Couture for Super Heroes

Jason was working from home today.  He went to work.  Then they sent everyone home because of the possibility that someone in the building might have swine flu and go round licking and sneezing on everyone else.

This, along with the fact that Oscar went to nursery for the morning, Tilly was still at a friend’s house, and Tallulah didn’t come home from her dad’s house until ten this morning has made for the best day of the holiday so far.  I got to drink a whole pot of coffee, alone. All alone. Mwhahahahaha.  And I am half way through the very excellent ‘Day’ by A.L. Kennedy.  It is not cheerful, but it is bloody good.  It almost made me feel human again.

Then I spent half an hour sewing with Tallulah.  It kind of undid a lot of the calm, but it was better than last time we did it and there was no blood.  We bought a t-shirt from the charity shop for 50p.  She has a bag of remnants from the cloth stall on the market that she bought with my mum on her birthday treat.  I had the bright idea of using the remnants to make a picture which we would then sew onto the front of the t-shirt in a fun kind of way.   This is better than what she has done with them so far.  So far up to this point she has made me a mat for putting vases on top of.  This sounds innocuous until you realise that a) she is not allowed to sew unassisted, so she used sellotape, and b) she had decided to cover the entire surface area of the mat with small stones.  This made it very difficult to put a vase on top.  Then she got the hump.

She is intellectually very smart, my middle daughter.  But she is unlikely to win seamstress of the year.  She fails to grasp the basic principles, like the fact that in order to make any headway, the needle must be threaded, and stay threaded, or that one must progress in an orderly fashion with the stitches, not just going backwards and forwards depending on what takes our fancy.  She thinks I am sewing Hitler. I think I am not unreasonable.

Let us say it is a work in progress.

This afternoon we made more books.  I have started Derek II, but having run out of pictures of Derek I am now making my own.  Derek II will be a long time in the making.  Tallulah wrote a book about a kitten who went to the pub.  I am not sure what this says about us and the way we bring up children, but the kitten had a lovely time.

Oscar and I read lots of books this afternoon.  He has become suitably intrigued by the idea of super heros.  We read a story about a small boy who became one.  Oscar was fascinated by his cape and we spent a good half an hour discussing the nature of super hero capes and what they are for.  Then he demanded that I make on for him.  I had a brilliant idea.  I will share it with you.  UE cleared his wardrobe out recently and offered me several bin bags of rejects for my craft projects.  I snapped them up.  When the order for the cape came in I remembered that UE had bequeathed us a particularly garish shirt which was black with huge, flaming yellow dragons all over it.  Perfect for a small boy’s cape.  I cut the arms off, trimmed the collar and just left it like a Mandarin collar with the top button.  We were ready to fly.  He was very impressed. I was very impressed.  No sewing was required and he has been busily flying round the house ever since.

Genius.

I even managed to fall asleep this afternoon.  I dreamed I was made manager of a new Unicef store in Leicester and decided to have a Fifties throwback theme for our opening day, complete with Skiffle band and Rockabilly hairstyles.  Wierdly nobody came.  Who knew?

Right. They are all back now.  Tallulah is nursing her torn toe nail.  Oscar is trying to force everyone to drink bath water and Tilly is soaking her foot after cutting it on a stone in the brook earlier.  Oscar is still limping after the trampoline incident too.  We shall not be taking up power walking any time soon I fear.  It is also bedlam.  I’m off to find the volume control.