Saturday 13th December

This is what I wrote for Saturday, and didn't get around to putting it on here. You'll see why on the next entry.....

Today was a pretty perfect day. To start with, my wonderful husband let me sleep till 10am. And that wasn't all - there was other good stuff too!

I came down and we had bacon sandwiches for brunch. The TV was left on and Saturday Kitchen was showing. A lady came on and started making a gingerbread house and all four boys (that includes Richard, not Baby, he was in bed) sat agog watching the sticky gooey goodness. When the creation was complete, Richard turned to sons one, two and three and said, "Boys, who wants to make a gingerbread house?!"

I spluttered on my cup of tea and tried to give him that look with my eyes, but he didn't catch it. "Let's get dressed and go and buy some sweets!" he carried on.

"What are you doing?" I cried, dispensing with the silent pleading. "Don't you know that we don't do any family activities in this house that require glueing, painting or baking something unless it comes in one packet and takes ten minutes max?"

"Chill," he said. "I'll take full responsibility. Are you going to come with us?"

Well, I wasn't going to miss a show like that, so I agreed. First we went to the Co-Op and got the baking stuff. Then we went to a proper sweet shop and chose different goodies for the roof, walls and chimneys. It was fun, we kept them under control, we even bought some fish from a real fishmongers and looked at blinds for the bathroom on the way.

Then we got back and they went to the kitchen and mixed all the dough together in a fairly peaceful and calm manner, and put it in the fridge to thicken overnight.

I expected the calm to be shot when Richard left at 3.30 to go to a youth event, but it carried on. I put Baby to bed and then raided a couple of drawers the boys hadn't been in for a few months and dragged out some old colouring books. Scooby busied himself with colouring a whole Balamory book orange, Crash found a book with reuseable stickers (and therefore endless experimental possibilities) and Turtle spent his time usefully recalling the names of any Star Wars characters and planets he could think of and listing them all on paper.

I snuck off to the kitchen which hadn't been cleaned for a week little while and got busy too. An hour and a half later, I had gone into every nook and cranny, and they were still playing quietly! Normally when we have a chilled day, it feels pretty wasted because I get nothing done. I don't think I've ever accomplished so much without really trying (okay, I know I need to develop some higher standards).

We had a quick tea and then had a movie night which Richard came back in time for the second half of. I was a bit naughty and actually spent my time on the laptop doing a newsletter for me Christmas cards instead of engaging fully, but, hey - I was getting things done again!

To top it all off, after the boys had gone to bed we watched X Factor and saw the right act win (whoop whoop!). It was a productive, relaxing fun day that had very little shouting. Now why can every day not be like that?