Essential Food Group

One of Bear’s favourite places is the Larder, the café near school in the opposite direction from home. He’s been known to dig in his heels and refuse to move unless it’s towards the Larder (a ploy that doesn’t work!) Most of the time, I say no. We are often doing something else, or I can’t justify the expense. This afternoon he said, ‘Mummy, please can we go to the Larder?’ I was happy he’d asked nicely and it’s been a while so over the road we went.

Bear had a smoothie and a chocolate-bean-biscuit. I went for a flat-white. The Larder do the best coffee on the High Street (which is saying something!) and the most elegant milky-coffee-leaf on top of the flat-white. I was also desperate for chocolate. I haven’t had any in the house for days and I haven’t been near a supermarket due to a food-glut. The stuff you can buy in the newsagents doesn’t come close for me. So there we were, just the two of us indulging in our favourite treats and catching up on Bear’s school day (another caterpillar has turned into a chrysalis – I seriously hope they make it to butterflydom. Bear expects.)

Anyway, I feel loads better now. The moral of the story – never run out of chocolate. Never let the secret stash be completely depleted, especially when there isn’t even as much as a mint chocolate at the back of the fridge.

Bear Time

Whoever said time is linear hasn’t spent much of it in my life. There are lots of types of time. Holiday time runs too fast, so it’s over before we’re ready. Negative time is where I somehow get to school to pick up Bear, even though I was just hanging up that last bit of washing five minutes before the bell. Secret time is when I arrive ten minutes early and grab a chai latte at the Larder (café just over the road to school) to stop it from becoming slow time. But in our house there is mainly ‘Bear Time’. It started when Bear was born. Before that he was in my tummy. Before that was nothing.

Yesterday, he told a friend that my mummy died while he was in my tummy. My friend started to condole with me, but Mum actually died two years before I became pregnant. So she didn’t know a bit about Bear, even for a bit. My missing mum has always been a hole in my own experience as a mother. Then my friend pointed out that all of a woman’s eggs are already  there when she is born, so in the dim (and very) distant past my mum carried Bear in her womb too. Cheers Mum!!!