Bread & butter

For Lent, the boys and I have agreed to pray together every night and name something we are thankful for. I was thinking about it this morning, as I put the yeast, flour and other ingredients into the breadmaker and tonight, I'm going to say thank you for bread.



As I am on an exclusion diet, I make all our bread, so I am very thankful also for the breadmaker, which makes it considerably easier. Today, I also used the Kenwood mixer and made the butter in the photo, another job I would not enjoy having to do by hand. I don't usually make the butter, but the mummy board I read has been talking about it recently, so I thought I'd give it a go. I now also have buttermilk....scones call, or maybe soda bread.

A new church hall

Last night, we went to church to celebrate practical completion and the handing over of keys to our new church hall. This church hall has been a long time in the planning. When Jack was baptised in July 2004, Bob, our late vicar told the congregation, with some glee, what Tiff did for a living, as the seed of the plan was already hatching. In Oct 2005, when I had Luke, Tiff came to see us in hospital on the Friday night for about five minutes, before heading off for a church hall related meeting. When we shut the old hall up and prayed over the site in February last year, Luke, then five, said "but I don't want you to knock the old hall down, I love it". Like most of the church family, we had spent happy times in it, but it was time to let it go and grasp a bigger vision.

Last night, we finally got to walk around inside our new hall and give thanks to God for it. Of course, the church is not a building, it is the people and Bishop Stephen reminded us of this, urging us to consider the building as a tent, a sacrament and a servant. His talk will be available on the church website shortly and is well worth a listen.

Half term

Half term has been and gone, it's Sunday night. I've made the lunches, packed the PE kits and the book bags, written the cheques and set the alarm. We had a lovely week, over too soon. The SSOH has been crazy busy at work and didn't manage a day off, which was a bit of a blow, but this weekend has been a good one. I can't believe we are about to start the second half of the school year - goodness.