• Feeling:  Tired but OK
• Listening to: Happy music
• Watching: Vagrant Queen (until I fell asleep)

This is (I think) the 90th day I’ve written a post since I started writing about our experience of quarantine (initially) and then lockdown.

I was up early (6:30) to get some work done before a meeting at 10. No school for F today because they close the school to deep-clean on a Friday. She had her Friday morning session with Liz which seemed to go well as always (although I didn’t hear it as I was in my meeting at the same time).

Once I’d done with my meeting I found it more difficult to settle to work for the rest of the morning (which caused a bit of friction with D as I was looking for distractions while she was trying to work).

At lunchtime I got some bread going ready for a planned picnic with my Mum tomorrow. We’ll still be socially distancing (Mum is part of a bubble with E and family as they live 5 minutes walk away from each other), but it will be lovely to see her and for the kids and D to see her – and hopefully have a nice walk in the countryside and a picnic.

B had been planning to make a lemon meringue tart all week, and so with his schoolwork all done by lunchtime he decided he should make it this afternoon – his first attempt (as far as I know) at pastry. He had a Mary Berry recipe (I have to admit I’m not that keen on her recipes – they always seem a little off to me) and started well getting the pastry together – getting the flour and butter to breadcrumbs in the food processor without any help. But after adding the sugar and eggs it all went a bit wrong (I think it was probably a mistake to carry on with the food processor when adding the liquid to be honest – mixing by hand would have been the safer bet) – and ended up with a past instead of the promised (by the recipe) ball of dough.

I wish I was better at helping B at these moments rather than just taking over – but whatever my failings at teaching I did manage to rescue the pastry and we got a reasonable ball of dough to chill for a bit. It was still incredibly delicate when it came to roll it out – and again I had to help and we ended up doing a bit of patching once it was in the tart case – but it went better than I expected to be honest.

The rest of the recipe B got on with pretty well – although he needed reassurance from me several times he was able to make the lemon filling and the meringue pretty much by himself (he was remarkably patient while zesting 6 lemons which seemed to take hours!), and the result was pretty damn good.

B isn’t the tidiest of cooks, and I felt like I spent the whole afternoon tidying up after him – but he did show willing and he’s getting better at doing these things for himself, or at least realising that he does need to wash things up or put them in the dishwasher!

I was trying to work alongside all the cooking, but my back was aching and I decided to stop a bit early and rest it a bit. We ate late (because of the ongoing lemon meringue tart baking) and after the kids were in bed I pretty quickly nodded off on the sofa and didn’t wake until after 10pm.

Need to be up reasonably early tomorrow to pick up some bakery treats before we head over to Mum’s, so time to sleep (again) now.

Stay safe, stay strong