Jonesfest

Last year we got new decking made in our garden and I managed to acquire a sound system for my comedy night, and when you put them together with a big mosaic I've made, it sort of makes the perfect little stage for hosting a tiny festival in your garden. 

Hosting a festival in you garden is one of those things that I wish was normal. When I've told people about it sometimes they've asked "why?" and I really want to respond "why not? Why aren't you? Why isn't everyone?" Like imagine how good it would be if everyone you know put on a festival every year or 2. Imagine that it was just the standard thing you did, and occasionally you could opt out if you wanted to, but people would stop you to ask why. 

I think the same about slides in houses. I wish it was standard when fitting a staircase for it to be half stairs (for going up) and then half slide. And if you really wanted only stairs without a slide you had to make a point of it and fill in a form and pay a bit extra. That's the kind of world I want to live in.

Dan claims he did not consent to this festival (I didn't - Dan) and as an introvert found it a bit more of a challenge. There definitely were some conversations about it though and if he was on facebook he would have seen an invite and the itinerary! (Without me you'd never have spelt itinerary correctly - Dan).

It was originally planned for June, but obviously that didn't happen and then it was really hard to work out whether we should still do it, as the advice is constantly changing and people's views on meet ups change a lot too. In the end we did a massively cut down version of what I originally planned. I had planned a night of music with face painting and hair braiding for the kids, a night of comedy, a live podcast recording, a Jenga tournament, a clothes swap, weaving and knitting workshops, a ukulele strum along and a few other things. All of those thing didn't happen but we did do 5 fun things.

Day one: a bike ride picnic, where I taught the kids rally 123 (you might call it 40 40 home or something else). It's like a cross between hide and seek and Tig (which you might call "tag" or "it"). Anyway the point of this story is that I got outrun by a 7 year old. Sad times. My friend Steve poured salt on the wound by asking me if I let him win, no I didn't he genuinely was faster than me!

Day one was also kids baking, we made cheesecake and gingerbread.

In the evening of day one my lovely friend from uni days Josh came to stay, and on day 2 he put on 2 circus skills workshops on day 2. 

Me and Josh in our student days just hanging out on stilts.

It was a lot of fun. I learnt that there's some circus things I can only do with an angry face and Dan discovered a secret talent for hula hooping.

 

Day 3 was breeze block sculpture, which is one of my favourite things you can do with a single breeze block. If you're looking to sculpt something and your budget is £1.20 I would highly recommend a thermolite breeze block. The true cost though is £1.20, a trip to L13 and a bit of embarrassment. It's slightly embarrassing just being a woman in a builders merchants, you always just feel so aware that you don't look like a builder the whole time. I once got asked out by someone there which further adds the feeling you have that women never enter these places. If I worked in marketing at B&Q I would propose this as their USP:

"Want to not feel completely self conscious while looking round DIY stuff? Don't mind paying double for the privilege? Come to B&Q where we have women, and the ability to browse without having to state exactly what you want in imperial measurements."

So I went to the builders merchants to buy 5 breeze blocks. It was a rainy day but I specifically wanted dry breeze blocks, you can't sculpt wet ones. I made the builder man get some out that were 5 layers down, just to add the the awkwardness of being a woman, bringing my kids and only wanting 5 blocks. Anyway it was all worth it. None of these are finished yet but I think they all had fun.

The finale of Jonesfest was Drama games led by the brilliant Steph. There were 3 families as well as us, all with kids ages 1-8 and considering some people didn't even want to say their names at first, she did an excellent job of gently bringing us out of our shells. At the end one of the kids was begging her to do more. 

I particularly enjoyed an improvised quick-fire game where someone says "what are you doing?" and you had to come up with an action such as "reading a book" or "mowing the lawn." Percy came up with "killing a cow". I asked him later about it and apparently it was the first thing that came into his head. This led me and Dan to come up with the actions "taking my son to counselling" and "resuscitating a cow".

It was a super fun weekend and I can't wait to start planning Jonesfest 2021! you're invited.

This week feels like the last week of this bizarre season of a pandemic and having the kids 24/7. Today was Eric's nursery trial, he'll be doing 3 days a week and Percy will be starting year 1 on Monday.  I'm going to have some child free time at last!! I'm pretty excited about all the things I could do, but that's a whole other blog post which I'll write soon. Well done for surviving life this far everyone. xx

Food

Lockdown is the time for some deep refections on life and since it's 12.45am and my neighbours are having a party which is keeping me up, I might as well write down some of those observations now.

Today I was asked on twitter what is the opposite of ham. I replied "A happy pig?" Other possible answers include cheese, bread, and eggs.

But I've been having my own food-based ponderings and have managed to write down a list of unwritten rules about bread and toast:

Is this just the UK rules? If anyone is reading this from outside the UK let me know your rules.

My kids regularly ask for weird sandwiches such as a grape sandwich. Peanut butter and raisin is a current favourite of Eric. No pun intended.

A few weeks ago we signed up for a Zoom cookery class. It was a free class and they provide all the ingredients for free delivered to your door, it sounded great. I had visions of learning to make a curry sauce from scratch with the boys, before sitting down to eat our wonderful creations as a family. What actually happened was I pretended to make Jam quite convincingly on Zoom. I knew my B in GCSE drama would come in handy one day. 

Yeah I was not that happy when they announced the first lesson would be jam and chutney and Dan was busy working, so I had a 2 hour Zoom class to make these things with a 3 year old and a 5 year old. And we have Jam! You can buy it for 23p, whereas fresh strawberries are something we treat ourselves to every few weeks in the summer, and we were completely out of caster sugar that week. It was sold out in our local shop, so the thought of turning fresh strawberries and sugar into boring old jam while trying to supervise two kids didn't appeal. 

I made the chutney, that was first, and chutney is even more pointless than jam. I guess it's middle class savoury jam for people having cheese and wine parties, which is very few people in lockdown. And really, if you had a load of good cheese, and wine, no one would miss the chutney. Anyway I made the chutney and then started chopping up the strawberries for the jam and putting them in the pan (which wasn't on) giving them the occasional stir, then I made my excuse to leave because of the kids, (who annoyingly choose that moment to be angels) and then we ate the strawberries. Unfortunately she has asked me to send a photo. If you're the one Facebook friend on this course with me, please don't grass me up. I did the next week; I made pizza and focaccia bread. It was delicious. 

Dan and Eric did the class where you make chocolate marshmallow scones, they were incredible!

Have you tried any new recipes under lockdown? What did you make?

Thanks for reading. x

The Lockdown Birthday Boys

Eric was born 4 days after Dan's 31st birthday, bad planning there. Some people say, when they give birth on their own birthday, "it's the best gift ever." Each to their own, but I always think "really, always having your birthday overshadowed by your child's birthday is the best gift ever?" Have you never received a scalextric? I really tried had to make Eric not be born on Dan's birthday, he was going to be induced early (because he was too tiny and they were worried he wouldn't get enough from the placenta) so I sort of had a bit of a say over the induction day, but in the end he came before being induced so 4 days apart was the best I could do.

It was hard to think of a way to make Dan's birthday special, in lockdown, with our kids, in bad weather. If one of those 3 factors were different I could think of ideas, but you have to be pretty creative to think of a way to make a day special locked in your house with your crazy kids who you've had no break from in 6 weeks. We had a bit of a dilemma about whether he should take the day off work. It seemed a waste of a day, but also we wanted to make the day different, so we decided to do it and it was a good choice. 

I got up first with the boys and we decorated the house with balloons and homemade bunting, he had a couple of presents and we played Happy Birthday (the Stevie Wonder version) as he came down. We actually made him cry! Result!

 

I had collected a few video messages from a few of his close friends, including our old friend Will in Australia, they were really lovely. The main fun thing you can still do in lockdown is eating and we all love to eat nice food, so we had a special breakfast of pastries, a special party lunch and a takeaway for tea. Dan even got these very special artisan biscuits in the post, but when he wasn't looking I switched them for custard creams. Ha ha ha I'm hilarious.

In the morning it was cold and windy but not actually raining, so we used the opportunity to get out to Otterspool. In the afternoon we snuggled up and watched the film "The Incredibles". I doubt it would have been Dan's first choice if we didn't have kids, but it was a nice compromise. The best thing about home schooling is you can just decide to sack it off for the day if it's your Dad's birthday. 

In the evening Dan's sister Lydia organised a family quiz, Dan's brother Josh even got up at 4am in Korea to join! One round was a picture round on famous land marks from above, like the Taj Mahal etc. We couldn't work out this one of a normal looking house, I thought it must be a celebrity house like the childhood home of John Lennon or something, but after a lot of back and forth we realised it was actually our current house!

On Sunday it was Eric's turn for a birthday. I think it's a bit easier to think of fun stuff for a 3 year old, and actually 3 and younger is the perfect age for a lockdown birthday. They are happy with lots of attention from us and don't particularly need loads of other people in the house. He woke in the morning forgetting it was his birthday and said "mummy come and look at the morning mist." He was very excited about the morning mist until he realised it was his birthday. He had a lot more presents than Dan, all the family had sent stuff. He's Fireman Sam Mad at the moment so there were a lot of fireman related presents and a few garden toys. We did the homemade Elmer Piñata too. 

We spent the whole day in several different forms of fancy dress, because why not! We had online youtube church followed by coffee on zoom with our church friends. This was the first time we'd tried this and it was a bit weird because when you're having coffee after church you don't talk to 20 people at the same time. But it was nice and they sang happy birthday to Eric and we cut the fire engine cake.

Then we had some delicious food and social distancing visits from our friend the Nevils and Dan's parents. 

I hope we'll find this photo in the future and wonder "what was going on here?"

We also made a social distancing visit to our friend Steve, who also had a birthday that day. Still in fancy dress obvs.

We had a short virtual party, which consisted of musical bumps which didn't really work because no one could hear our music, a scavenger hunt and a magic show, from our very own magic boy.

We ended the day with a sleepover and watched the new Lady and the Tramp. The boys were super excited to sleep downstairs and we were thrilled to be woken by a lot of jumping the next morning! #sarcasm.

I can't believe my baby is 3! I really am gutted that he's growing up because he's just too cute at this age. I didn't mind Percy growing up I was excited to for him to reach new stages, but it seems really sad now to be leaving the baby stage behind. The little voice, the way he neatly fits onto my lap, the way he walks and moves that isn't quite like an adult. I really don't feel like this about actual babies, I was relieved when we reached his first birthday. It was like "Happy birthday not long to go until you get fun" and sleep deprivation really makes me a horrible person.

Eric at nearly 1

Sleep and money are the main reasons that we're done having babies, but to focus on the positives, I am super excited to be a bit more free again. In September Eric will get his free nursery hours (hopefully if nurseries are open again) so I can get a job, or have more time to give to making comedy a job, or try and go back to the art workshop stuff I used to do. But also we can just do more fun stuff that we've been too scared to try with tiny people, like camping and ice skating and cycling. I hope when the world is open again we'll be ready for a lot of family fun.

Bad Haircuts and Llama Farms.

Hey, how are you all? I hope you're ok. If you're not ok message me, I could cycle to your house and act out your favourite film in interpretive dance, or something, to make you smile. I am really sorry for the people who aren't having a good time, but I'm having a lot of fun! Its hard work and full on, but I'm doing things I would never normally do and I think I feel less stressed than normal, because all I have to do is keep my kids alive and entertained, I don't have to be anywhere, or ever be professional.

I was excited but stressed about the weekend of Eric's 3rd birthday (next weekend). I had a gig on the Friday night, then on Saturday I had my hour long show at the Coventry Comedy Festival and then the Sunday was Eric's birthday. So all this meant I had to make a Fireman Sam birthday cake, learn an hour of comedy, (and also 10 minutes of comedy which needs to be 10 mins of best bits not just the first 10 mins of the show) make childcare arrangements for Saturday, because Dan would have a small part in my show, promote my show, then after the show immediately drive home and then host a 3rd birthday party. All fun things to do, but 3 fun things together does not equal a fun weekend. So I think Eric will have a way better day with just the 4 of us having time for him.

I think these times are great for creative people, theres so many fun ideas going around of stuff you can do with kids. We've done a lot, with varying levels of success. Percy has tried stop-frame animation with lego, most days they do yoga, we made the stairs into a slide, we made bagels that were horrible, we made rhubarb crumble that was not horrible.

Making the crumble

We made dinosaur eggs,

Tape town, 

We made paint bombs and painted the drive, 

We played "what's the time Mr wolf?" a lot, learned telling the time with a paper plate clock, decorated the house for a drive-bye wedding.

We've eaten outside most days. Percy cycled 3.5 miles, we've made toilet roll rockets,

and rainbows,

We've drawn on the walls, (we're going to get rid of this awful wall paper)

I made a pinata, (find out how I did it on my art page)

Dan launched his improvised comedy story-telling podcast

And we did one disastrous haircut that was traumatic for everyone.

Sorry Percy.

It doesn't look quite as bad now, but it's safe to say Dan is not looking forward to his lockdown vasectomy.

We've also had a lot of chats about future adventures, which we do a lot, but I think now that we have decided not to have a third child I would really like to do something fun so that I don't regret not having a third. So I can look back and say "a third child would have been nice, but if we'd had a third we never would have bought that llama farm in Peru." The average cost of raising a child in the UK is apparently £75,000 which coincidentally is also the exact cost of buying a llama farm in Peru.

More likely ideas are moving to the south of France, or having a family gap year and homeschooling the boys in a camper van. This is really a whole separate blog post, there's lots to think about. It's fun to look at what kind of house you can buy for not a lot of money in France, but it's less fun to think about what you would actually do for money, and what you would do with your old house and about how my French is so bad that I once accidentally announced in French to a French person "I am very pretty".

Stay Safe. xx

Lockdown and Homeschool.

Hey, how's everyone doing in day five of lockdown? What I don't get and what I just kept saying while watching the news was "why didn't they close things ages ago?" Schools were still open 8 days ago! and I couldn't really take things seriously when the schools were still open. I mean I wasn't like going around licking Grannies and stuff, but I did meet up with people and take Eric swimming in the last week of schools. It was last weekend I thought "time to take things seriously now the schools are shut."

Obviously we should all be careful and stay indoors and that means hopefully in 2 weeks time not a lot of people will be dying from this. But the people who are dying today got infected when schools were still open and people were still living almost normal lives, and I personally would blame the government for that. I don't know all the ins and outs and science and economics but it's not like we were the first country to get this and didn't really know what we were doing. However much hand washing and social distancing we're doing today it's not helping the people who got it a week or two ago.

My sister Sarah has had a crazy time recently as she was due to get married on 11th April. At first when this stuff came into the news she thought "ok maybe I have to limit the wedding to less than 100 people", then she thought she'd have a very small wedding in the church and a big celebration in a year, then even her small wedding was not possible because the banns of marriage were not published 3 times, and churches were shut. Then she planned an outdoor social distancing small family wedding which would not be legal, but managed to see this wedding wizard guy who did something magic so that the banns thing didn't matter anymore. Straight from there they went to the church in normal clothes, got legally married with 2 witnesses and went back to separate houses. In her head the "real" wedding was going to be in the garden today where she would wear her dress and we would sing some songs and play some games at a safe distance. Then we went into lockdown and this was no longer possible. I suggested we all planned our weekly shop at the same time and that she walked down a different kind of aisle in her dress, but she didn't go for it.

Homeschooling has been quite fun at times, I'm sure the novelty will wear off. I feel like Eric is getting a bad deal. He normally gets me to himself in the day, but now a lot of focus has been on Percy's learning. We have a timetable which starts with yoga at 9AM. I love this kids yoga, Cosmic Kids yoga on YouTube. It's basically putting your kids in front of YouTube guilt free, Percy loves it. Eric joins in sporadically. At 10am I've been doing live craft which has been really fun. I like the interaction of it being live, but it is a little stressful when Eric is kicking off and having to make the crafts at a few different stages is effort. Yesterdays was super fun though.

Day 1 weaving

Day 2 Treasure maps

Day 3 Magazine holder

Day 4 Turtles

Day 5 Giant board game.

If you want to follow the crafts like my page.

It 11AM Percy does half an hour of reading while Eric has half an hour of 1-on-1 time with either me or Dan. Percy's reading is painfully slow. 12 is lunch and exercise time.

Then we have a bit of time for school worksheets. The teacher also sends work, yesterday was make a butterfly and we smashed it.

This school time is great if Eric naps, which is not what normally happens. Today we drove to a park (now banned I think) and we drove a bit extra to get Eric to sleep, which meant I could teach Percy properly. I quite enjoyed today's lesson where I taught him about money, how to recognise the coins, what £2 could actually buy you. He loved it, and it was a nice feeling to be like "I actually taught you something you didn't know today." It makes me think I should do more stuff like this in school time.

The kids watch TV at 3 and have daddy time after that. The first the plan was for him to teach music and French, but I think this was a bit ambitious at the end of the day.

Today I was feeling pretty positive, I like change, I've video chatted this week with people I haven't talked to for ages.

Extended family chat

I even played Monopoly with our friends Jess and Martin. It works well if you have two boards and when you owe money you put it in the bank and they take it out of their bank.

It's nice to have a break from doing so much comedy, it's nice to have lunch as a family, and now that they've announce the self employed thing I should be fine for money. But then I watched the news...
People are dying everywhere, but the thing that made me really sad was seeing a massive refugee camp of Syrians who don't have running water. So far no one there has it, but it's only really a matter of time before someone gets it, and then everyone will get it and anyone who would go to hospital here, and have the chance of getting better, will just die.
I don't know what I can do about that other than pray, but there's ways I can help people here. There's friends I can check up on, and I'm helping with a Food Bank. I hope my art is fun for parents out of ideas. I really hope I can be generous, and kind with what I have.

Stay safe x

The Lucky Ones

Since I last blogged the world has gone mental. My last blog was about a guy saying I was shit at a comedy gig. Now I long for the opportunity to go out and be called shit. It's so crazy that less than 3 weeks ago I was at my sisters hen do, we were happily playing the classic toilet roll wedding game, we didn't even save the used bits of toilet roll. We all left saying "see you in 6 weeks". Now it's looking like the wedding might be just immediate family, I might be the only bridesmaid. The Hen do will certainly be a bigger gathering than the wedding. My other sister is a doctor who specialises in infectious diseases so this must be like Christmas for her!

But we are the lucky ones. I always think it's funny when people say "oh you were lucky" on days when you've had a car crash and only got minor injuries. People said that to me when I dislocated my elbow just before my GCSEs, I was "lucky" because it was my left arm. But what about all the days that nothing bad happened! You don't go calling people lucky then. But I guess I feel like of all the times in our lives this could have happened this is actually a good time for us. Dan is able to work from home, I will loose some work, I had some paid comedy gigs coming up and some schools work in June but hopefully it will just be pushed back. The kids are at an ok age, they're not worried, they're not in the middle of exams, Eric is just about old enough for me to explain things to him. Our house is big enough and we have a garden. They will still drive me mental though!

But imagine if this happened while we were in our old tiny house with a little yard, or when we were homeless, living with another family. We're also all healthy so we don't need to worry too much about us getting it, and our parents are young enough to not be at risk either. We are a best case scenario family, and I hope we will be able to use this privilege to help others.

We know old people who can't take any risks and will be completely isolating for months, I know a lot of comedians who don't have another job and have paid out for Edinburgh and stuff, I know a couple who are both self employed, I know a single mum on a zero hours contact. What will homeless people do?

 We've got a old neighbour called Geoff, he's such a legend. Once when I got trapped in my porch with both kids I had to climb out of the window and run and get help, Geoff was the first person I saw, he's always out walking his 2 dogs. I got him to come back to mine, I climbed back into the window and then passed the boys out of the window to him. Eric was only a baby at the time and cried, but we managed. I saw him in the street yesterday and he was saying how if he has to self isolate he won't be able to go out and top up his gas card because he's on a pre-paid meter. I told him to leave his number with us and we'll look after him. He doesn't have much family and isn't on the internet. Today he called round with his number and gave us 2 toilet rolls!  he said "your kids.... when I see them my heart shines, and when they go in your house it's like the sun goes in."

We have a lot to be thankful for, so I feel like we're able to be positive about this time. We don't actually spend much time as a 4 so I think this could be nice, when you are limited in what things you can go out and do it does make you be creative with what you have. I hope to practise my banjolele more, maybe write some new comedy, get back into art, I'm thinking textile stuff (batik and machine embroidery is something I want to do more of). Dan has already been making a podcast which hasn't been released yet, but this might be the ideal time. I'm going to finally start Eric's baby book, I spent hours doing Percy's one but Eric's isn't even started.

This is a weird week where everyone has been told not to go out, but the schools are still on for now. As a massive extrovert I'm trying to get out and see people while I still can. Yesterday we did some chalk painting after school.

I've decided to do a Facebook live craft a day for kids, everyday at 10am starting on 23rd March from my Hannah the artist page. I'd love people to interact and post photos of what stuff they've made.
Here's the link: https://www.facebook.com/artisthannahjones/

The internet does make this time in history better. I'm normally a bit down on the internet but it's great to see people asking for or offering help, sharing photos and videos of funny stuff they're getting up to.

A nice thing about being a parent in times like this is that kids are so in the moment, they don't get the seriousness of the situation, they're not talking about it all the time like adults are. I had to begin the day yesterday by singing happy birthday to one of Percy's teddies. He also said before bed "mummy I love you from the ground to space, Daddy I love you from the ground to the top of a giraffe." He is unaware of what a burn that is to Daddy because he's really saying Mummy I love you 20,000 more time than Daddy. (based on space being 100km away and a giraffe being 5 meters high)

Stay strong friends!
Big up the NHS workers
Big up the supermarket workers, thanks for staying calm in the chaos.
Parents - you can do this!
People who are struggling financially, emotionally, or health wise have a virtual hug from me, lets all look out for each other. x