smoothies

Wrote an article today on making summer smoothies - a way of using up ripe fruit, when there is an overabundance of it. Waste not all this nature's bounty. To my shame, when I return to the kitchen, I have to eat my words - the previously perfect mango has disintegrated into a pool of pulp in the fruit bowl - too past it even for processing into a smoothie. I'll still post the article though - what is life if not full of aspirations that one cannot always stick to!

Talking of aspirations - I'm reading 44 Scotland St by Alexander McCall Smith - enjoying it, it's full of well painted characters, pithily brought to life. One of them is the archtypal pushy mother with a "gifted" 5 year old, poor thing, who can speak Italian and play the saxophone, he gets into trouble for writing graffiti in the kindergarten toilets, in Italian, so couldn't blame anyone else. So far one is smiling along with the author. It only jarred on me when he mentions that the boy is down to go to the Rudolf Steiner School where the Guardian is read out in assembly every morning...!

Now my experience of Steiner or Waldorf schools, my seven year old is at one, is that that sort of intellectual elitist pushiness is completely the opposite of their philosophy, where children develop at an age appropriate pace and enjoy learning because of it...maybe the author got muddled with Montessori (now I'm the ignorant one, I don't have any personal experience of Montessori) or just picked an alternative education system without knowing so much about it......still a good book though.