P365 - Day 165 school holiday fun

This is the second week of school holidays. Because Juniordwarf is only in school three days a week, there’s only three days we have to cover each week, so Slabs and I each have taken a day off work and my mother has kindly agreed to look after Juniordwarf for the other day.

This week I had today off so, combined with the public holiday on Monday (thanks monarchy!), I’ve had a five day weekend.

It was great, and reminded me of the past few years where I used to have Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, by the end of which I felt like I was just getting into my ‘Mum’ role, only to have to go back to work the next day.

Today we did a lot of fun things. We did housework.

Actually, we spent some time cleaning up in Juniordwarf’s bedroom, and reorganising his bookshelf in the lounge room. We vacuumed and we continued to bring an airer full of washing in from outside at a time in an attempt to get it dry before next week’s washing day.

Juniordwarf discovered a bag full of flyers for the local community radio station that Slabs is involved with. He’s recently been watching a DVD we made of his first Xmas, which involve a rather lengthy sequence of me (in a Santa hat) handing out presents to everyone.

So today he got the flyers out, sat some of his toys down in a circle and proceeded to hand them out their ‘presents’ – ‘Teddy from Santa’, ‘Mum from Dad’, ‘Juniordwarf from Sleepydog’, ‘Mum from Juniordward’ and so on, until all of the flyers were handed out.

It took a long time, and an equally long time to pack them all up again.

I had a productive morning constructing the third tier of a scrapbooking paper rack that had been sitting in a box by the back door for longer than I care to remember. Also in the box was one of those fold up outdoor chairs that we got for Juniordwarf but never took outside to store with the rest of the chairs.

He sprang upon it as soon as I took it out of the box and decided it was time for him to set it up. So after lunch that’s what he did.

This was the temperature.

This is him.

I don’t think he feels the cold. I certainly do.

The last thing we did today, after a quick trip up the street to put the contents of Juniordwarf’s money box into his bank account and do the shopping, was to make sushi for dinner.

We had sushi because that’s what he said he wanted, and he was telling me all about how some of his school friends have sushi for lunch. About one of them, he was saying that she has sushi for lunch, then he said ‘actually no, she has a sandwich’. Bit of a difference there!

This is the first time Juniordwarf has had sushi and I was encouraged by the fact that a lot of the ‘healthy kids lunches’ type books suggest this as something kids will eat, and I’ve heard other people say their kids love it. So what a fine way to get him to eat vegetables.

I haven’t made sushi very often, and I’m not particularly skilled at it. I can never get it to look as dainty and perfect as the sushi gurus – probably because I make it every six months or so as opposed to every day –and I’m delightfully unimaginative when it comes to fillings. My standard is smoked salmon, carrot and cucumber. I’d love to try using raw fish, but I’m terrified of doing it wrong or keeping it at the wrong temperature and poisoning myself, so I usually stick to what I know.

Juniordwarf helped out making his roll. I let him taste a bit of wasabi, but he was less than impressed, as I suspected he would be, and so his was just salmon and carrot. He even ate a couple of carrot sticks on the side. Small victory!

He was so keen to eat his sushi. He kept asking when it would be ready and when he could eat it and I had to keep telling him to wait a bit longer because it needed to be chilled.

Finally he got to eat it. We showed him how to dip it into the soy sauce and eat it, but he ended up unwrapping it. After a couple of pieces he decided he didn’t like it after all, and pulled the rolls apart, picked out the salmon and left the rest.

At least he tried it, and he knows what it is now. I wonder if he’ll be as keen next time or if that’s it for his sushi experience for now.