It’s school holidays again and I have been enjoying the week with my delightful offspring. They return home this evening, I go back to the Marie Celeste for 2 days and we collect them again on Saturday morning – they’ll be here for 5 days (by which time I will have exhausted every bit of my annual leave). I honestly don’t know how these 2 parent families do it!

I collected the babies in the car, and it was every bit as fabulous as I thought it would be. I am sure taking them home will be super-fabulous too. Have I mentioned that I love our car?

We have been baking and knitting and watching dvds and reading (nothing much more active because just to add to all my other physical woes, I have somehow put my lower back out – oh! the paaain!) and we were going to go to the park today (despite my sore back), but the weather has turned all sorts of ghastly.

Never having learned my lesson about cheap acrylic yarn, I picked up a ball of camo “wool” to knit Joe/Frank a scarf (in farrow rib, which I’m rather obsessed with). I rather expected it to knit up like Bessie’s current knitting project.

Bessie’s knitting

camo wool

However, it is knitting up very oddly. I was very thrilled when it started to do this:

The beginning

Less thrilled when it started with this:

The middle

It’s now up to this:

about 3/4 done.

I’m not sure how I feel about it, but am just going go with it and see what happens.

We bought some cute silicon cake pans and cooked chocolate cakes from this recipe. The cake is fantabulous, but would definitely be better confined to one pan (and the cream was probably an unneeded addition).

cake pans

courtesy of bess the cake decorator and co-chef

tasted rather nicer than it looked

makes a heck of a lot of cake

And it’s July 4 – we totally should have decorated and had fireworks and hot dogs and such (but I completely forgot about it – obviously that americanification isn’t working too well after all).