Draining Day!

Today has been one of the most draining I've had in a long time. Liam has been at work for most of it and the children have been, well, challenging to say the least! I'm now practically falling asleep on the sofa! It started off well however - I managed to sleep straight through the night (a rarity these days) until baby woke at 6.30am, and then Liam took him downstairs and I fell back to sleep until 8.15am. Bliss. Just what I needed.

I then enjoyed a cocoa-cherry green smoothie whilst watching the Royal Wedding...

this was delicious - frozen cherries, banana, spinach, cocoa powder, raw honey and Greek yoghurt instead of my usual milk. The yoghurt didn't make it as thick as I was expecting (even after adding a pinch of xanthan gum) but it had a gorgeously smooth texture...

I love having a sweet start to the day :) As I mentioned, I also spent this morning watching the Royal Wedding. I'm not normally a big follower of the Royals, but I did find this interesting, it's such a rare thing to see I guess. Although I am very glad our wedding isn't going to be anywhere near as posh (obviously!) or as long...I felt a bit sorry for Will and Kate having to sit for so long after they were married without being able to chat or anything - I know the long readings etc are quite common in religious wedding ceremonies, but this seemed even longer than usual...admittedly perhaps in part because I had daughter nagging in my ear to change the TV channel to CBeebies!!

Anyway, back to food. My meal times were all over the place today. Thanks to my lovely lie-in, I didn't have breakfast until 10am, and I was taking the children to a picnic at 3pm so I wasn't sure what time I'd be eating there. In the end I had a snack about 11.30am of apple and Dark Chocolate Dreams...

this was so good, the DCD seemed so much creamier than regular nut butter, divine!

A couple of hours later, I ate a late "lunch" of Taleggio cheese and oatcakes to keep me going...

Mmm, cheese!

We were then off to the picnic. Despite a stressful morning (daughter has been just awful today, so stroppy! I'm normally reluctant to criticise her as she's so young, but she has just been so rude to me today - almost had me in tears!!) I'd made cupcakes - my Mum had given me 'British' cupcakes cases and flags so I couldn't not make them really!

These were just simple vanilla cupcakes topped with vanilla butter icing. I actually ran out of butter so didn't have enough icing to fully cover the cakes, so just went with blobs to stick the flags in! This actually worked quite well as the cakes can be a bit rich for children otherwise (I met my friend and her 3 children at the picnic, so they all had a cupcake too)

Considering how stressed out I was and how quickly I made these, they didn't turn out too badly!

For the picnic, I also took egg mayonnaise pitta breads...

plus some cartons of juice. We ended up eating at 5pm so I wasn't overly hungry, but still managed to eat 1.5 pittas and a cupcake, and have eaten another 1.5 cupcakes since we've been back home!

The picnic was good fun. Daughter cheered up for it (although went back to whinging on the walk home!) and played with my friend's two boys of similar ages. My baby and her baby played together/stared at each other too, so all good! There were free bouncy castles there too, baby had his first ever go on a bouncy castle which daughter thought was great - when he started backing up to get off it (he backs up miles in advance to go down steps/slopes/whatever!) she tried to make him stay on...

cute! I'm so glad that even when she's being horrible to me, daughter and baby always seem to get on with each other...so far anyway! By the way, what are everyone's thoughts on my sharing photos of the children? Part of me thinks that, as I share photos of myself anyway, anyone who recognises me will already know the children and vice versa, but part of me is still wary for reasons I'm not really sure of. I think I'll stick to just the occasional not-too-recognisable photo for now, but would be interested to hear people's opinions!

That's it for tonight. I've got an early start tomorrow - I'm off to the Exeter Food Festival with my Mum, and with no children. Can't wait for a bit of "me" time going somewhere I enjoy, where I can chat with my Mum without the children demanding attention! I love them to bits and they're great most of the time, but the occasional break, especially after how today turned out, is definitely welcome! Hope everyone else is having a good weekend!