Children in Need today so work was pretty insane.  It is always combined with preparations for the Christmas Bazaar which makes an already crazy day even worse.  We tried hard to simplify things for lower school this year which helped somewhat but there is still sooo much going on: bring in a gift for the bazaar in return for non-uniform, bring in money for CinN & to take part in competitions, a mad whole school assembly & costume judging.  Also because we did our own thing in lower school (read: less than they did in upper school) we had some confused children asking for things that we were not having.  It's pretty frustrating too when you are trying to raise funds for the school & some parents think it's ok to not bother....ummmm, hello, it's YOUR children we're doing it for.

The impromptu fire drill in the afternoon did not help the day be any calmer either!

Ok....rant over...

Sitting here watching Children in Need is making me feel a little tearful & very, very grateful.  We are so fortunate to have happy, healthy children.  We are so often grateful & proud of the extraordinary things they achieve that we forget to be grateful for the simpler things - we had 2 pregnancies & 2 perfect babies who have grown into healthy children, even a teenager! 

F helped me prepare a Rogan Josh last night which spent today in the slow oven.  It was DELICIOUS (F even had seconds!)  but the real reason for mentioning it is that while we were talking about cooking we discussed marinating which F defined as "when a boy & a girl meet & start to get to know each other" :) 

In other F news, she is currently planning to be a part time actress & part time waitress when she grows up.  She says she likes cooking but she doesn't want to be a chef because there's too much to do & when you stir stuff you get "hot in all that steam"  I guess it's good to have a dream.