danieldwilliam | On Birthday Weekends

I have had a lovely weekend.

My mum, sister, niece and daughter are all visiting. They all seemed cheerful. My sister has been finding being a new mother difficult. My mum has been helping out a lot but has been worried about my sister and not had enough time to manage her own life. They both seemed in a much better place. My daughter has not seem much in the way of education this month because of the snow and the strikes. My niece has very round ears and a nice smile. Everyone being cheerful seemed to help everyone else be cheerful and MLW has been hosting with great skill and sensitivity. I have been cooking.

I cooked steak for MLW, mum and myself on Friday and on Sunday I cooked two Balkan Drunken Chickens (take a chicken, insert a small can of beer or a stuby in to it, roast upright, use the remaining beer to make gravy). Both a triumph.

Got a lovely email from an old school friend of mine with a photograph of where I used to sale in Queensland.

Saturday was spent watching rugby and playing board games. It was super Saturday, the last round of the Six Nations. Tense game against Italy although I was not experiencing the near existential despair I usually get when Scotland go behind to Italy. Explained more of the rules to mum. Watched the England Ireland match out of the corner of my eye. Mixed feelings about the result. I'd rather nobody won the Grand Slam (unless it were Scotland) but I'd rather Scotland finished as high up the table as possible - so hoping for an Ireland Grand Slam was the order of the day. With Ireland's win we needed a close Wales win - which we got. So we finish third. Which is alright and a good place to start our preparation for the 2019 World Cup. We do have to beat Ireland in that, in the group stages in order to avoid New Zealand in the quarter finals - so we'd better work out how to do that.

The rest of the day I spent playing board games with the Captain and my sister. We played Stramash - which is becoming a fast family favourite. Use playing cards to move a fleet of marbles round a track - a bit like Ludo. It has a built in difficulty escalator - the more marbles you have home the harder it is to get the last couple home so games tend to be close. Then we played Clank (a present from my sister to the Captain) which is a deck building game where you use the deck to move around a castle stealing treasure and fighting monsters. By luck I hit upon a very successful strategy and won by quite a margin. It's a game aged for 13+ so the 8 year old Captain did well to beat his aunt. She also played Kings of Tokyo with him (I was watching the rugby.) Exploding Kittens got an outing too.

The rest of the day I spent dandling my niece with the very round ears on my knee. I like babies and she's a particularly fine example.

Then round to dad's for dinner.

Sunday was the day of the Captain's birthday party. (His birthday is later this week.) He was having a trampolining party. This went well. Lots of excited kids bouncing. Well organised and run by the venue. The bouncing looked fun, the kids were pleasant. We were finished by 2pm - leaving me plenty of time to cook Balkan Drunken Chicken whilst the Captain enjoyed some birthday love from his family. I spent the evening finding out about Uzbekistan for my mum.

Early start this morning for the gym and here I am.