love balance

Today is an unusual Monday in that one child has returned to school and the other isn't due in til tomorrow. I have a long list of stuff to do and yet it will be good to see if hanging out with said child can feature heavily - that will depend on how much he's willing to assist me with "boring" tasks like food shopping and dog walking, and also how willing I am to watch Lego Atlantis. I wonder if we can return the painted room to a habitable condition. I can celebrate that I finished the painting, even if I did manage to depilate the pad somehow onto the wall so by the time I'd finished, the wall was coated with bristles and the pad had none left - good job I'm not a perfectionist! However, it will take some time to return the room to a state in which sleeping can occur.
Church yesterday was great for getting me out of my own concerns and thinking about others, with a sermon on welfare reform. Today has begun with a nudge from a friend to contact someone I'd hitherto not heard about. http://freetalha.org/about/ I do like it when I get a good balance of caring for myself, caring for those I already love, and caring for strangers. Good luck with all you are balancing today.

It's been a gorgeous morning but I'm STILL trying to persuade my boy out into the fresh air. We're hopefully off now to buy the ingredients to make cupcakes for his siter. I'm not sure if the intention, or how it will be received, is to show affection, or to gloat at look what I was able to do today whilst you were at school...

I was a little anxious part way through. I'd been given the interesting concept last week that cooking is an art but baking a science, so whereas creativity reigns with a recipe most of the time, if it's a baking recipe, the relationships between amounts of ingredients is crucial. So when we reached the part in the recipe that went "add the eggs one at a time" and no eggs were listed in the ingredient list, we had to guess how many eggs we thought they meant. They taste lovely warm - a meal in themselves to be honest, as they contain an entire bag of coconut. I've enjoyed hanging out with my boy today :)