Carnival Weekend

This weekend my Dad came to stay with us. He and Toby had a great time on Saturday morning playing catch in the garden…

and in the afternoon we all went to the funfair…

The apple on his pushchair cancels out the candyfloss right?!

The only meal photo I took on Saturday was dinner – Indian takeaway – paneer pasanda, rice and sag aloo for me (plus naan & poppadoms added to the plate after this photo was taken)…

But I did also photograph a few of my snacks from earlier in the day. I love these gummy bears. Not only do they have pretty much the same texture as their gelatine counterparts (possibly slightly less squishy, but not really noticeable) but they also taste of actual fruit – delicious!

and a Butterfinger – love, possibly my favourite chocolate bar! I’d forgotten I still had this left from London!!

On Saturday evening, we took two little wooden chairs down to the bottom of the road to watch the carnival…

Toby’s favourites were the pirates and robots…

and Izzy loved the animals & Alice in Wonderland…

After we’d finished watching, we got the children to bed and then went to stay at my Mum’s house – to make sure my little sister got home from her party ok (at 3am!) as my Mum and her partner were in London. Liam and I had considered going out for drinks, but in the end we decided that, sad old people that we are (!), a DVD and tiramisu sounded more appealing!

After a peaceful night’s sleep, we went home to see our cute (when they want to be!!) children…

and then went out for carvery with my Dad. Adult carvery was £9.50, children was £6.25 (but we were allowed to just pay for Izzy and get an empty plate for Toby) but my vegetable only option was a bargainous £6.10. I could have had nut roast, but to be honest the main things I wanted were cauliflower cheese & yorkshire puddings!!

I also had roast potatoes (cooked in oil), ratatouille, carrots, peas, veg gravy and apple sauce…plus one of those extra yorkshires in the background was also mine for a grand total of 3, oink oink!!

Needless to say, after all this I really didn’t need dessert, but Izzy really wanted one (there was a big dessert cabinet – too tempting!) so I didn’t want her to be the only one (!!!). Izzy and Dad shared a white chocolate and banoffee cheesecake…

and I had a red velvet strawberry gateau. I was meant to be sharing with Toby but, having not had his usual morning nap, he was too tired by this point!

Liam looked on enviously – when he’s full he’s really full, so despite wanting pudding he couldn’t even think about ordering one – not a problem I ever have!!!

After this we all went home and the children had naps while we lay groaning on the sofa!! I wasn’t going to have another meal at all, but in the end the thought of bagel French toast drew me in…

More than enough food!!

What did you do this weekend? Do you have any carnivals near you at this time of year? The carnivals do the rounds down here in September/October – a different town each weekend. We used to have a Christmas carnival too but sadly that stopped a few years ago, I used to love that one as a child!

Thursday Things

Otherwise known as “some random things that have been collecting on Lucy’s camera”…

1. You remember the hat Izzy made on Saturday? Well, not many of the children from her school entered she won a prize! I need to work on my enthusiasm I think, ha, when the teacher gave it to me at Tuesday school pick-up I think she was expecting more than my “Greeeeat…what is it?!!” I was very glad I’d brought the car though – it was hard enough getting plant + Toby back to the car as it was…one poor Mother was walking home and her child had won a tree about three times the size of our blackcurrant bush!!

Izzy is very pleased with it though and has been watering it morning and night. If anyone has any tips for blackcurrant bushes (that’s what the teacher said it was anyway) please pass them on. I’m planning on transferring it, somehow, into a large pot at the weekend…but I don’t really have a clue about gardening!!

2. I know this seems to be a “popular” thing in blog-land at the moment, but I have been loving fresh figs lately. I perhaps need to work on my presentation skills (!) but this salad was delicious. Salad, smoked cheese and figs that I grilled for a few minutes with a tiny bit of brown sugar…

3. I had some fun post this morning! I joined BzzAgent several years ago and still get invited to join “campaigns” sometimes. This latest one was an invitation to eat chocolate – how could I say no?!

As you can see, they sent me full size bars of both the Golden Biscuit Crunch…

and the toffee popcorn chocolate…

I opened the biscuit one with my Grandma this morning, and then Liam and I have been working our way through both bars this evening. They are both super tasty but, for me, the popcorn one is the most addictive, sweet & salty and full of popcorn – I can’t stop eating it, oops!! Liam likes the biscuit one best though, the only thing we agree on is that we’d both happily eat either of them! The letter BzzAgent sent me says that they are on offer in Tesco 2 for £3, after that they’ll be about £2.50 per bar I think.

4. Izzy also got some post this morning. We never normally send away for “free” things, but my Dad bought the children a box of Coco Pops when he last visited, and Izzy really wanted one of the bowls that was offered on the back. It did require purchasing another two boxes of cereal but, unlike a lot of these offers, you didn’t need to pay for postage or anything, so we ordered online a few weeks ago…and her tip and sip bowl arrived today!

Haha, as you can see she was very excited…cereal as every snack from now on then!!

5. The final thing that I have been sent recently was a loaf of Burgen bread. They didn’t tell me they were going to be sending me this, so it was another lovely surprise waiting on my doorstep one day last week. They have a new design for their packaging for Breast Cancer Awareness month in October…

The bread is still as delicious as ever! I had some made into French toast, served with my current favourite toppings – strawberries, maple syrup and Philadelphia mixed with icing sugar and vanilla extract – my at-home version of the delicious mascarpone French toast topping we had in London, as we always have Philadelphia in the fridge.

6. I have a new cake to add to our family favourites rotation, alongside lemon drizzle cake and chocolate brownies…gingerbread loaf (without the icing or the stem ginger) I’d promised my Grandma a cake as her birthday present, and she requested that I try to make gingerbread…

We all loved the result – so much so that my Mum has already put in an “order” to make her one to share with her colleagues in a couple of weeks’ time!

What are your favourite everyday cake recipes? No fancy icing required please! I was chatting to Mum today about what cakes she wanted me to make, and we eventually settled on the above gingerbread as well as my usual lemon drizzle cake, but I’d love some new ideas too. I make slightly more labour intensive cupcakes/birthday cakes for special occasions, but the cakes I make most regularly seem to have no icing or just a drizzle…a cake needs to be quick and easy if I’m going to make it time and time again!

Nature Day - Leafy Hat Making!

This morning – whilst I was getting some exercise in at a 9am spin class (yawn!) – Izzy and Liam were putting leaves (and googly eyes!!) into a hat…

There was a local nature thing going on 12-4pm and Izzy’s school had set the children “homework” to take a wildlife themed hat with them if there were going along.

They were told that they’d all be given a little prize for bringing her hat along, and Izzy was very pleased with the little bag of chocolates she was given…

I ate the creme egg one, yum!

We didn’t wait around until the end to hear the winner be announced, as both the children needed naps, but looking at some of the other entries I’m sure Izzy’s wouldn’t have won anyway!! Some clearly had a lot more parental help, but were still very cool, my favourite was a tall hat shaped like a tree, with a squirrel sitting in it!

While we were at the nature day, Izzy and Toby both made badges…

and Izzy had her face painted…

Butterfly on her face and butterfly on her badge…

Finally, before we went home, the children did a bit of “stream dipping”…

Sadly (!) they didn’t manage to find any fish themselves, but Toby liked looking at the tiny fish that other people caught!!

It was a really fun event. There were also large garden games (connect 4, chess etc) to play with, and a BBQ and cakes for sale. Liam was tempted by a burger but we’d brought a picnic with us so we stuck with our egg mayonnaise sandwiches, family favourite! By the time we'd finished eating them he was too full to want a burger, haha, funny boy - I never have that "problem" with my appetite!!!

We wouldn’t have known the event was happening at all if it wasn’t for the newsletter school sent home – I hadn’t seen any advertising anywhere – but there seemed to be quite a good turn out…clearly lots of children like Izzy that forced their parents to take them so that they could hand in their homework!!

What are you up to this weekend? Any fun plans? We are having a quiet day tomorrow – tip run, DIY etc – so I’m glad we did something fun today. A good balance of relaxing, but also doing something that Izzy will be able to talk about when she goes back to school on Monday!

Good luck to everyone running the GNR tomorrow!

Back To School

Izzy has had two days back at school, so far so good…

She’s enjoying her new class – old friends, new friends and a new teacher…but is happy that she still gets to give her old teacher the occasional cuddle too!

I finally got round to getting the top drawer in our kitchen organised into a “morning drawer” – something I’d been wanting to do since we moved into this house at the start of June to help our school mornings be a little less chaotic!

We finished off the summer holidays with Izzy’s favourite dinner – macaroni cheese n peas – on Wednesday night…

Half macaroni, half shells as we ran out!

and we started the new term with our current favourite smoothie – peanut pumpkin – on Thursday morning…

With chocolate covered sunflower seeds on top for me!

I was a bit sad that the summer was ending as Izzy is such fun to have around – both to be a chatterbox to me, and also to help entertain Toby. She was a bit nervous when I took her to school on Thursday morning – which I expected – but what I wasn’t expecting was Toby’s reaction…he was absolutely distraught and wailed the whole way back to my Mum’s house, devastated that we’d left his sister at school!!!

He soon cheered up with a bowl of blueberries at Granny’s house though (!) and I re-discovered the benefits of term time – in this instance, day time exercise! Mum offered to have Toby so that I could go to a new-to-me spin class on Thursday morning which was great. It was an instructor I’d never met before and she did lots of sprints, whereas my normal spin classes tend to be higher resistance but therefore not quite so fast…my legs were sore by the end of the 45 mins! I then further taxed my legs at Friday’s pump class as the instructor decided to do an old release (73) and the lunge track used a bar for lunges…ouch, my legs were aching on the drive home afterwards!!

Back to positives of the school term, another thing I’ve missed is Costa dates with my friend! She has 3 children so trying to take all 5 children out in the summer was a bit too stressful so I’d only seen her once or twice at the start of the holidays. With just our two year-olds left at home though, we got back into our Friday morning coffee routine, and I was delighted to discover that Costa have started selling chai lattes! Using powder rather than syrup, so not quite as nice as Starbucks, but still tasty!

I also had a toasted teacake, and Toby was very happy to be reunited with the toy dinosaurs – first time he’d been in Costa for 6+ weeks and he still remembered to go straight for the toy box in the corner as soon we entered the building!!

Right, I think that’s all I have to say today! I’m off to Exeter this afternoon to do a bit of shopping so I will no doubt pop into Starbucks for a “real” chai latte too, yey, can’t wait! I’m hoping that now Izzy is back at school I will get back into a more regular routine with blogging again. Because I’ve been exercising more recently (4 classes this week!) I have been too tired to blog in the evenings, but once the weather is cooler I’m sure I’ll get back into blogging in the daytime again…at the moment the sun keeps tempting me outside!! I was looking back at my New Year’s resolutions the other day, and one of them was to “try to do some kind of exercise at least twice a week” so I’m quite pleased that I’m actually now consistently exercising 3 times every week, and sometimes even 4! Classes are definitely the key – I’m so much more motivated to go to a class than just to a standard gym session.

Did you make any New Year’s resolutions? How are you doing with them now? I’m doing ok with most of my others I think – losing weight is still a work in progress, but I am finally – in the last couple of months – seeing a consistent downward trend, although I long ago got rid of the public weight loss page that I started in January! I need to get back into taking Toby to more activities – summer holidays kind of waylaid that, although we did do lots of trips to the park, beach etc. Saving money/organising paperwork is again a work in progress, I am finally getting some kind of paperwork systems in place though! I’m glad I thought to look back at my goals though, it was a good reminder of how well I’m doing in some, and how I need to re-focus on others!

Start of September…Back to Pumpkin

Am I ready for the end of Summer – both the school holidays and the sunny weather? No.

Am I, nevertheless, starting to look forward to Autumn? Maybe.

I was doing a bit of online window shopping last night and, instead of bikinis or cute summer dresses, I found myself lusting after hoodies and chunky jumpers.

And I may have opened one of my (many) tins of pumpkin that has been lurking in my larder since last Autumn. I actually opened it on the 31st August, but shhh, we’ll keep pretending that my taste buds are super in tune with the seasons!!

So on Friday I made a Oh She Glow’s pumpkin gingerbread smoothie – one of my favourites from last year.

Delicious, but too strongly spiced for Toby, and perhaps a bit too fall-like for me just yet.

So this morning I cut out the spices and molasses, added in the all important peanut butter (!), and made a mellowed down pumpkin smoothie that is perfect for adult and children taste buds alike!

Peanut Pumpkin Smoothie
(makes 2 large portions)

• half a tin of pumpkin (200g)
• 2 frozen bananas, chopped before freezing
• 500ml milk (I used organic cows but you could use non-dairy if you want this to be vegan)
• 50g oats
• one huge heaping tbsp smooth peanut butter (prob about 60g?)

1. Put the milk, oats and pumpkin into the blender jar, and leave in the fridge for a few hours/overnight. This isn't essential, but will help you get a smoother result.
2. Add the bananas and peanut butter when you are ready to eat, and blend until smooth and creamy.

I prepped this first thing this morning and put it in the fridge whilst Izzy and I went swimming. Exactly what we wanted when we got home a few hours later

Thumbs up from Izzy (despite the face, ha, I think she still had a mouth full of smoothie!!)…

And Toby gave it his version of a thumbs up too…

Divine. I think I possibly even prefer this version to the spiced one – it has a lighter flavour whilst still being super thick and creamy. Definitely more “appropriate” while the sun is still shining…the perfect transition into pumpkin season!!

Are you ready for Summer to be over yet? Thought about eating pumpkin? I love summer, especially the recent (for England) heat we’ve been having – beach, iced lattes, sunbathing etc are my idea of bliss. I’m also sad that schools start back next week, however it is never too early to start eating pumpkin!! I’m pretty sure I was still eating it into Spring this year, but I have seemingly now had a long enough break from it to start wanting it again! I might stick to this smoothie for now though – pumpkin oats can start happening when the weather gets cooler again, which wont be long I’m sure!