The Tattie Holidays

Its been a funny couple of weeks. The schools up here have been on holiday, so there's been quite a lot of catching up with 'schooled' friends, and our usual (vague) routine has completely disappeared. This always makes me feel a bit uneasy, but thats my stuff, and A has had a great time.

A went on her first Guides sleepover at the beginning of the holidays, held in a local church hall. I think she got about two hours sleep, and she spent most of the following afternoon dozing on the sofa - so a success then!

We went to see this fantastic ice show with Granny, then on to La Tortilla Asesina for a very delicious Tapas meal.
I had a bit of a mini film fest, going to see I am Love and A Prophet in the same week, two very different films. I enjoyed the first mainly because it was in Italian, but I did get drawn into the story. It took me a while to get past the weirdness of the kind of wealthy existence portrayed, where you have staff around all the time to cook, clean, pull your curtains for you etc, but once I'd adjusted to that I became quite intrigued by the characters.
The second film was a very powerful prison story. Not exactly easy viewing, but beautiful and intense, definitely my kind of film.
Whilst in film mode, I watched Dogville (on DVD) again, one of my favourite films. Quite a depressing view of human nature, but brilliantly written, and I love the way its filmed almost like a stage play.

A seems to have developed a keeness for baking, and there is often a chocolatey smell coming from my kitchen these days. They don't always work out well - she's quite reluctant to follow recipes so its a bit of a trial and error process - but the one she's produced today looks very promising :-)

There was another sleepover this weekend, with A going to stay with our HE friends over the other side of Inverness. She had a wonderful time with them, and they managed to produce and perform a little play together - she's clearly found some kindred spirits there!!

So tomorrow its back to normal, whatever that is. Back to a little bit of structure anyway, and back to all the clubs and groups.

Baking Day

This was a couple of weeks ago, A decided she wanted to bake something completely by herself to take to Nonna & Nonno's. She did a very professional job, I just sneaked in to take a few photos.

Baking

We had a baking session on Saturday (after a loooong lie-in!) and made these beauties, both recipes taken from my VeggieHealth magazine. We used strawberry soya yoghurt in the vanilla sponge as we couldn't get hold of any plain, delicious.

A went for dinner at my aunt and uncle's, with Granny and her friend on Saturday evening, while I went off to the pub as my friend up from Lanarkshire was singing there.

Sunday was very chilled, spent at Granny's: a bit of badminton, lots of tea and cake :0)

We are now having a happy Monday, various Maths & English type stuff went on this morning, and A has spent the afternoon creating fairy personas, inspired by Fae magazine, which I bought for her recently. I have lots of beautiful photos, but she has asked me not to blog them. Fairy-nuff.

Messy biscuits

Don't laugh!!!!

Yes, we've been baking again. These were supposed to be perfect little squares and spirals, but clearly we didn't make our dough firm enough as they all squished when we cut them. But do we care? No, because they still taste really good.

As usual our baking session morphed into a dance session, we cannot bake without dance music on, and once the goodies are in the oven there's nothing else to do but boogie around the kitchen. Its just as well really, considering the extra calories we are getting with regular cake and biscuit creations happening.

Talking of dancing, we have been doing the Latina_Tone exercise DVD in the mornings, as an attempt to wake us up and get us ready for the day. Its worked quite well I think, and has been quite hilarious as neither of us can keep up with the DVD so end up doing our own version.

A decided for some reason that today was our first day of 'proper' home education, I think its just hit home that her friends are back at school now. So she did some maths this morning. She doesn't seem to have any problems with maths apart from self confidence, she's very quick to say "I cant do it", but when I sit and go through it with her she actually picks things up very quickly.

She also wrote a story while I was doing my Tai Chi class, so she's worked very hard today.