Today is all about laundry and baking

Lots of clothes and bedlinen (which is none of it linen) and I will also need to make bread. And get to the post office and the supermarket. The children are as pleasant and sociable as weasels now, though Emer was fine when we woke about eight. Linnea needs to spend a day proving we have boundaries, really.

Bah.

Two loaves

I'm waiting to bake them. They are sitting like lumpen blumps now, hopefully planning to rise.

The children washed themselves, once in hand sanitiser gel, and then again with soap and water to get the gel off. They also eventually agreed to eat.

I can't get them out of the house today. But perhaps just stopping the whinging is a high enough goal.

We had a good day after all

The children did lovely things to my sorted piles of clean and dirty laundry, which I have callously disarranged since. But I had a domestically productive day and Emer spent the whole day naked (except for a brief period when she wore a double string of painted wooden beads around her waist) and Linnea helped me tidy up and got two tidy up stickers and both children had a bath and Linnea cooperated beautifully while I washed and conditioned her hair. I did mountains of laundry - almost all of which has already dried - including Linnea's quilt and stuff. I also baked three loaves of bread and cleaned the kitchen of the accumulated grime of ages, including the patina of hand-grease on the oven handles. I totally failed to get the water-stains off our glasses, even with vinegar and scrubbing, but restored the teaspoons to a Stepfordian shine.

We ate baked beans, pitta bread, and pickle for our lunch. The beans were a different brand to usual and had sugarin them, which tasted really odd to me, but the children didn't mind.

In the afternoon, we had two sets of visitors, and much tea, bread, and talking. The five mobile children played beautifully together and the baby was adorable and ate a lot. Then they all went away and Rob came home and we had a stir-fry for dinner, and next Rob and I are going to sort through the in-use clothing and cull, cull, cull. Clean clothes just get used up and dumped in corners, so we try not to have too much in use at any given time, but if we go away - as we did in December - we pack enough to last without doing laundry. We also tend to save our newest and nicest clothes for then.

Speaking of newest and nicest, I was given a skirt today which someone was given by a friend who bought it on Ebay and didn't like it. It's branded L. K. Bennett, is made of green velvet (viscose and silk) with sparkly trim, originally cost £119 (though has clearly been on sale several times at lower prices) and is very nice and wholly unlike anything I would usually wear. Where shall I go in it? Must I buy it some shoes? I definitely need to buy it a top.