A Good Day

Yesterday was a good day.

I drove my daughter, Taylor, back to her student house to empty it of the last of her belongings and give it a good clean before handing the keys back. The journey was easy, her things fitted effortlessly into the car and the cleaning satisfied an urge in me that surfaces from time to time to restore pristine cleanliness to where once was clutter and dirt.

The University uses a credit system whereby students have a card that can be topped up with money and spent in food establishments on campus. Taylor had a few pounds left on her card so she bought a lunch for us both that had become something of a tradition for her on Thursdays when lectures had kept her on campus all day. A freshly baked baguette generously filled with brie and salad eaten in the glorious sunshine on the central piazza was a perfect reward for all the scrubbing and vacuuming.

Our final job before heading back home was to collect Taylor's results.

We all knew that a mathematics degree at a prestigious university was never going to be easy and having now experienced it, Taylor would be the first to concur. She found it extremely challenging for all sorts of reasons beyond the simply academic ones, yet she persevered. Her boyfriend did everything he could to support her (including sending her a very prickly cactus that outgrew the box it had been delivered in thus causing a few concerns about how to transport it home!) Big sister Liberty made sure she had colourful post-its and notebooks to help with revision. I did my best to encourage her without putting her under any pressure to live up to my perceived expectations. We all did what we could and so did she... but would it be enough.

Taylor's first and second year results coupled with how well (or otherwise!) the final exams had gone meant that a first class degree was not going to happen. The dream was to scrape a 2.1 but a 2.2 was a more likely outcome. A 2.2 could still open doors, just not as effectively as a 2.1.  Of course, the worry was that after all her trying, all her enormous effort... she wouldn't get a 2.2. I would need all of my consolation techniques ready to deal with that particular outcome.

We walked to the maths building. We were moments away from knowing. I grabbed a coffee and waited outside as she and her friends went in to face the truth. Students were emerging from the building, mobile phones to their ears, sharing their news with anxious parents. There was jubilation. There were tears. I waited.

Taylor is a petite little thing. She was wearing dark clothing. As she emerged from the gloomy interior of the building into the bright sunlight, I saw her smile before I actually saw her. A huge, beaming smile.

A huge beaming smile followed by a thumbs up as she waved her piece of paper at me... the piece of paper with an unfathomable jumble of percentages AND the magic number... the number we had dared to hope for.

2.1

We drove home letting the good news sink in and sharing it with friends and family by the magic of text and facebook.

We celebrated with a rather unusual meal created by cooking all the partially defrosted frozen food that had been left in Taylor's uni freezer. Nobody cared how odd the meal was because Liberty arrived with a bottle of bubbly. As I toasted my daughter and sipped my drink, I could rejoice that the stress of 'not knowing' had been replaced with the joy of a fantastic result. I may have it all to go through again with the A level results, but today was most definitely a good day.

A Uni Send Off

Maybe it's because my daughter Taylor is small and petite or maybe it's because she has big brown puppy dog eyes that make her look vulnerable - whatever it is, the idea of her going off to University next weekend is quite scary. My head tells me she will be absolutely fine and has an amazing time ahead of her - my heart makes me want to scoop her up in my arms, hold her tight and tell her to stay home! Of course my head is right but to pacify my heart, we are doing little things to help us both feel able to deal with the big day.

Yesterday we had a party for the family to wish Taylor and her boyfriend's twin sister (who is now safely ensconced in the student room that she will call home for the next year) the very best of luck.

I do love an excuse for a party and spent some happy hours baking cakes, taking inspiration (and instruction) from the Cake Decorating Partwork I subscribed to earlier this year.

I had a go at some icing techniques to create red, white and blue 'cupcake' cookies. It was messy and tricky and I wasn't entirely satisfied with how they turned out but it has left me wanting to try again. The potential is there to make spectacular looking biscuits. With a bit more practise I might just get the hang of it. In the meantime, my children have demonstrated their support of my cake decorating hobby by kindly volunteering to eat all my disasters.

I was happier with my ladybird cupcakes. I absolutely love my new icing nozzle that creates a grass effect. I modelled the ladybirds out of sugar paste but cheated and bought a pack of icing flowers from Asda to complete the look.

I made a chocolate fudge cake and covered it in white chocolate buttons. I had bought a packet of milky bar giant buttons on special offer for £1 and a packet of cheap Morrisons white chocolate buttons for 39p (or 3 for a £1) thinking it would look nice to have two different diameter circles in the design. Once both packets were emptied onto a plate, it was almost impossible to tell the difference between them. Next time I need white chocolate buttons for cake decorating, I know which ones I will be buying!

My cakes were willingly pushed to one side to make way for the incredibly ambitious Union Jack cake made by the younger sister of Taylor's boyfriend. In the absence of a relevant song to replace Happy Birthday to You during the ceremonial cake cutting, we sang a rousing rendition of the National Anthem.

We presented the two almost Uni students with boxes of chocolates (they will both be making lots of new friends and chocolate can be a good ice breaker!) and celebratory bottles of champagne. When I say champagne, I do actually mean bottles of sparkling perry - weekend offer in Lidl's for £1.29. However, with my genius of a daughter Liberty doing a five minute photoshop job, we transformed the bottles into personalised 'Really Classy Champagne'.

Had it been real champagne with a real champagne price tag, I could not have watched as they shook the bottles and popped the corks with frothy spurting and hilarity in equal measure.

It was lovely to have a little celebration and the opportunity to wish both girls luck and apart from my little ones getting tired and grumpy by the end of it, there were plenty of happy faces.

I very much hope that the good feeling generated sustains us through the next week as we pack and prepare to go.

We're all going to miss you Taylor!

Chinese New Year

Despite the fact that both my little ones are under the weather and consequently being more demanding than usual, I decided to go ahead and celebrate Chinese New Year with a special dinner - if only for the excuse to use an oriental bowl set that my much missed older sister gave me on the occasion of my first wedding many years ago (a wedding which had it not yielded four amazing daughters would have counted as the biggest mistake of my life).

I had grand plans involving an elaborate menu and painting dragons but on account of my poorly babies, I downscaled. I did egg noodles and quorn nuggets with dipping sauce (that is tomato ketchup dolloped onto a little plate) for the less adventurous palettes and a vegetable thai red curry that was as easy as chucking frozen stir fry vegetables into a wok with a jar of curry sauce. I managed to turn the nuggets hard and leathery and the rice soft and blancmange-y by overcooking both but nobody minded once they had entered into the spirit of celebration.

I'm not sure how much the little ones actually ate but they enjoyed the novelty of chopsticks and spread noodles and ketchup far and wide.

Dessert was another cheat - shop bought chocolate fudge cake (not very Chinese but they both start with Ch) which we decorated with some little plastic dragons that I found in a tin of mythical creatures  I had forgotten we had until I had a rummage for a dragon that I know we have but failed to find. These dragons were much better anyway!

The one thing that we did spend a bit of time on that made the evening special was our origami fortune cookies. I pointed Charis in the direction of a You Tube tutorial, provided her with paper and left her to get on with it. Rather than fortunes, I told her to insert little slips of paper with monetary values on them from 5p to £1 and for one lucky person £10. The money corresponding to the amounts was left tantalisingly on a small plate waiting to be claimed.

Charis did an amazing job in the time she had and wrote little messages telling people what they had won rather than simply putting the value as I had suggested.

I won £1 which made me stupidly happy given that it was me that put the money into the pot in the first place! It wasn't Taylor that won the £10.

One Year of QWERTY Mum

The sun is shining, it's a beautiful day and it's exactly a year  since I sat down, created this blog and wrote My First Blog Post.

I wrote about the first six months of my blogging journey in a Guest Post for Mummy from the Heart. A lot has changed since then. My confidence has grown and I feel completely free to take my blog in whatever direction I choose. I have had some fun product reviewing and had the opportunity to attend some blogger events but writing about my children and my life is still what I like to do most.

Some blog post highlights have been:
My husband's vasectomy operation (photo!!)
A video of myself giving birth to my son
My beautifully embellished wheelie bin
An attempt at writing a short story for a competition (I came 2nd!!)
and the post with the most number of views (and still rising steadily) My Frozen Frog

It used to be that writing my blog was something I did when I was breastfeeding my baby boy. My 'baby' boy is 14 months old now and weaned. I don't have that excuse to sit down and write any more but it has become important enough to me that I feel I don't need a excuse. It's just what I do and I love it.

I have no fancy 'Blogaversary' Giveaway to help me celebrate my One Year of QWERTY Mum (unless you want to count my Bob the Builder Giveaway), just a rather lovely cupcake that Ivy brought home from a Social Media Conference she attended yesterday that is crying out to be eaten.  However, I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to all the people who have read my pages, left their kind comments and made me feel part of the blogging community.

Here's to another year!