Evenings full of beans

It is hot and light and upstairs in our house there is a kind of quiet, languid, settled sleeplessness until late into the evening. Mytle is covering her floor with cutting and sticking (who gave her the scissors and sellotape and glue for her bedroom?No one can remember..) and producing strange mytle-sculptures and finger puppets that eat each other by fitting together like Russian dolls. C creates elaborate battle formations. We (vegetarian pacifist bedtime loving parents) are bemused by these developments, a little nostalgic about guaranteed adult time when children were asleep by 7, but deeply understanding and celebrating the need to relax with books and paper and scissors and glue (and little plastic soldiers? well maybe a little more foxed by that one..) To muse on a plan all day and wait until there is quiet and time alone to make it real, this I understand and I suspect somehow may be a seed of happiness for a time far in the future. My daytime plans today; turning allotment broad beans into a pasta sauce with garlic, sundried tomato paste, glugs of olive oil, the juice of a lemon, black pepper, dill (don't leave this out), marjoram (it grows outside the kitchen door so it ends up in most of what I cook; I have no stronger opinion about it than that) feta cheese, chopped fresh tomatos and black pepper. It was eaten to the sound of Just William on Myrtle's CD player and interrupted once by Myrtle with a puppet show and her Christmas list "just checking if I can ask Father Christmas for a real dog and stuff to make a birds nest with"