My (not so) Silent Sunday

The day started before dawn and by mid morning the garden had turned into a holiday camp, complete with Bollywood music on a mini-ghetto blaster (courtesy of Charlotte, age 8). I was in the middle of baking scones (as the blueberry muffins I made the day before hadn’t lasted long). My hands were just at the kneading out the dough stage when my father phoned to see if I was up to a Skype call. I had the flour covered phone tucked between shoulder and ear… ‘Erm, give me a minute…’.

Hubbie set up his iPad in front of my baking station and then, all of a sudden, I was being watched.

It wasn’t just my Mum and Dad, there was a surprise… my beautiful sister was there too! She was making a quick visit before Mum and Dad fly south to us for Christmas and I was kind of lost for words at ‘seeing’ her. Skype really is amazing. For my children it’s just ‘life’, but I’m of an age when all this new technology is something I marvel at (and sound very archaic to my children when I start talking about cassette tapes and non-portable telephones that one had to dial… in the ‘old’ days!).

I haven’t seen my sister ‘in real life’ for four years. We rarely get a chance to talk on the phone (both have very busy and extremely different schedules), Skype we should but, again, rarely do, and write – well I’m the one that loves words – my dear sister is amazing with numbers, physics and climbing cliffs (as featured in Climber magazine – photography by her partner, Mike Hutton). My sister isn’t even on Facebook!

So, there she was… beaming back at me from the screen. I felt almost star struck. Meanwhile, at my end of the video conference, my baking was taking another turn – a little naked imp of a 21 month old had climbed up wanting to ‘make shapes’ in the dough, my 5 year old wanted to join in too… and so did my 8 year old and her friend. Mmm, so much for quiet Sunday morning baking. I quickly sent them back out to their holiday camp in the garden.

My Dad commented that it looked and sounded like a war zone… well, yes, one with flour instead of gun powder and, mid-video call, the water guns came out. It was just as well we were having a video call, and could enjoy the pleasure of at least seeing one another, as any form of conversation was extremely difficult – given the frequent interruptions.

Ah well, at least they’ll be feeling ‘in the know’ for their arrival on 20 December!

What’s more, my dear, dear sister has given me the best Christmas news ever… she’s coming to see us Easter 2012!

There is gold at the end of the rainbow!

Have a great week and hope your weekend was good too x

Photo Credit: Mike Hutton (Claire’s wonderful partner in life, love and climbing x)