Fathers Day: A nice slow afternoon

With wifey ill yet (wo)manly dragging herself out of bed to go bowling in the morning, the afternoon was left to me to entertain the kiddos while she went back to bed to recuperate from illness and an embarrassing score at the old ten pin.

Started off the afternoon with a bit of gardening. We’ve been away a bit in the last couple of weeks and that combined with the long needed rain meant the veggie patch was lush and verdant. Unfortunately the verdant-ness of it all was partially weeds, so some hefty weeding needed doing. I didn’t trust the kids to be able to spot a weed from my raspberry bush, so I left them making mud pies out of the remains of a grow bag while I weeded.

Rogue Raspberry, how I love you!

Bit of a result, I spotted a small raspberry bush growing about a foot into the lawn. It had obviously been seeded from the actual bush proper which was next to it. A bit of work with the fork and it was soon in it’s own pot.

Once that had been done, it was on to harvesting some broad beans and all the black currants before they over-ripened. There’s a frightening statistic about how much of the UK black currant harvest is dedicated to Ribena production. It’s something like 5,000 acres of farm land produce black currants for nothing other than Ribena. Well, they haven’t offered to buy my harvest, so tonight I’ll probably be stewing them.

We did some more housekeeping- thinned out the radishes, fiddled with the peas, picked some gooseberries and so on but the majority of the rest of our outside time was spent tidying up the mud pie mess. I subsequently found out the boy had been in trouble at school for doing the very same thing. Kids eh?

his attempts to curry favour worked

I thought I’d have a stab at making something properly for tea too. I had a go at Tesco’s Thai red curry. The ingredients were pretty simple: chicken, fish sauce, red curry paste, coconut milk, onion and pepper but the results belied the ease of cooking. The boy actually ate about half his body weight in curry and the child minder is going to have a rather nasty surprise when he does his afternoon toilet visit…

So that was my Fathers Day afternoon, pretty nice and relaxed all told. We had a smashing morning at the bowling, even if I did come third behind my brother and the boy. I was a little too honest in helping him aim his ramp thing and he got rather too many strikes as a result. I’m a strong believer that Dads get the easier deal of it in most circumstances, so Fathers Day shouldn’t be about getting stuff, it should be about doing stuff with the kids and that’s what we did.

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