Hestia & Sonshine - now we are 12

Eggy bread breakfast - hence the tomato sauce
We don't usually have tomato sauce at breakfast
*cough*

Twelve years ago this very day, Tartarus gave me a son.  And an inkjet printer.

Getting the son thing needs no explanation, but the inkjet printer was a gift in lieu of a bouquet of flowers.  Even through my drug-addled post-Caesarian haze, I realised that the box at the end of my bed didn't contain anything romantic.

But, by jingo, it lasted for YEARS!

Unlike the bouquets of flowers that my fellow new mothers received.

Practical man is Tartarus.


Fast forward 12 years and here I am, celebrating Sonshine's final non-teenage year.  Of course, the preenage shit has started already.

'What would you like for your birthday, darling?'

'A gaming laptop with an NVDIA graphics card....one of these would do.'  He points to a black laptop on the Amazon screen.

Did you hear that? 'Would do.'  In other words, this laptop that he has found will suffice his needs, but it's rather for OUR benefit that he has chosen it.

I check out the computer that he's talking about.

'Alienware? Looks pretty cool with the red back-lit keys.......IT'S HOW MUCH????????'

Reader, it was nearly £800.  I blanched at the thought of the one he REALLY wanted.

Oh for the days when he just harped after a LEGO Pirate Ship.

Needless to say he did not get it.  But he got money instead.  He has worked out that at his current rate of 'earning', he will have left university by the time he can afford to buy it.  Inside myself, I secretly rejoice.

Then comes the flinging down on the sofa.  The watery eyes.  The 'no one understands me,' routine.  And I am amazed at how easily I can tune it out and still watch Grimm on TV over the top of his head.

Hard.  That's me.

Anyway.  He wanted a cake.  A home-baked cake.

So yesterday I baked two sponges, which, with my usual baking aplomb, turned out about an inch thick.  Officially, they are pancakes.

They were carefully stored in the cake tin until this morning when I seized the bull by the horns.  Or rather the cream carton by the lid.

And I transformed the sponges into this:

Will let you know how it actually tastes later once I've poisoned fed it to people.

Still only the thickness of a novel by Cheryl Cole though:

Tartarus phoned alllllll the way from Denmark or Norway or wherever it is he is currently working.

I was dreading the phone being handed to me because the cheque that I put in Sonshine's card wasn't quite what Tartarus and I had agreed I should write.....

'So how much did we give him for his birthday?'  the disembodied voice asked down the crackly line.

'Sorry? I can't hear you..... it's a really bad line, Tartarus.'

I crunkle up the sellophane from the top of the strawberry punnet into the receiver.

He repeats his question.

'I gave him a cheque,' I shout back. 'I made it out for.......'

And promptly cut the phone off.

He never reads this blog.

He'll NEVER know.  And you'll never grass me off, right?