Reading

I just finished listening to the audio version of How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. I transcribed a few quotes where I felt I was learning something new:

The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As president Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “you do not take a person who, for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say ‘you are free to compete with all the others’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978: “in order to get beyond racism we must first take account of race. There is no other way. In order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.” (…) The construct of race neutrality actually feeds white nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-white Americans towards equity is reverse discrimination. (Chap. 1)

We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an anti-racist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism and regular self-examination. Racist ideas have defined our societies since its beginning and can feel so natural and obvious as to be banal. But antiracist ideas remain difficult to comprehend in part because they go against the flow of this country’s history. (Chap. 1)

Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: people are in our faces, policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people. (Chap. 2)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 3)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 6)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 12)

Here's what to do with strawberries

Assuming you’ve gone out to a field under a hot sun, picked the berries fast or slow, overheard conversations from a few rows over while you were at it, paid for the privilege of picking the ripest fruit from the farmer’s hard labour and the risks he incurred from the season’s capriciousness, come home and delivered them from the uncomfortable confines of their cardboard box and spread them out lovingly on a cloth-covered table where they now perfume the air… here’s what you can do.

You can make a double batch of freezer jam.
You can also make a double batch of berry syrup - for dousing pound cake and whipped cream for example.
You can make a strawberry shrub which comes from olden-day traditions involving vinegar used as a preservative.
You can grab a bunch of them, unadulterated and drop them over waffles and cover them with whipped cream (again with the cream…).
Then, out of ideas and energy and time as they wilt before your eyes, freeze the rest.

Yes, strawberries are a feature of our summer… I’ve written about them before here, mentioned them here, and linked to one of my favourite strawberry desserts: shortcake!

Here's what to do...

Because the kids were home from school, doing school at home, I too stayed home but did no school. Sacrificing school was fine, I told myself, because summer would come and teachers would be home too, and I’d pick up my research again like an old friend, and push ahead with plenty of time for my own study.

So bright and perky on that first day of summer, I checked in with the archives and got an e-mail after the weekend was over, to inform me that the archives are closed under provincial restrictions.

Small spaces with lone researchers are taboo places for Covid cases. Things like old paper shuffled in the silence of concentration in air-conditioned rooms, just lay welcoming viruses, you know. And then I suppose that when the province puts archives into the same category as libraries and museums, disgruntled historians are too few in number, too shy in disposition perhaps, to make the necessary ruckus required for 25% capacity… or 50.

“I’ll bet you,” my husband said, “I’ll bet you Thermëa is open.”

And he was right.

So I took my pale skin to Thermëa, with him, where we shocked our systems hot and cold and laid in the sun, where I temporarily, really, only for a moment, forgot that I could not go and spend time looking through Langevin’s letters under high-ceilinged fluorescent lights.

Enzo - 1 year

The end of June marked one year since we welcomed a beagle puppy into our home… Just before Marie-Hélène’s 11th birthday, we drove out to Branko’s Beagles near Saint-Laurent to pick up the purebred for which she had found the name “Enzo”.

One year in to being a family that owns a dog, Enzo is very much a member of the family… And thankfully, he’s grown. Puppyhood was adorable… but was it ever a lot of work!

Now, he rings a bell when he wants to go outside. He also doesn’t eat everything he finds on a walk. Until having a puppy, we had no idea how much litter people left behind, or how many birds hid in the shrubs along the path…

One fall Thursday, Enzo swallowed a sock. It wasn’t one of our socks… it was a sock someone had left behind in the forest. It was a sock so quickly disappeared I couldn’t tell you if it was a baby’s sock or a dog’s foot warmer, or some careless small person’s. The kids who were with me on the walk, told me of the sock, and it was so quickly gone that I wasn’t even sure there had ever been one. But on the Monday that followed, when we brought Enzo to be neutered and picked him up after the procedure, the vet had made a note on our bill to be more careful about layabout socks. Apparently, when Enzo had been sedated, he’d vomited the sock.

He’s vomited on our carpet twice; once after eating crickets at the park, another time after finding birdseed on a walk and mistaking himself for a member of the feathered species.

Once my sister asked me why we picked a beagle. For one, I’ve always heard good things about the breeder… Branko’s has a brilliant reputation. For another, beagles are known to be friendly, and Enzo is decidedly so.

He’s also an active dog… early on, he was eager to come along on family hikes and now runs alongside Christian on family bike rides, thanks to a bike harness.

Car rides make him nervous and balloons scare him. (We let him play with one when he was a puppy and it popped.)

I didn’t expect that I would turn into a person who likes talking to other dog owners. Even more than that, I didn’t expect that the all-season daily walk would yield such an appreciation for cold weather… There is something special about going out in the cold with a tough dog who delights in getting his exercise no matter what.

Mostly though, Enzo has been a wonderful diversion for the kids. The moment he’s out of sight, they ask, “where’s Enzo?” With school-at-home, he was always around for spontaneous cuddles. His “welcome home” treatment of Christian is delightful to witness.

Drawing

I’ve taken up the practice of keeping a sketchbook and drawing in it daily. I felt completely out of my depths at first, but borrowed Everyday Drawing and Sketching by Steven B. Reddy, followed the steps, and immediately felt encouraged enough by the results to continue. Reddy’s tone is so friendly that one can release oneself from the death-grip of perfectionism.

I’ve noticed, as my enthusiasm for the activity has yet to wane, that it‘s the nature of the activity - the practice that leads to incremental improvement - that I like. Maya Shankar explains it perfectly in an interview on People I Mostly Admire:

Fundamentally, one of the things that I love engaging in are pursuits where your inputs feel like they really matter because they’re expressed in outputs. The more you practice, the better you become as a violinist. And that’s not true in every discipline. You can try your absolute hardest on this latest start-up but then all these market factors and exogenous factors play a role and you just don’t have control over the system. But it felt like I could see the translation of my hard work and see it manifested in better playing. And when you choose a pursuit like that, it can be endlessly satisfying because you’re not always concerned with the absolute quality of playing, you’re concerned with the delta: how much progress you’re seeing over time.

So yay for sketchbooks!

Backyard

We recently walked through a new neighbourhood where backyards lined a large reedy pond and landscapers had only recently finished with brick hardscaping and young plants. The new development and the size of the houses is impressive, but I still come home and count myself supremely content tending to the changes we’ve made in our own small yard.

Before, we had a raised garden and an apple tree. We took apart the raised bed, moved the garden and cut down the apple tree.

With some of the wood from the raised bed, sanded and painted, we made a larger sandbox. On hot days, we can top the sandbox with an inflatable pool.

Cocktails are more fun than wine

For Father’s Day, I bought Christian a cocktail shaker, muddler, stir-spoon and citrus juicer. I also bought Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s Bar Book. You might suspect I bought the book for myself, and you’d be right. But one cannot prepare one’s husband some cocktail without proper technique, no? Morgenthaler talks about cocktails with the same kind of enthusiasm as cooks talk about recipes; I like his voice.

I still like wine. Short of becoming a sommelier, or tracking purchases, or reading reviews and finding out what oak and cherry means in your mouth and nose, wine will always be a little shrouded in fog as far as I’m concerned. Add to that the fact that wines change from year to year, that experts will declare that this label is priced at more than its value to encourage customers to buy it, or whatever, and see? Fog! Most rosés will taste refreshing on a summer’s evening. Most red wines will be fine with that piece of meat. Maybe one will be extraordinary, and that’s a treat, at a restaurant, on a date.

But you know what I imagine is even more satisfying? Preserving the strawberries you picked just the way Morgenthaler recommends you do, and making a shrub one evening, when the air is so warm that even in the darkness of nightfall, you take a careless stroll around the block with your husband and feel like the night is a gentle hug.

Don’t get me wrong… I like wine, but I think that mastering a cocktail here and there might be just plain fun. Wine is serious and sometimes makes me fall asleep, but the other day, when it was Father’s Day, I made mojitos for the first time. While my mother-in-law sat in the living room, I went outside with a bag of ice and used a rolling pin to pound it from cubes to crushed, as if I were a furious drummer: Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat-Tat-Tat... And the mojitos were a surprise! I thought they might be sweeter, but the mix of lime and mint and simple syrup and white rum was a bracing mouthful of flavour with each sip, refreshing in its own way. The glasses, served with straws and soda water, with their floating muddled greenery were their own pieces of art, the way a plate is, when you balance colours: caramelized sauce on charred meat, bright green salad and cubes of red tomatoes dressed in garlicky vinaigrette, the white sphere of potato with its earthy brown skin, and glazed carrots, like chopped orange firewood.

Sometimes I think our artistry is small and sensual. Look at this sky, for example. It’s huge and imposing and can’t fit into a glass.

Alcoholic drinks have always had, in my mind, an association with guilt and shame. Even writing about it here feels like a confession, feels like revealing a thing that should be hidden and I wonder why. I wonder why pleasures are classified like diamonds in a jeweller’s case: good, better, best. I feel like it’s necessary here to defend the happiness I take at the prospect of exploring cocktails. And yet, no one has to defend taking a road trip to see a new landscape even though people can pursue travel with just as much avidity. Why is it that I can take a picture of the sky and feel ownership of it and find that my admiration and sharing of nature is accepted on social media in a way that makes me seem more innocent than if I was to post a picture of a cocktail I made? But I no more own the sky or the praise I get for its capture than I own the recipe I follow and the disapproval it garners.

Sketchbook artists

I’ve recently become entranced by the idea of improving my drawing skills and consequently picked up books on the subject of sketching. I like how artists, when interviewed about sketching, have such varied habits around keeping a sketchbook:

Some have drawn since childhood and other started in adulthood.
Some sketch daily, others can go through phases.
Some plan their sketchbook pages, others don’t.
Some draw from real life, others draw from their imagination.
Some use their sketchbook for experimenting, others use it as a journal.

I don’t know what kind of sketchbook person I will be, but the only way to find out is by dedicating time to it!

84-Ageing

My friend and I have an age difference I don't always appreciate. She's only a few years younger than my dad would have been, were he still alive. Occasionally she talks about some health problem or other, and I busy myself with gentle teasing. Here, in North America, one does one's best to stay young, and then if people lapse and act their age and worry about it, you provide them with excuses and denial. "Pas mal bon pour ton âge" we say in French, when our 83 year old mother-in-law does anything that surprises us. My friend is much younger. She's of the age when, were she to die, people would say that she died young. And since I am twenty years younger myself, I have poor perspective on the subject. Therefore it came as a surprise to read Mary Oliver speak so gently about ageing in her essay “Building the House”:

There is something you can tell people over and over, and with feeling and eloquence, and still never say it well enough for it to be more than news from abroad - people have no readiness for it, no empathy. It is the news of personal aging -  of climbing, and knowing it, to some unrepeatable pitch and coming forth on the other side, which is pleasant still but which is, unarguably, different - which is the beginning of descent. It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one's time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively.

I realize now that I must try harder not to impede the grace and attentiveness of people who know themselves to be ageing.

La friperie

The other day I took my son to the children’s thrift store. In French, it’s called a “friperie” and somehow, that letter arrangement sounds more delightful to my ear than does “thrift store”. But this isn’t about linguistics, rather, it’s about how that unassuming place is so often a secret source of happiness. I shopped an hour and a half, arms raised, going through tight racks while my son played the store monkey, filling a cart with options. When my son swung by, I’d tell him to separate the shirts hanging on the cart handle into yesses and nos. First I select things I like, then my son selects what he prefers, then we try on the shirts, working as if crunched for time in the store’s only bathroom. It’s a sort of dance really; removing the clothes from their hangers, putting it on the boy, pause for mirror-appraisal, taking it off, readying the next item, and making a triage of the clothes tried on: yes, no, maybe. All while keeping up cheerful banter.

The effort, even when I put it off, is usually worth the savings… I left the store with 34 items and paid a little over 150$. Once Upon A Child, even if the name is long, does organize their clothes nicely by size, gender, type and colour. I suppose the thing that makes me happy is how the boys’ closet can contain, after one of these trips, such a colourful variety of styles and brands. In one place I’ve gathered a collection of pants, shorts, t-shirts, and dress shirts, some from labels that don’t even have stores here in Winnipeg. The other thing is that while I like everything we select, if an accident happens, I don’t feel precious about the item, the way I sometimes do when paying for new things. I don’t condone recklessness, but the pang of regret felt when the puppy made a hole in a 4$ shirt compared to a 12$ shirt doesn’t have the recourse to imagining that money-with-the-wings emoji.

This is just to say that I’m grateful for thrift stores. Not all the kids’ clothes are sourced there, and it would be an unsustainable model if there weren’t parents buying new clothes. Nonetheless, when I do go, I’m usually really happy for having done so.

Friday!

It’s Friday… kids hang from hammocks, laundry gets folded, adults eat quiche while the kids have cheese-stuffed tortellini.

The lawn is in poor shape, but the installation of fibre-optics underneath it has made it a lawnmower maze of flags and even the dandelions feel outdone by the spray-painted lines everywhere. The Badger truck spent a day around our place, humming noisily. The men gave stickers to the boys and we googled the website written on their truck door. We looked at pictures of badgers and compared them to the logo. The lawn will wait for quieter days.

I crave the ability to draw and since this seems like as futile as wanting to be a sea urchin, I’ve taken to googling the benefits of art. So far, the results have only been gentle persuasions and not gale-force arguments. Perhaps that is the nature of art… it is gentle and it transforms slowly.

Success

I like making meals that people like, but I consider it a triumph when I can disguise an ingredient a person doesn’t normally like, and they still end up enjoying the meal.

Christian doesn’t care for chickpeas and even hummus leaves him indifferent. But tonight, for the first time, I made falafel served with tomato-cucumber salad, lettuce, tahini sauce and pickles all in warmed store-bought pitas and it was a hit!

Once upon a fall night I hid a whole two cups of dates in a cake and served it to a guest who, like me, was never tempted to reach for a Grandma’s date square.

Freedom to explore

Writers of non-fiction, like journalists, will sometimes leave reality behind and dip into the “freedom” of fiction. I’ve heard them use that word: freedom. Lucky so-and-so’s I’d think… I only wish I could feel freedom in inventing a story. In fact, I’m very much like Mary Karr who wrote: “I just have zero talent for making stuff up. While I adore the short story form, any time I tried penning one myself, everybody was either dead by page two, or morphed back into the person they’d actually evolved from in memory.” (The Art of Memoir, p. 21)

Lately, I’ve been reading Amy Tan’s memoir, Where the Past Begins. She describes her talent for realistic drawing, and I’m annoyed… here again, a writer who is an artist besides? Harrumph! Put a marker in my hand and I freeze the same way one becomes immediately self-conscious before their picture is taken. But Tan explains why she chose writing over being an artist and it has to do with her childhood trauma:

It has to do with what does not happen when I draw. I’ve never experienced a sudden shivery spine-to-brain revelation that what I have drawn is a record of who I am. I don’t mix water-colour paints and think about my changing amalgam of beliefs, confusion, and fears. I don’t do shading with thoughts about death and its growing shadow as the predicted number of actuarial years left to me grows smaller. When I view a bird from an angle instead of in profile, I don’t think of the mistaken views I have held. With practice, I will become better at drawing the eye of a bird or its feet, but I can’t practice having an unexpected reckoning of my soul. All that I have mentioned - what does not happen when I draw - does occur when I write. They occurred in the earliest short stories I wrote when I was thirty-three. Then, as now, they are revelations - ones that are painful, exhilarating, transformative, and lasting in their effects. In my writing, I recognize myself.

Discovering and being able to explain why one writes is fascinating! I enjoy collecting these writerly “raison d’être”s because it shows how in one profession, there is such interesting variety. It also highlights how expanding a talent is linked to personal development. I think that ideas about freedom, in fiction or in art, suppose a kind of ease. I immediately associate art with freedom, but that is not really the case… art in one form or another is exploration and it is work just the same. The method used for the exploration is irrelevant.

Cookies

I used to come home from an office job, and consider the week productive only if I managed to bake a dessert. Dessert signified a form of self-care and indulgence and generosity too towards my husband. Now, I bake cookies for the kids and these Apple-Spice Cookies from The Pollan Family Table are a favourite. I like the almost ginger-bread-like spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves), the simple icing on top, but I especially like their cake-like texture.

Yard work

Since last Saturday we moved our vegetable garden from one side of the backyard to the other and filled the new fenced-off section of earth full of potato sprouts, tomato plants, peppers, herbs, beets, carrots, beans, zucchini and cucumber. Children and a puppy have made for the change in landscape design and this flexibility… this thing where Christian and I, lying in bed at night just before turning off the light, considering this season’s garden, the dry summers, the kid’s fun with the inflatable pool, the sandbox, the dog’s muddy paws when it rains… It’s a leisurely back and forth of thoughts and ideas. I enjoy this. I love how we can up and decide that play space wins over deck privacy and mediocre apples, and Christian, next weekend cuts down the apple tree. I like how we can see that the yard plan we started out with needs modification and both of us are game to do it.

Ahistorical

There is this thing, when you’re a historian, where you have to be careful not to project onto the past a feeling you have in the present. Recently, I read in a methodology textbook how a researcher can misunderstand circumstances in the past because the written records provide only fragmentary information. This is the case, when (in centuries past) for example, lots of mothers suffered over the high rates of infant mortality. These deaths might be recorded in a parish register, but few accounts can be found of the sadness they provoked. Historians are left to puzzle over what this means… Were mothers less emotional? Did they hide their grief? Was the society such that this kind of written record was thought unimportant? Etc.

As we are making our way through a pandemic, I think of the future historians who will have the advantage of perspective, but will, probably, not have been participants.

When I sit down to write, I don’t often concentrate on my feelings about the pandemic, the new government orders, the worries, hopes, deceptions or general ennuie. And then sometimes, that future historian pops into my head.

Take for example Nellie McClung. I thought it would be neat to know what she thought of the Winnipeg Strike of 1919, since she was around when it happened. Luckily enough, she left evidence of having grappled with the event… but there are other instances when you imagine that some event will have an impact on a person’s life and find nothing.

Today, the announcement was made that schools here in Manitoba are to remain closed until the end of the year. I do not count myself among the mothers who are overly concerned about their children’s getting Covid-19 or passing it on. The evidence of cases so far backs this up. The government’s decision to keep schools closed therefore feels unsubstantiated. And writing about feelings? That seems quite useless. It’s enough just to keep one’s head above water.

Masks

I used to think I could only read one book at a time, but have since become a promiscuous rifler of pages. Reading multiple books at once can lead to idea collages across genres. Take for example Amy Tan’s thoughts on photographs in Where the Past Begins:

I used to think photographs were more accurate than bare memory because they capture moments as they were, making them indisputable. They are like hard facts, whereas aging memory is impressionistic and selective in details, much like fiction is. But now, having gone through the archives, I realize that photos also distort what is really being captured. To get the best shot, the messiness is shoved to the side, the weedy yard is out of the shot. The images are also missing context: the reason why some are missing, what happened before and after, who likes or dislikes whom, if anyone is unhappy to be there. When they heard “cheese,” they uniformly stared at the camera’s mechanical eye, and put on the happy mask, leaving a viewer fifty years later to assume everyone had a grand time.

Now compare that to a similar idea in a completely different context… In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam is explaining how the communist regime changed its citizens’ lives. Here she describes how people had appear uniformly fine:

It was essential to smile – if you didn’t, it meant you were afraid or discontented. This nobody could afford to admit – if you were afraid, then you must have a bad conscience. (…) But while wearing your smiling mask, it was important not to laugh – this could look suspicious to the neighbors and make them think you were indulging in sacrilegious mockery. We have lost the capacity to be spontaneously cheerful, and it will never come back to us.

Look how both authors use the word “mask” - Tan, a “happy mask” and Mandelstam, a “smiling mask”. It’s funny how, now, in the pandemic, the use of a mask in public has both robbed me of the ability to smile reassuringly to strangers but also provided me with the convenience of not having to make the effort if I don’t feel like it.

Gathering clay

For the heck of it, I started listening to early episodes of one of my favourite podcasts, Longform. In episode 9, Jeanne Marie Laskas describes how getting material for a story is like gathering clay:

(I talk to my students like this…) I always feel like I’m like a potter, like a sculptor or something like that. And when you’re reporting you’re going out and you’re just like, gathering clay in a riverbed, like, you just got to get all different colours and all different textures and you don’t even know what you’re going to do with it. But you need the clay! You can’t make anything unless you get the clay. And then that’s a whole stage you’re going through, and then you’re bringing that back and you got these lumps. And it’s just like, you just went to a store and bought stuff, and you’re just like, “now I have all this now!” And then you get to play with the clay! 

The metaphor is pertinent now, as I tunnel through research in order to write a Master’s thesis. The small town’s registry I’m studying has an interesting connection to the larger French community, because over the years, when the Catholic Church was the dominant influence, the community newspaper would also record baptisms, mariages and deaths. Right now, I’m noting how many of the registry entries were also reported in the newspaper in order to see if patterns emerge. I’m gathering clay.

One way or another

I was listening to Phuc Tran’s book Sigh, Gone, in audio version, and there’s a part in which he describes how his mother was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, if I remember correctly. His parents, who are Catholic, up and decide to travel to the shrine of the newly-sainted John Henry Newman to beg his intercession. The mother is cured because the doctors find no trace of the cancer in her body in a subsequent appointment.

As I understand it, from Phuc Tran’s point of view, there may or may not have been a miracle, and either way, the Catholic religion was a minor key bass line in his growing up - underpinning everything rather sombrely. What Phuc Tran offers the reader is a delightful example of how this possibly Divine Intervention was but an anecdote in this story. This thing that people pray for, that people can literally die or live on, has no greater repercussion in someone’s life than eating out on a Tuesday at McDonald’s. Just imagine the opposite… that this poor immigrant family, recently come to America, does pray to John Henry Newman and that the situation is not reversed and the mother dies anyway. The author would be no more Catholic than he is today with the miracle having happened.

It strikes me that when it comes to desires, it is the immediacy that counts. It also seems to me that when it comes to decisions, our human nature wants two things: to avoid suffering and to feel right. Basically, a request for Divine Intervention is a request that says: “please do something!” But say that a an indication is granted for a decision to be made. Or rather, say that clouds part, a voice is heard, and a command is handed down: “get the vaccine” or “don’t get the vaccine”. Assuming that the instruction is followed, our human nature would then be all puffed-up with the idea that our adherence to the instruction made us good. Instead, the instruction-less among us have to stay humble, have to search for calm and find peace and follow their own heart and then, even more importantly, have to give up their idea of what is good, in order to accept and understand the intentions and actions or inactions of others. I think this is the greater challenge. It’s not making the decision itself. Rather, it’s accepting that, free to choose, there is no immunity to suffering and no guarantee for the future, and that our choice might never find universal approval. Furthermore, in the future, the immediacy of this issue will have disappeared and we will struggle to remember what it was that we talked about so much.

School lunches

Schools went online here in Manitoba on the Wednesday after Mother’s Day. Unlike March of last year, the day’s routine is structured around the children’s classroom appointments rather than a schedule I improvised. (I write about it here.) This means the kids are more independent and I have time to make lunch the day-of, rather than doing it the night before. Here is what the kids have for lunch during the week:

Monday: Sandwhiches

Tuesday: Quesadillas

Wednesday: Pasta salad (here with tuna)

Thursday: Fruit smoothie, a muffin (here banana-chocolate, although other favourites include banana chocolate-chip, zucchini, and pumpkin) and nuts and bolts

Friday: Pizza (from frozen)