting memories start to form — when individual events can be distinguished in time?

I appear to be turning into quite the blogger, this is my third this month I think. Anyway, had some time to myself this afternoon as both children are at nursery/pre-school, so finally got around to doing some gardening.

Last year I had a somewhat surprising success at growing French beans, I had always fancied growing my own veg, saw the seeds and thought “Why not?”. So planted them and they actually did what they said on the packet, and grew, giving us quite a lot of beans. The children really liked them, think it was because they had a hand in the planting and picking. We also grew strawberries and tomatoes, lots of tomatoes, lots of green tomatoes that made chutney (note to self - that is probably ready for eating now) and a few strawberries. Would have had more, but the second they turned red, Jessica ate them off the plant.

So this year have got a bit more organised and have got a raised bed of some size, constructed by my lovely husband. It has taken huge amounts of soil to fill it, but it is looking good. Had a minor set back with some lettuce and parsnip seeds whereby Ben and his girl friend from across the road decided to plant a mixture of bean and pumpkin seeds over th top, not sure how that is going to turn out - picked a load of the seeds out, but who knows? Don’t think it will have done the lettuce a lot of good.

Anyway, back to this afternoon. Have had quite a constructive time, have put up stakes and string ready for planting out the pea plants (Ben’s choice). In the raised beds I have planted out the pumpkin plants (Jessica’s choice), the parsnip seedlings and a dozen leek plants. Have got some more leeks to do, but figured I would try and stagger the planting so they are not all ready at the same time - am hoping this works.

Have gone for bush tomatoes this year, should hopefully produce a lot of small fruit on a compact bush, so no need for staking. They are already doing really well, with lots of flowers on a couple of them already. Am now wondering it if is too late to plant some cucumber seeds, although I think they are quite tricky - certainly didn’t have much luck with te marrows last year, they got to a certain size and just rotted away.

So this is the first of my vegetable blogs, if it all goes quiet you know I will have had some sort of setback and given the whole thing up. The next big challenge in the garden is taking down the greenhouse that has been here since we moved in, and don’t really use, and assembling the shed I had delivered last week. The greenhouse already has a new home to go to; we put it up on our local freecycle site. This site really deserves a post of it’s own, but will leave that for another day. Take a look anyway.

A couple of weeks ago it was the Grand National. Traditionally I have always had a couple of bets on this race, or taken part in a sweep stake, and generally I do okay. Not big bucks, but generally get my stake back. In our family however, it was always my Grandma Bee who had the big wins, or would have done had she ever made it down to the bookies. Every year, she would look down the list of runners and the riders colours, and more often than not, pick the winner.

This year I brought up the list of horses and their riders colours for Ben and Jessica to see. I had chosen L’Ami (my grandmas middle name was Aimee - very technical choice here), and Longshanks. Ben chose Thisthatandtother based entirely on the fact that the jockey’s silks looked like the flag of St George - it was red with a white diagonal cross, but that was close enough for Ben. Jessica went straight for the blue shirt with a star on. Was not interested in any other one.

So we all sat down to watch the race, Ben very excited that the picker of the winning horse would get a prize. Jessica kept a keen lookout for her horse, and kept shouting “blue star” whenever she saw it. Ben was shouting at his horse to “come on, come on”. Sadly his horse decided to stop running about two thirds of the way, and although both of mine did reasonably well, neither of them made it into the top four. Jessica, however. Well, her blue star horse was called Silver Birch, and won at odds of 33-1. So the Bee tradition will continue.

Ben was quite disappointed, and wanted them to all race again, didn’t quite understand they wouldn’t be. I think we may have started something of a gambling habit for him though, yesterday when the London Marathon was on, we saw the start of the wheelchair race.

And Ben wanted to know if he could “pick one” and what his prize would be if that person won. Hmm. It just seemed wrong on so many levels.

Had been thinking recently about how to start getting Ben to give up the night time pants (pull up nappies). I know it is completely normal for kids up to five to still need a nappy at night, but I had no idea really how to get him started; his pants are normally sodden by the morning.

We usually buy the Tesco own brand pull-ups, fairly cheap and cheerful, they have jungle animals on them. Some have lions, some elephants or giraffes, and some monkeys. And it is the monkey ones that were the problem. Ben didn’t like the monkey ones. and refused to wear them, piling them up on his chest of drawers. When I asked him why he didn’t like them, he said that he didn’t like the monkey, didn’t like his eyes, or the way he looked. So we amassed a few pairs of unused monkey pants.

The other night we ran out of pants. Except for a large pile of monkey ones. I explained to Ben that they were the only ones we had, and that he would have to wear them, and we would go shopping for some new ones in the morning. Anyway, Ben decided that he would rather not wear any than wear monkey ones, and has now been dry at night for over a week. We take him to the toilet when we go up to bed, he is usually half asleep, you have to prop him up and his aim is even worse than normal, but he goes straight back to sleep and has been dry every morning. He is very pleased with himself, as are we with him.

PS - if anybody has a good use for some monkey pull-ups, let me know.

So apparently Reading is the worst place in the country to bring up children. How was this conclusion drawn? They surveyed 1,162 parents across 408 areas. Yes, that’s an average of 2.8 parents per area. My, that’s pretty conclusive, isn’t it?!

What’s really wound me up is that something with less statistical relevance than the average claim made in a beauty product advert has made it onto the front page of the BBC news web site. It’s a shame because that’s a little bit of my trust in the BBC that’s never going to come back.

There’s no denying that raising children is hard work and at the age Ben and Jessica are, sometimes it feels like a willpower war of attrition. Just occasionally though, you get a glimpse of your hard work paying off.

Over Easter Louise made chocolate nest cakes which we took round to the family on Easter Sunday. She kept four back for us to have for our tea, each with a different coloured chocolate egg on top.

When it came to eat them, Jessica picked the pink egged cake. Ben immediately kicked off, crying that he wanted a pink egg. Understand that this is entirely because it was the only pink egg and he didn’t get to choose first, no other reason. After about a minute of rising hysteria, explanations of the merits of a blue or yellow egg and that sinking feeling of yet another pointless confrontation, Jessica quietly lent over the table and pushed her cake towards Ben. Louise and I stared at each other in blank amazement at this selfless act — two year old children are not generally known for their benevolence.

It’s hard to describe my feelings at that moment but it’s definitely one to remember.

Thanks to the inestimable Mr Estall I got to see a preview of Danny Boyle’s new film Sunshine last night. Better still, before the screening there was an interview with the man himself. Danny Boyle, that is, not Mr Estall. It was a good interview and he took a wide range of questions from the audience. I thought he was very open, unpretentious — especially around practicalities such as marketing a film — funny and not a little self-deprecating. He hung around after the interview to talk to some of the folks in the audience and he even stayed when the film started to roll.

And the film? Well, in genre terms it’s a sci-fi thriller/actioner. It’s definitely towards the “harder” end of sci-fi, think 2001 or Alien. It’s got the confined feel of those films too and from the interview I picked up that this was a concious choice. In places I was worried that it was going to veer towards the mindless chase-me-chase-me-blood-and-gore of something like Event Horizon but thankfully these elements of the film are kept in proportion. It was only as we discussed the film afterwards that Mr Estall and I began to appreciate how clever and different the writing really is; some of this can easily pass you buy as you are pulled along by the compelling story. The visuals are a treat and there are some striking stylistic choices made that raises this film above the norm. If you decide to see this intelligent action flick I’d recommend finding the biggest screen you can.

I have long been opposed to DRM on music downloads, which is why I’ve never bought music online (and yes, I am aware of options such as eMusic). So I was thrilled to read today that EMI has agreed to release every song in its online catalogue without DRM. This means that tracks I download can be copied as many times to as many places as I like — just the same freedoms I enjoy with a good old CD and without being prejudged as a criminal by the record label.