Back To Normality

It's very quiet here today. Having had Daniel home from university for the last five weeks, and Eleanor off school for the last fortnight, the house has been filled with noise. Today, you could hear a pin drop.

We haven't done much over the Easter weekend as Saturday was the start of the cricket season so Mick and Daniel were out all day playing their first match and on Sunday, we packed Daniel up and took him back to university.

While the boys were out playing cricket on Saturday, I did a bit of baking for Daniel to take back with him on Sunday. First, I made a lemon drizzle cake. Can you see all the little holes that I stab in in so that plenty of lemon syrup drains right in to the cake?

Then, I made Daniel's favourite, brownies. This is a Mary Berry recipe and it's delicious, crispy on the outside and deliciously gooey on the inside.

Before Daniel went back to university on Sunday, he decided that he'd open up a tin in which he'd been saving bits and bobs of money over the last couple of years.

He hadn't been able to see what was in there as it's completely sealed and there's no way of getting in unless it's opened up with a tin opener.

I was surprised that he'd managed to squirrel away quite so many notes.

He'd got £95 in notes, £60 in pound coins and £5 in fifty pences. The rest of the coins didn't make up whole bags of what the bank would accept, so he used this money to start off another tin. All told though, there was about £200 in that tin. He's taken some of the money back to university with him and asked me to put the rest of it in his bank account for him. He's not daft with money, he manages his student loan himself, working out his rent, what he needs for food shopping and what he can afford to spend on going out. My friend works all this out for her son and drip feeds him an allowance week by week, but I think it's important that they get used to looking after their own finances, you can't be doing it for them all their life.

So as I said, the house is very quiet today, but it's only four weeks now until Eleanor leaves school. She only has to go back in when she has an exam after that, so the house will, once again, be full of noise.