‘Hmmm.  You’re rather twisted aren’t you?’

‘I am?’

‘You are.’

And that’s how the conversation started as I stepped into the room where I had an accidental massage this Tuesday.

My sister (a beautician) was giving mum a facial at the spa where she works.  I’d done Tesco on my own (amazingly fast, but surprisingly boring without Mum), picked up Mum and taken her to the spa.  I sat in reception and pulled out my laptop to catch up on some work and my sister mentioned her colleague Mike was there, should he appear round the corner.  I know he does some sort of massage and jokingly asked if he had a free slot.

He did.  I went in.  And I was pummelled.  Had I known that the walls were so thin, I’d have tried not to swear so much, but seriously.  It alternated between agony and ecstasy and when he threw my leg over his shoulder, twisted, pushed and…oh god….my spine did the most delicious cracking all the way from the bottom to the top.

‘Do it again!’

So he went to the other side of the table, threw the other leg over his shoulder and arrrrrrgggghhhhhh!

So… this Tuesday was a little different.  Mum loved her facial, telling me that she forgot my sister was there and in fact ‘everything disappeared from my head’.  I resisted the urge to comment that it wasn’t a huge feat for that to happen and let Mum find words to tell me how very lovely it was and that she would like to do it again.  Very soon.

Back at Mum and Dads we got on with cooking the pasties dad had seen Stepson 1 cooking in a previous post  and liked the look of, while we danced to Abba as usual.  It didn’t escape me that I am currently teaching different ends of the spectrum (18 year old novice, 77 year old veteran) to cook the same thing.  The jury is still out on who is the better student though 😉

And then we went on to the knitting. Mum has kitted out the entire family in hats and scarves now. And between the fact that it’s getting warmer, and because there are only so many hats and scarves you can wear at any one time, and the fact that she was still having issues with a paper template of a square to create the hats, I thought I’d had a genius idea in a project between us where no templates were needed and anything and everything worked.  So for her birthday, along with this card:

I bought her a knitting bag with lots of compartments so things don’t get in a muddle and some wool.  There was a bit of confusion to start, but when I left, we’d made a start on our crochet / knitted blanket:

It was not quite the genius idea I thought.  Because yesterday I got a phone call from Mum in tears because she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to do and had tried, and undone it and didn’t want to try again… So firm instructions don’t work (‘here is a square template, knit your square this size with these needles’).  And loose instructions don’t work (‘knit with whatever needless you want, whatever shape and size you want’).  So, I think I need to go back to the drawing board a bit here.  But we will get there, even if we all get a bit more twisted up in the process…

And I told Mum I’ll take a photo of where we have got to every week and I’ll post the picture on here so anyone interested can see the progress of The Tuesday Blanket.  I’m not sure she entirely understood, but she was very happy people would see what we had done.

So lovely people, here is the start of The Tuesday Blanket:

🙂

2016