www.tineke.net

Archive for July, 2010

I’m so happy about these beans.

These are the first dozen green beans from our garden. I don’t know why, but you just don’t get green beans in the shops here, and I hadn’t realised how much I missed them until I saw these little beauties curling out of the flowers on the bean plants.

Following the instructions I’ve seen that you should pick your beans pretty hard in order to get them producing more, I pounced today and picked out the biggest 12 I could find. I ate one raw while I was cooking, and threw the rest in our dinner for a short while, so they were still a little bit crunchy. Adults and toddler alike agreed that they were very good.

These were from seeds sent to me by my Mum in NZ. They’ve grown very happily here so far and there are signs of many many more beans to come. Hurrah!

This weekend I made my first ever batch of jam. Late last summer I picked about 3 kilos of blackberries from our garden, and froze them all, intending to spend some wet wintery day making jam.

Now it’s summer again, and our blackberry bushes are heaving with little green berries. So, in anticipation of a really bumper crop later in the summer, I figured I should use up some of those frozen berries now.

And here they are, six happy little jars of jam. There was another half a jar too, which is in the fridge for using right away. In the absence of scones and clotted cream, I mixed a couple of spoons into some of my home made yoghurt, for immediate nom.

For a while, I’ve been considering colouring my hair with henna instead of using chemical dyes.  This has partly been driven by the fact that I hate the thought of all the icky chemicals I’ve been smearing on my head for years, and partly because I’m consistently disappointed with their lack of grey coverage.

So, finally, this week I took the plunge.   I used 200g of henna and about 50g of indigo, to darken it up a bit and make it a bit more brunette than just red.

Here are some before photos – I had a cocktail of colours including old dye jobs, old highlights, and my natural blend of mouse brown and badger grey.

And here are the after photos.    These were taken the day after, and since then the colour has darkened up a bit.

I was concerned that I’d still have a really strong tide mark where the old blonde was growing out – but although it’s still there, it’s slightly less obvious. I was also a bit scared of coming out fire-engine red, but since the henna sits on top of your existing hair colour, that is unlikely unless your hair is very fair to begin with. Plus, the addition of indigo was a good way to tone it down.

Most of all I’m impressed with the grey coverage. I have tried endless dyes that claim “100% grey coverage” and each and every time I have still been able to see greys immediately after I used the damn stuff. It’s been a few days now, and several shampoos later I still can’t see the greys peeking through – I can tell that some hairs are lighter than the others, but they’re a pleasant coppery red rather than grey. Plus my hair feels like it’s in better condition than before. It’s a double win!

Those little people can be silly at times.  Our little one took a tumble in the bathroom the other night, and instead of catching herself with her hands (as is most common) or forehead (less common, but it’s happened more than once), she caught herself with her mouth.  This new technique resulted in one very loose little tooth, a bit of blood, and quite a lot of tears.

According to the dentist, the tooth is quite likely to be alright once the gum around it heals up nicely and snugs it back into place.   So she’s back on “baby” style food for a while – mushy stuff and things that can be cut up really small.  Which is a shame when she has really started to enjoy using her incisors on apples, knäckebröd, and other crunchy things.

The most perplexing thing about this episode is that it happened when she wasn’t even climbing on anything.  She’s such a danger monkey that we’re both amazed that the first tooth injury didn’t occur as a result of climbing in the fireplace, or out a window, or up on a dining chair to play with my laptop, or onto the kitchen stool to play at the sink …