Baking Day

I had big goals this morning...
We were going to walk into town, go shopping for gifts for everyone's birthdays - why do birthdays come in clumps like that? How can everyone, from myself, my partner, my father, my father-in-law, my mother-in-law, etc, how can they ALL be Geminis? I wonder what that means? Anyway, the plans weren't extravagant, or even exciting.

But they didn't happen. (You felt that coming, didn't you?)

As with many things baby-related, I'm just not sure why they didn't happen. One hour-long feed bled into a 45 minute cry-fest, which led to me getting dressed about, oh, six hours later than a normal human being might.

The result? By 2:00, we'd managed to move from the bed to the sofa to the kitchen, but most definitely not to the buggy and certainly not outside the door and into town. Ha.

Which was when I gave up on any grandiose plans like oh, seeing other people, and just popped up to the local shop for some baking supplies.

Which brings me to my point. I love my local shop. I love that I know the names of the workers, that I walk up a snowdrop-laced alleyway to get there, that the aisles are so narrow I can't fit the buggy through them. I love that everything's hand-priced with a sticker gun, and that some things are way cheaper than the big market grocery stores and some things way more expensive, as if it's all a game that they play in the back room,

'White bread? Let's say, £3.'
'Washing up liquid? Is 10 p too much?'

Love it. Love the randomness, the eclectic shelves, which take me twice as long to find ingredients as a normal store might, and the fact that little old ladies seem to come out of the woodwork in an eerie sort of way when you walk through there with a baby.

So back we came,
and baked honey-beer bread
and chocolate chip cookies (two batches)
and applesauce.

And now baby is a-bouncing in her doorway bouncer, and my house smells of bread and applesauce and cookies, and it doesn't matter that I got thrown-up on about 3 times today, or that things were so frustrating this morning.

It's all about saying yes, in the end. Whatever the question was.