This week’s gallery theme is Here come the girls. What a great theme. Here are some of the girls who are important to me. (There are, of course, others, but I don’t have easily accessible photos of them!)

This is me, my American cousin Sally Anne (who now lives in Ireland) and my cousin Sunny (who now lives in America). We were about 13 here, I think, though Sally is a couple of years older. Sally was over for a visit and we both went to stay with Sunny for a few days. I tried to persuade them to go to the Radio 1 Roadshow in Skegness, because I thought Sally would like it as she was American. No idea about my logic there!

I think this is shortly before Sunny and I both got heavily into Madonna and started wearing fingerless gloves and big silver crosses. Now, that was fun.

The lady in the middle is Granny Mary. She passed away a long time ago, now (26 years I think) and is still very much missed by us all – even those, like my sister, who never met her. I like to think I inherited my love of jazz from her.

This is Granny Goddard holding Rosemary when she was a baby. She’s long overdue a visit and hopefully I’ll rectify that at half-term. Although she’s only just over an hour away by car, it takes a whole day to visit by train (about 3 hours each way, including walking to and from stations at each end) which means school holidays are the only time we can do it (Sunday trains don’t make it feasible). She is a Great Great Grandmother, which is pretty amazing and she’s a true matriarch.

Here I am with my mum, back in my home-schooled days. It always amazes me what she gave to me in those days – teaching me, helping me, talking to me, taking me off round Europe to Esperanto conferences. And she still gives – these days looking after Eleanor every weekday from 9 to 3, so I can work.

This is my oldest friend. We’ve been friends since she was born (I’m about 6 weeks older than her). We were like sisters for many years and I still think of her and her parents as family. We don’t see each other very often and are both too busy to chat on the phone much, but that doesn’t matter. Because we’ll always be friends and pseudo sisters.

And this is me and my sister a good while back. There are 12 years between us, so we didn’t grow up having the traditional sibling relationship, but I think perhaps this makes what we have now even stronger. We’ve been through a lot together and will probably go through a lot more over the years. She’s my best friend after Chris and I turn to her these days for comfort, laughter and cuddles. She only lives round the corner but we don’t see enough of each other due to differing timetables. Which is a big shame.

And, last but absolutely not least …

… these are now the two most important girls in my life and no doubt will always be so.

Please update your blogrolls/links/whatever to the new address: http://www.wahm-bam.org Thank you! The old feed automatically redirects, but it would be nice (if you have the time/inclination/know-how, of course) if you could change your feeds to point to this one (click the RSS posts link in the top, right-hand corner of the blog). Thank you again. (This, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to get back in the Tots100. Nothing whatsoever.

Here are some images to whet your appetite. I posted a recipe recently and have a fair few more planned. I’m hoping to do at least one a week, but you know me – life will probably get in the way of that.

Vegetable lasagne

With a meat version to make at the same time if you’re so inclined:

Served with salad an garlic bread.

Vegetable risotto

Made with onions…

and vegetables…

Also coming soon will be minestrone soup and tortilla (the Spanish omelette, rather than the Mexican wraps).

Any votes for which one you’d like to see first?

Any tips on taking good photographs of food you’re cooking? This attempt at showing the tomato sauce for the lasagne is dire, for example:

How do you take a steam-less photo?

Please update your blogrolls/links/whatever to the new address: http://www.wahm-bam.org Thank you! The old feed automatically redirects, but it would be nice (if you have the time/inclination/know-how, of course) if you could change your feeds to point to this one (click the RSS posts link in the top, right-hand corner of the blog). Thank you again. (This, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to get back in the Tots100. Nothing whatsoever.

Well, not to buck the trend or anything, here are some pictures of my girls smiling:

And here’s something that made my smile today:

And a close up:

These flowers were sent to me by Interflora, and have been hand-picked to match the colours of the blog. I love getting flowers, especially ones delivered to the door, though hand-picked bunches from Rosemary are still my favourite (as long as she hasn’t filched them from the neighbours’ gardens, of course). And what a lovely idea to match the blog colours, because that gives me even more inclination to post pictures of them on the blog itself. I can’t imagine anyone hasn’t heard of Interflora, but if you haven’t, do check them out. We’ve used them to send flowers to my Gran and Chris’ mum, among others, and have always had excellent service, and beautiful flowers. Thank  you!

Disclosure: The flowers were obviously free and all the photos were taken with the Kodak EasyShare M580 Digital Camera, kindly provided by Kodak. Still loving it, though the photos are a bit too clear and so show too much of my lack of cleaning prowess.

Little late, but never mind.

I love this picture. This is a picture of everyone except Uncle Bobby, the photographer, at our big family Christmas many, many moons ago (no, I can’t actually remember what year, but I think I must have been 13 or 14 maybe). The four redheads on the sofa are my mum and her three sisters. And surrounding them are their children and husbands (and Ted, the dog). There are more children and grandchildren now, though all the husbands are ex-husbands (and late on top of that, in my dad’s case), which is kind of weird I think, though perhaps these women are particularly hard to live with!

It was a wonderful Christmas, full of family, good food, and a big barrel of beer. It was a bit strange having to do blend in with others’ traditions (we had to go to church on Christmas morning – what’s that all about), but comforting to be with such familiar people at the same time.

Anyway, we’re not religious, but we do celebrate Christmas and this photo really epitomises what Christmas is to me – a celebration of family. This Christmas, we’ll be up in Scotland with Chris’ parents, having a bigger celebration than usual, with family visiting from Down Under. Hopefully it will be as much fun as my last big family Christmas.

I wrote a bit about Rosemary starting school a couple of days ago. It’s now her third morning there and she’s loving it so far.

The teachers provide a summary of what they’ll be doing each week on a Monday, which we think is a great idea. One thing Rosemary tended towards at nursery school and playgroup was responding with ‘Nothing!’ to the query ‘What did you do today?’ But, knowing the topics they’re going to be covering or things they’re going to be doing, means you can offer a prompt to help her.

Yesterday, Chris asked her if she’d done any counting (because that was one of the things they’re working on this week) and she proceeded to tell all about how she was counting while playing hopscotch. Hopefully, the summary will provide enough of a jump-start to help her tell us all about her days. Of course, I’m sure there will still be times when she doesn’t want to talk about it at all, but hopefully not too many.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the new camera on me, so this is taken with the phone (and you can really tell!).

Well, I thought it’s about time I joined in with The Gallery and this week’s prompt is a particularly nice one, I think, because that’s what photographs usually are for me – memories. Of course, they can’t replace actual memories, but they can usually jog them and remind us of a place, a person, a feeling, or just who we were once upon a time.

This is me, many many moons ago:

Rosemary is just about to start school, which will hopefully be a wonderfully exciting and fascinating adventure for her. And I really believe she is going to love school, as long as they can challenge her enough. They weren’t able to challenge me enough, which is why, at the age of seven, I swapped the schoolroom for the kitchen. This is me in my home school. This is where I spent my mornings soaking up knowledge. Delving into the wonders of algebra and symmetry, finding out about the Egyptians and the Greeks, drawing pictures of plants and birds, doing science with candles and jars of water, learning French from a secondary school textbook, learning Esperanto from a correspondence course. This is also where I would eat my lunch of diced up lettuce, cucumber, tomato (from the garden/allotment), cottage cheese and crushed up prawn cocktail crisps, while listening to The Archers. This is where I learnt to sew, to macrame, to knit (none of which really stuck, sadly) and wrote limericks and stories and illustrated books, while listening to the Afternoon Play. For me, this was a place of wonder, far more satisfying than the one I had left. I hope that Rosemary finds her wonder at her new school, but if she doesn’t we’ll make sure she gets it somehow, somewhere, whether at another school, at home or somewhere as yet unthought of.