Hannah’s Hair, Redecorating Nat’s Room, My Marrow surprise, Young Dumb and Living with Mum.

Having, yet again, stayed up most of the night I popped to bed when Deb and Hannah woke up. When I finally awoke it was to be presented with the all new Hannah. Like Deb, Hannah has very sensitive hair and she, like Deb, experiences severe pain if it’s, even gentle, pulled! This is exacerbated because she’s always had her hair long and has resisted having it cut shorter. So, one can imagine the scene when we have to comb out her tangled hair; it is, very much, a tear’s at bedtime/breakfast situation. Finally Deb had enough and insisted that it had to be at least cut and trimmed a little. By now even Hannah accepted that the situation couldn’t continue and agreed to this so long as too much wasn’t cut off. Well what a difference, she looked great and finally her hair was manageable that I could brush it for her without her ending up in floods of tears. Below are some photos of the new and the old Hannah.

After they’d got home Deb decided to start on her plan to redecorate Nat’s bedroom. Three of the walls were to be painted a greeny/yellow and the fourth a dark blue. In addition we needed to have a good clear out of his old toys, rearrange the layout of the room and finally remove his old fabric wardrobe and built the replacement wooden one that Deb had purchased on eBay. All in all a big job, I left Deb and Hannah to get started knowing that, at some point, I’d get dragged in to do the heavy lifting (Deb likes paint whereas I can’t abide doing it, if for no other reason than the paint fumes always leave me with a splitting headache afterward) and sundry construction. She and Hannah made good headway and before long the first wall had been completed and now the hard part started. Decorating Nat’s room involves constantly moving things from place to place. It’s like one of those tile games where you have to keep moving the tiles back and forth in order to build up the final picture.

 We weren’t sure what to have for dinner so I suggested that I might experiment with one of the marrows to see if I could create an edible dish from it and the limited ingredients we had in the kitchen. I managed it; first I sliced and diced some red, plain and shallot onions. These I placed in a large pan with some garlic, Worcester sauce and olive oil. I proceeded to fry these and while they were frying I diced a marrow into relatively small pieces. When the onions had cooked sufficiently I added a tin of plumb tomatoes and the marrows, seasoned with black pepper and left to cook on a low heat. After about half and hour we were left we a reasonably tasty sort of ratatouille. Hannah, as per usual, wouldn’t try it and had macaroni cheese but Deb and I managed two bowls each and eat the lot. Not bad really because Deb had been all for chucking the marrows, saying that she didn’t like marrow. Next time I’ll put a few other vegetables in too and add more spices. While we were eating we watched BBC3’s second series of Young, Dumb and Living with Mum; now, often, especially when they’re sitting watching me vacuum cleaning, I think that my kids are spoilt, lazy and overly dependant on us for everything, but compared to this shower of twits our two are over achieving self starters. How on earth do you reach you late teens/ early twenties without being able to boil water without burning it? I had watched the previous series and had been equally gobsmacked by the bunch of selfish lazy incompetents they’d found for hat series; I was astonished to see that they’d been able to find second bunch who were as useless as the first, if not more so. You don’t get a book when you become a parent so you never know if you’re doing the right thing but, at least, with programmes like this you can see that you haven’t gone as wrong as you could have…one hopes!