Last day of six

I'm getting lots of cuddles from this little girl today as she won't be so little tomorrow when she turns seven. She is, as you can imagine, very excited.

She has often commented that she doesn't like birthday cake very much. Most children just eat the icing off and abandon the cake and I tried to explain that children's birthday cakes are often the very plainest of cakes. I can make much more delicious cakes than those that are easy to shape into mermaids and such but she didn't want that sort of cake at all. She wants an ice-cream cake.

Memories of horrid, plasticky ice-cream cakes at McDonalds' parties when I was young have rather put me off ice-cream cake so I decided to go fully home-made. I have made Nigella's strawberry ice-cream with lovely pure cream and fresh strawberries. Bethany helpfully cleaned out the ice-cream maker's freezer bowl before I washed it up.

Do you like the way her fingernails match the freezer bowl? Andrew and Toby were in Sydney last weekend watching Celtic lose unexpectedly to the Central Coast Mariners so Jossie, Bethany and I had a girls' weekend. We painted our nails blue, made pizzas and watched Little Dorrit on DVD.

I finished my book club book for the month - Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle. I wasn't sure I wanted to read it as it looked a bit like a misery memoir. I know a lot of people love misery memoirs, I met a lady in the library once who read nothing else, but I am not a fan. Jeannette Walls has the background to write the most miserable of memoirs but she hasn't done that. She is remarkably non-judgmental of her parents and the book wasn't at all painful to read. Now, I am reading the memoir of a former kitchen maid (this book is marketed to lovers of Downton Abbey) and am finding it fascinating. Not surprisingly, she is pretty scathing of the upstairs folk. Still, they never seem very happy to me in books or on film so I think I would actually prefer to be downstairs, doing something useful and falling in love with Mr Bates. They all did that didn't they?