I generally consider myself to be a professional. It's true, that reasonably often this means I need to take a junior recipe tester assistant with me to business meetings. But I always try to maintain a professional, um... air. I brush my hair and my teeth. I dress appropriately. 

I don't go to meetings in my pyjamas.

Well, hardly ever.

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I assume it's not just me, others too, find themselves in this situation. But there are times in life when you are forced into the most ridiculous conversations. Living with one or more  junior recipe testers under the age of five will mean this is a daily occurrence. But it is made even more problematic when you are forced to have a ridiculous conversation in a very public place.

Now, I realise, I am at high risk of over-sharing here. So if you are prone to embarrassment, please do avert your eyes.

I recently had need to visit the GP....

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We buy veggies for your dinners from a local vegetable farm. When I first went to the farm to talk to the farmer about this arrangement we gazed out across his fields. "Well," he said to me, "You'll have to give me a couple of days notice of your order."

"Ok," I replied.

"So I can pick 'em."

When the veggies get to our kitchen they have often just been plucked from the ground. We need to wash them, then we trim them, before we chop them up for you. They don't come in plastic bags, they're rarely neatly cubed, and they never have a 'washed and ready for use' sticker on the pack...

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Recently, I had one of those days. Not the good one. I had a bit to get through, so I made a list. Lists are good. They keep you on track. And there's that sense of great personal fulfillment when you tick something off.

My big problem is, I lose little pieces of paper on which I write lists. But I will not be deterred. I now write them on my phone. And then they do not get lost. Very often...

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Most days, I work on the proviso that we start every day with a certain number of energy points. These are there for the picking, spent as the situation requires. Some tasks, of course, require a greater number of energy points than others. Occasionally I find I can achieve two tasks using a single energy point, and in those rare moments, I feel supremely smug.

Over the years I have learned three things:

1. Getting an overdraft is difficult.
2. Sometimes I am over-expended by 8.32am.
3. My application for an overdraft, logged by 8.43am, is usually denied by 9.03am.

Here's how the tally went today:

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We had a special day today in the kitchen, as we were joined by two clients of Northwest Disability Services who came to volunteer their time in the kitchen. They helped us package your dinners, wash up a myriad of pots and pans (you should see the mountain of washing-up we create each day) and they also found time to make you some choc chip muffins.

These muffins don't look like our ordinary muffins. And that's because they aren't ordinary...

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There is an art in parenting, I think, in recognising the time at which you would do better to stop. There's a time when it would be prudent to realise that continuing to do for your children is pointless, and just leave well enough alone.

I am a lousy judge of such a time.

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