I am a proud mum

Both the boys have been up and down this week, not helped by J developing an ear infection. This has meant we haven't done much and have tried to stay indoors as much as we could.

We missed MEND on Tuesday, but D went to Spanish on Wednesday.

They are now onto months of the year, days of the week and birthdays. He had a little bit of homework to catch up, but he did this on Thursday. He will go over it all again at the beginning of next week as a reminder.

Though J was still not feeling well on Thursday, he wasn't going to miss MEND as it was the last one and they were having a food tasting session. This meant we had to do some cooking on Thursday morning following the MEND friendly recipes we had received. This is a walnut and apricot loaf that J made. It also contains apple. We should have used the zest and juice of an orange, but they had all been eaten, so we substituted apple juice. This went down really well and we are going to make it again for us.

D made this plum crumble. We all agreed we would like to have more topping. It was a normal crumble mix but had oats added. Instead of sugar, honey was drizzled on the fruit. We enjoyed this too.

D made these vegetarian sausages. These tasted a lot better than we had expected, though I think they would be a lot better served with the tomato sauce suggested. We will try these again and see. The sausages were made using breadcrumbs, oatmeal, mustard powder, thyme, parsley and an egg yoke. After shaping they were dipped in the egg white and flour before being fried. Very simple and quick to prepare.

J made these sweet potato wedges. They tasted lovely and definitely a must.

As this was the last session, J was measured and we had a lovely surprise when we compared them to the starting measurements. He has grown 1.5cms(mum not happy as he is now 1 inch shorter than me!), lost 7cms around his waist, and lost 3.2kgs in weight. After his hard work, J is now at a safe weight and I am so proud of his hard work and determination in achieving this. I am now hoping that he will keep up the hard work and maintain a safe weight into adulthood.

All the children were given a graduation certificate and also a certificate which listed what the other participants thought of them. This was definitely a good boost to personal esteem that these children sometimes need. The instructor very kindly gave certificates to D too. He wasn't enrolled on the scheme, but as I had no one to leave him with, he attended the sessions and partook in all the activities. His hard work and support had also been recognised.

We are going shopping on Monday to buy J a little treat as a reward and to show how pleased I am with what he has achieved.

Details of the MEND can be found on their website, http://www.mendprogramme.org/.

Apart from the library and reading, there hasn't been much more going on here this week, but we do know, that the end of next week is going to be busy. Hope everyone will be feeling up to it.