I am extremely lucky that Stuart enjoys cooking. Even more so because he has taken over almost all the cooking during the busy work weeks.
However, sometimes (but never during those busy work weeks) I miss cooking.
As with any skill, your “touch” gets rusty when you don’t use it. I used to instinctively know how to season and flavor a dish. Now I need to measure everything and trust the recipe. Which – to be honest – typically tastes fine. But feels different.
I was listening to Alanna read her homework chapter to Stuart tonight. I was surprised how well Stuart was able to catch all the little mistakes, whether she mixed up letters (which can change the meaning of a word) or got the endings wrong.
Considering that he probably didn’t even understand what all the words meant, it is quite a feat.
Definitely requires a lot more concentration from him than from me.
It’s a guaranteed rabbit hole in any conversation with fellow parents: how many chores should kids do?
We are still at a pretty basic level. We expect the girls to clean up after themselves: to tidy their rooms (and whatever else they have scattered around the house), take their plates away, put their laundry in the basket and clean up the kitchen after making their own snacks or breakfasts.
For bigger jobs, such as raking leaves or cleaning up the garden, we expect them to pitch in for a few hours.
I think the girls are soon ready to take on more responsibility around the house. In fact, we’d probably have insisted on it already, if getting them to do their chores weren’t such an enormous chore for Stuart and me.
Stuart, Alanna and Kiara took me out for dinner to celebrate my birthday.
Over the years, Stuart and I have perfected the art of maximising the number of dishes you can taste in a restaurant. We never order the same dish, and often go half-and-half on starters, sometimes even on mains.
The girls complicate the maths, as they are just as keen to taste everything. With you have half a starter to start with, sharing it with two other people tends to leave you with very little.
When the dish is very small – or exceptionally good – we claim it is super spicy. But even that doesn’t always work anymore.
The drive home from a holiday, especially with forecasted rain, is rarely fun.
But when it is, it is a lot of fun.
A morning walk (with a breakfast that, according to Kiara, is worth moving to Haapsalu for), a submerged limestone quarry, an abandoned prison, and a real submarine – a few worthwhile stops. And Stuart drove faster than the wind, as the rainclouds never quite reached us.
Whenever you ask the girls what they liked the best, their standard answer is “everything”. Same today. After some considerable pressure, they concluded their favorite was climbing the lighthouse. And the weirdest playground they had ever visited.
Hiiumaa has great lighthouses. We only visited three – all seven would have felt like overkill. Climbing the Köpu one, with its incredibly steep stairs and windy platform, was, indeed, more adventurous than it sounds.
Stuart’s favourite was the series of abandoned WW2 and Cold War coastal bunkers and military posts in the middle of the forest. The underground bunkers and remaining structures, including a watchtower, were free to explore. One needed a flashlight, good shoes and a real spirit of adventure. They were creepy! And not just for the girls…
And the playground… The random collection of wooden structures, all built by one (sligtly obsessed) man, was quirky and the scale was impressive. Clearly it had been amazing – at some point. However, now they teetered between unkempt-but-charming and unkempt-and-not-safe. The girls had a blast, though, exploring every structure we allowed them into.
My favourite part was all the photos. And the coolest bus stop ever.
We got an early start today due to a serious underestimation of how early one must book the ferry to Hiiumaa. Luckily, someone had come up with the idea of a few non-prebookable tickets.
But that gave us plenty of time to meander around the southern part of Hiiumaa. A short hike towards the southernmost tip, an old (sill functioning) wool factory, and a playground or two…
We decided to have a quiet evening and braai (BBQ) at the cottage – and luckily we did. The girls loved the place! The cottage looked like a pink Moomin house, with round walls, the main bedroom in a tower, massive cubby beds for the girls and an amazing floating sauna in the little pond. It even had a tiny playground.
The fact that it was totally impractical bothered only Stuart, who was cooking.
Lotte is not a character I was familiar with. So we approached Lottemaa with some trepidation, especially as we knew everything would be in Estonian.
But children have an amazing ability to throw themselves into the parts of the story they understand – and just ignore the rest. The park had sufficient things to do, even beyond the story itself, especially as (totally out of character) I actually looked at the website beforehand and knew about the hidden adventure trail…
And everyone told us about the Finn in the village, the blue fox called Katri Helena.
The “quick stop” to cool ourselves off in Pärnu beach took a lot longer than expected. Mostly because even the girls had to walk about 100m in to the sea before the water reached their belly buttons. The shallow water felt above 30°C, though, so I didn’t mind a bit of splashing.
