Precious times

So Easter has come and gone. I am amazed how quickly this year is rushing by: it's already April! We had a lovely four days with Little Planet. We've been missing her now that she has started in fulltime childcare, so the four-day Easter break with her was so precious.

On Saturday, we took her to the White Cube gallery to see Fred Tomaselli's colourful photograms, newsprint collages, watercolours and intricate tapestries (above). She was mesmerised by the colours and shapes, as was I. On Easter Monday, we took her to the Barbican to see the Le Corbusier exhibition. She wasn't so taken by this, preferring to gawp at all the people in the gallery instead. I wasn't taken by the exhibition either: I would have preferred a more thorough focus on his architecture than his paintings. It was great seeing his work in Chandigarh though.

The Barbican is very baby-friendly: its vast, carpeted spaces enabled Little Planet to crawl around to her heart's content. At one point, another little baby suddenly appeared on the carpet too and the two babies started to crawl eagerly towards each other. They sat in front of each other and then bumped noses. It was so cute to see. Then they exchanged toys - Little Planet and her green frog and the other little girl (who, coincidentally, was also 10 months old) and her Teletubby Po!

We also let Little Planet loose in Waterstone's bookstore on Piccadilly, where, in both the children's and fiction sections she crawled around and pulled books off shelves. She is now very much into books with buttons that press to play animal sounds or nursery tunes. So, of course, we bought several.

Most of Easter, however, was spent at home playing with her, as we no longer have the opportunity to play with her during the week. All in all, it was a very chilled four-day break with our daughter.

And of course, alot of eating got done. After Little Planet went to bed each night, M indulged in his passion for cooking. He made pizzas on Good Friday, boiled ham on Saturday, roasted Indonesian duck from a Sri Owen recipe on Easter Sunday (when we had dinner guests) and nasi goreng on Easter Monday.

And now Easter is over but I still have two weeks' of absolute leisure. Bliss.