True Love

The moment had come. The big date between Aged 8 and her beau had arrived.

He was invited for tea.

Now due our poor children having a mother who has passed the "lazy housewife's guide to survival" test with flying colours, they do not normally have the luxury of eating earlier in the evening as do some of their friends, because THAT would mean my cooking twice. And when you are cooking for seven people daily you don't want to do that. So, they instead have to endure an adult style dinner each night, as that way I can give them reasonably nutritious fodder, without having to cook two meals.

I am also a horrible mother in that despite being asked once by the youngest if I could cook nice food, the sort that little girls like to eat, like pizza and fish fingers and chicken nuggets, I instead quite often force feed them with stews, homemade soups and other horrible things like risotto. I also don't let them have squash because of their teeth, I rarely cook puddings, because that would make ME even fatter and I don't let them smother their food with that red stuff either. I'm so mean.

As Jack was coming round however, I made a concession, as I do when friends come, and asked Laura to find out his favourite food.

Pizza.

Now, the next bit is not because I consider it beneath me to buy frozen pizza from the shop. If the fancy takes I DO. I thought though that it would be a nice sort of child oriented activity. I was clearly feeling very benevolent. That is why I decided that we would make our own pizzas.

Youngest daughter also was also entertaining two friends. They were the female variety however, and were not invited to stay to eat with us. Admittedly ED is away on a school exchange this week, but even so, seven people is enough to feed on a week day evening.

So, with dough from the bread maker, grated cheese, pineapple, ham and tomato puree, we made a sort of Lomax version of deep crust pizzas. Considering there were five untrained sous chefs in tow, we did a reaonable job.

And the subsequent rearrangement of ingredients wasn't too demanding.

I served up supper.

Youngest child, aged 6, took one bite and announced that she prefers "proper pizza, made by professionals."

Jack, who is apparently the only boy aged 8 with, it seems, perfect manners, (or maybe it's just that when my boy was 8 years old he didn't bring home very good examples of well mannered friends, or something like that), announced that his Nan was the best pizza cook that he knew, as she cooked Asda pizza.

They all ate it though, and asked for more. Children can be very strange.

Meanwhile the subject of birthdays came up. Now, we we have a strange habit in our family of sharing birthdays: me, having narrowly missed my older brother's birthday by three hours, despite being born three weeks early (first and last time as an early bird. Didn't suit me clearly); my first sister in law who shares my mother's birthday; my youngest child who was born on my second sister in law's birthday; and hubby and me who don't share, but who neverthless are exactly the same age bar six days. (He is the older man of course.)

So when it transpired that Jack's birthday is the same day as mine it seemed that it must be fate.

It's obviously true love amongst the 8 year olds.