Category: Kids
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Alicia Keys' Tiny Desk concert
If you haven’t seen and listened to Alicia Keys' Tiny Desk concert (Feb 2020) then I highly recommend that you do, even if - or especially if - you think she’s not your thing.
This is a video my little kid loved to sing along to before falling asleep for a mid-day or afternoon nap.
We all just wanna be shown some love
My first attempt at a very simple recipe my Mum used to make fifty years ago.
Little kid: “I like onion and cheese [crisps]!”
Me: “Cheese and onion pie?”
Little kid: " Eugh!"
I recently read: How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy (of the band Wilco) 📚.
It’s full of practical if fairly obvious tips on how to write and get your creative muscles going.
Here’s a poem I wrote based on two books I regularly read to my little kid at bedtime.
Sausages
Lincolnshire sausages are the finest sausages you can get.
I remember as a boy, fifty years ago, my grandmother making sausages at home for the local butcher. Sometimes, she would let me feed the sausage meat into the machine and then turn the handle to push it through into the skins.
A special treat then was boiled sausages for breakfast. The skins would fall off, and we ate them with white bread soaked in the soup or broth they created in the pan along with a dash of English mustard.
In later years, my Mum would travel to Boston in south Lincolnshire from her home in north Lincolnshire specially to buy sausages from the butcher who made the best Lincolnshire sausages.
She would freeze them and pack me off with ten or twelve wrapped in old newspaper whenever I came back to visit from university or when I first moved to Manchester and then London.
I haven’t had a proper Lincolnshire sausage for many years now. The ones we get now are made in Hampshire. They’re nice enough, better than any other variety of supermarket sausage I’ve tried, but you wouldn’t want to boil them.
They’re pretty versatile. They’re great with mashed potatoes and gravy, in a special Valentine’s casserole, in a Yorkshire pudding, with xmas dinner wrapped in bacon, in a bread finger roll with (or without) onions and ketchup, in a sandwich or, as my kids like to eat them, cold on their own in the bath after school.
Every time someone mentions Croissant (for cross-posting) I hear big kid’s Mum telling him, “You can’t have croissants for breakfast every morning!”
I thought I’d done great with these pizzas, but big kid ate only three slices (he can usually eat all eight) and spat out his salami, little kid said he doesn’t like the sauce (it’s out of a tin, the same he usually eats), and the missus said hers was burnt and inedible (although she still ate it).
Digital Leader
Hoping we found a good solution to help big kid’s Digital Leader application.
He found it difficult to focus and get his head around answering the questions in a sensible (let alone helpful) way.
Instead, I recorded him speaking about the devices and tech he uses, how he helps his little brother and his parents to play games, and how using new apps like Duolingo has helped him to learn Spanish (when previously he hated Spanish lessons).
Google automatically transcribed his speech and copied it to Google Docs. There I edited out the ums and ahs and pasted it into his Discord chat with me. Then he copied it out by hand on to the application form.
🤞
