It's lunchtime and I am still in my pyjamas which is less a luxury and more a failure of will. The children are home for their last term break of the year and I am cooking spaghetti with a tomato sauce for lunch. Not the canned stuff, though Eilidh thinks it the elixir of the gods, which I take as a kind of evidence that neither nature nor nuture can account for some things. Only one out of four of the elements on my stove top work correctly, the rest blast heat at full bore whatever you try to do to them, making the avoidance of a burnt mess something of a mission. I manage it anyway. I would like to meet the mutant stove top that could take me on.
Yesterday Warren stayed home from work, a touch of some kind of virus. Iona insisted he measure the height difference between us; she was certain she had finally overtaken me. She was right. Warren looked at me in commiseration, but at 5'6" I refuse to be treated as short. Anyway, as I told the both of them, I can be nothing but happy at Iona's magnificence. This morning I greet her with, 'hello daughter who is taller than me', and she replies, 'hello mother who is shorter than me'. She is 12. It must feel good.
Nathan spends the day at a LAN party. Computers and people who are not his family take up most of his attention these days. Still. He laughs at my jokes, and hugs me goodnight, and is unhappy at the thought I might have to be away for his next birthday. It's enough. It's a lot.
Warren tucks a hot water bottle into the bed beside me as he leaves for work this morning. I drift back off with the warmth, for once not thinking of what I lack, of things I haven't done. For once remembering that I live with an embarrassment of riches.
