There is a limit

To how frugal even I can be...

I cleaned out the veggie drawer before I went grocery shopping and made veggie and pasta soup for lunch.

The soggy tray of tomatoes everyone turned their nose up at went into a saucepan and got cooked down into a tomato sauce to be used later in the week. Hey, I even mooshed it through a strainer to get the seeds and the skin out.

But the pile of socks Arwen has just unearthed from her drawer - lonely socks, holey socks, stretchy and too small socks - these I can do nothing with. I know I could make them into puppets. (Don't ask me where, but I have heard of a thing called a Sock Monkey. ) There is probably a chic and thrifty project out there on the web just perfect for using up the odd sock or twenty. I could make the children use them as beeswax-polishing mittens.

But I just rolled them up into one giant sock and put it in the bin. As I said, there is a limit...

Come Away, Come Away!

So, who knew 'Peter Pan' was funny ? As in " Stop reading Mum, we're laughing so hard we're squashing the guinea pigs! " funny. Yes, the guinea pigs were listening too. Perhaps Lucy and Arwen felt they needed more exposure to the classics...

It was the stand-off between Michael Darling and Mr Darling over the manly and prompt drinking of one's medicine that was the cause of the hilarity.


"Father, I am waiting," said Michael coldly.
"It's all very well to say you are waiting; so am I waiting."
"Father's a cowardy custard."
"So are you a cowardy custard."
"I'm not frightened."
"Neither am I frightened."
"Well, then, take it. "
"Well, then, you take it."

In between giggles I mused on two things. That 'Peter Pan' is about a boy who never grows up. So far (we are only two chapters in) Mr Darling is a premonition, an echo or a mirror of this - clumsy and benignly ogre-like where Peter is fleet and malicious - but a boy nonetheless, lost in his Head of the Household persona. I want to see how this pans out (sorry!) or doesn't, as we read on.

I had also forgotten that the Darling children pre-date the Green children in having a non-human nanny. The prim and devoted Nana is a forerunner to Nanny Piggins, though how we get from Nana (mooning over perambulators in Kensington Gardens ) to Nanny Piggins (cake-fattened and butter-smeared, flying from a cannon over Dead Man's Gorge ) is another post entirely.

Sometimes I'm like Meg's mother

That's Meg, from A Wrinkle in Time, whose scientist- mother cooks casseroles over her bunsen burner. Not that I do that exactly, but I have been known to get distracted by A Book whilst cooking and try to stir and read at the same time.

Less often, I'm like Laura Ingalls Wilder's Ma and stay loving and patient the whole slow and simple day.

More often than I'd care to admit, I'm in a tizz worthy of Mrs Bennet.

I'm curious - which book-mother are you ?

'Given'

This collection of poetry, by Wendell Berry, earned its keep on the first, cursory, birthday morning reading, with these lines, from How To Be A Poet.


Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Sometimes Berry's plain- spoken style can be banal. Sometimes it is clear like water, a gift to the thirsty.