Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?

I hope that's translatable without the double entendre, as well. We had a busy weekend and are having a quiet rather than hectic week so far. With a family birthday party on Saturday, we celebrated 4 birthdays (both my parents and two of my children have February birthdays!) and had two cakes.

Now, I get called a domestic goddess around these places (when my friends aren't calling me a sex-guru) because I make my kids birthday cakes, but I don't think I deserve such applause. The simple truth is I'm too tight to pay £7.00 for something that looks good but is actually virtually inedible. I don't see why Tesco's or Sainsbury's should be paid for something I don't like. So, a couple of years ago (when I didn't have the money for a birthday cake anyway) I made one, basic football sponge, you know the 4-4-4-2 style, and decorated it with that month's current obsesion. I think it was Thunderbirds. It went down a bomb, and since then I've been chief cake-maker in the house. This year was no exception. DP wanted Batman, to go with the Lego, and the Princess of the Beautiful Dawn (PBD) wanted a princess. And I obliged.





















Both these cakes cost me less than half the price of a shop-bought birthday cake, but both were just what the child wanted and an expression of love from me to them.










The point is, that we often cite time or skill as a reason nowadays for just buying something off the shelf rather than making or sourcing it elsewhere. That's all well and good for some things where it would be difficult or impossible to substitute for the mass-marketed stuff, but there are whole realms of our lives that we have passed across to the shop-keepers and just let go of our control of. Cakes being a very moot point. It took 10 minutes of mixing, 30 minutes of cooking time and a further 15 minutes of decorating time to make something no other child has. Where else could I take my not-from-the-shop principle and apply it? I make soft toys, can make soft-furnishings, have made clothes both for me and my children, haven't bought a card from a shop for ages (and that's not because I'm a tight-fisted git, but because I prefer the hand-crafted cards and refuse to pay £4.00 for them) and very often make stupid things like cheese or pasta sauce from scratch. All these little things add up to a whole lot of lovin' and I like it. I hope my children grow up without a heavy reliance on the mass-market, but given the current ad-heaven that is the world today, I doubt it. At least at home I can do my bit to encourage them to think outside the box and hopefully when they're older they will cotton on to the world of crafters and creators that I have met through blogging.




And the title of todays post? Well, after bedtime last night, we heard blooming big mouse-steps over the landing and when we went to look, the three of them had planned a sleepover.... just look at those grins!