Alice counting

This is a wee video of Alice counting. She did it for the first time this week, whilst playing with her blocks. She just started counting out of no-where and got to six. Then at dinner that night counted to seven; twice. Then tonight (after trying all week to catch it on video) she counted to nine. On this piece of video she is counting to eight though.

Christmas Cake

Here is how to bake a Christmas cake the Nigella Lawson/Pauline Grant way.

1. Soak 875g sultanas, 138g currents, 275g mixed peel in 150ml Earl Grey tea over night. Cover with clingfilm.

2. This takes 9inch/24cm spring form tin. Oven at 130C for fan assisted ovens. Line with a double thickness of brown paper and single thickness of baking parchment. I use the peg to hold it in place, quite ingenious I think. The paper must stand 10cm above the rim of the tin.

3. Soften 281g butter.
4. Cream together 244g brown sugar.

5. Grate the rind of one orange and one lemon.


6. Add one egg at a time making sure you mix well after each one.



7. Then add 2 and a half tbspn marmalade.
8. Add1 1/4 tspn mixed spice.


1/4 tspn cinnamon1/4 tspn nutmeg

1 tspn almond extract.9. Add and thoroughly mix fruit and flour alternately. Towards the end it will take a lot of mixing to make sure it's all incorporated.

10. Put into prepared tin and bake for 3 hours on 130 C (for fan ovens). Obviously take the peg off before you put it in the oven!!!


11. It is ready when the skewer comes out clean.
12. When cake is cooked immediately brush with earl grey tea and wrap it in the tin with double thickness of tin foil. This is the trick to it being really moist.


13. When cake is completely cold (which it isn't yet and it was baked last night), remove from tin and wrap in foil and baking parchment for 3 weeks ready for the marzipan.

So tempting to want to eat it right away, the smells all over the house last night and today are amazing.

Love it when it gets colder

We had a really great walk in Plessey Woods on Sunday afternoon, which is nearish us. I love this time of year when it starts to get colder and you get all hopped up (as we say in Northern Ireland) in your coat, gloves, scarf and hat. We've only been once before about 4 years ago and yesterday we were reminded how much we liked it then.




Alice really enjoyed standing on this bridge looking at the river (dauter, as calls water). We then introduced her to Pooh sticks. Stuart and I got a stick each, he was helping Alice. He gave his to Alice, stood at the edge of the bridge and started to explain the rules. When he said "you throw your stick in the river", she did. So she had a good 5 second head start on my stick. Cheating already. That's just not on and she won!!!!

She had a lot of fun crunching on the leaves, unfortunately we can't get welly boots small enough for her yet, so she had to make do with her shoes and Daddy carrying her over the muddy bits. She also has a thing about collecting stones. Not sure where that comes from, but she carried one round in her hand the whole time.

Busy couple of weeks

Alice hasn't quite got the concept of colours, we go through the colours in her rainbow book, but she can't remember the names of them. However, as you can see from the photo, she certainly knows that they are different and the same. This is how she plays with her blocks. Think that's a Daddy trait; being very ordered.

We all went to the dentist last week. We found a local dentist taking on NHS patients, so it meant we all weren't in different practices. So we all go together and Alice sits with Mummy whilst Daddy is with the dentist and vice versa. Then it was Alice's turn. She didn't really enjoy it too much, however she has 12 teeth and therefore 8 left to come through and the dentist told us they are all on their way. So that would explain the runny nose and excessive dribbling at the moment. She's coping quite well, just got her hand permanently in her mouth.

We now go to a toddler group and she really enjoys that. She loves playing with playdoh, a little too much as she also likes the taste of it. So we are now trying to encourage her not to eat it as you'll see from the video. She also really enjoys doing the sticky pictures and gets a little too enthusiastic with the glue. We've decided to keep all her pictures in a folder, until there are too many and then sift through them and choose our favourites for her in the future.

Last week we did some drawing, she can draw circles and was trying to draw triangles and squares, she did had the shapes right. Then Pauline drew a letter A and she said "gaggle" (triangle), drew a B and she said "bee", then C and she said "see", then drew a D and she said gurgle (circle) and it took us a while to figure out what she meant, but she recognised the shapes of the letters A and D. She is also starting to count and when we say 1, she says 2 and when we say 3 sometimes she'll say 4.

It was also cold enough the other day to put her new winter coat and hat and gloves on. The gloves didn't stay on very long though. Then when we actually got outside I realised it wasn't quite cold enough for the hat either.



Alice really enjoys listening to us reading. Today she wanted loads of her stuffed animals with her to listen too.

Here is the video of Alice pulling funny faces and talking about playdoh.

Birthday Weekend

Alice has this book that we got free from a group we went to in the summer. It's called "Not Now Bernard". It's a horrible story of neglect and murder by a terrifying monster. This has become Alice's favourite book. As soon as she gets up in the morning "Dadad" (Bernard) and she goes in search of the book. She then carries it around most of the day. Will want it read countless times and want the pictures explained too. When she wants to look at the pictures she will tend to have Jenny, the toy on her knee in the next pic, with her and will position Jenny's head so that she can see the book better. I'm wondering how we can destroy this book and blame her and then have to throw it out. Still plotting!!!



We had a very busy weekend. On Friday it was Pauline's birthday. Stuart went into work a bit late and we had a nice breakfast of croissants and pain au chocolats. At least we did because Pauline remembered to get them out of the freezer the night before to defrost and prove over night. Alice was very good at helping Pauline open her presents.


Must explain the giraffe. When we were dating, Stuart bought me an animal for my birthday, I didn't really understand why. Then for Christmas he bought me another one. Still I didn't really get it. Then we got engaged and for my next birthday I got another one. Then every birthday and Christmas ever since I have received an animal as a present. I still don't really get it, but it keeps him happy. A friend said that he should always buy me one and when we're married 40 years I will have this massive menagery of animals. I said "yeah, do you want to be the one to store them all?". Anyway, here are the animals.

Stuart then went to work, Alice and I went to Sainsbury's to do our weekly shop. Then after she woke up we had to go to Mothercare to get the security label from a wee top I'd bought her the day before removed. How I got out of the shop without the alarm ringing is beyond me. What a waste of time; thankfully I had the receipt.

Stuart and I got some friends to babysit and we went round to the pub for some dessert (pretty bog standard). We ate that and then after an hour we got the call to say she'd woken up and they couldn't get her back to sleep. So we came home and it then took us two hours to get her back to sleep. Isn't teething great!!? At least we got out for a short time.

Saturday we went to a family fun morning at church. Which was fun and especially as it was cold and wet. Saturday night we got take-away and watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the Jonny Depp version). Highly recommend it, if you haven't seen it, brilliant. Sunday, church as normal, Alice first Sunday in toddler creche during the service. She really enjoyed it. Then home, lunch, I went back out to church for a pastoral talk about bereavement. Cheery!! It was really good actually, the speaker was brilliant, really practical. Went to the evening service and the pub with some friends. A very busy birthday weekend. But a good one.