Yours

January 5th

Dear Sophia,

I love you.

I can see you. You’re with me. You’re looking right at me. You’re about to smile. Saturdays aren’t as lonely anymore. Sundays won’t be as sad. I still miss you but just seeing you makes all the difference.

The picture’s even better than I could’ve hoped for. The best thing about it is your expression. You look like you’re about to break into a smile and all I ever want to do is make you smile. That’s why I’m getting everything ready. To make you smile.

I know you’re a great cook. You’ve got good sense and you’re so caring that you can probably just naturally put food together in a way that tastes delicious. Of course it’s important to know what food is good for you and what food just tastes good. You can obviously tell the difference because you’re in such good shape. Our kids will be really lucky. They’ll always have new tasty things to try that you’ve made them. They won’t even realise you’re keeping them really healthy at the same time. All the other mums will be really jealous of you. They’ll be jealous of how good you look while being such a good mum too.

I decided to go through the cooking books sitting around the house. There were only a few. They were pretty much the only books my mum had. One was quite recent and had really shiny pictures of food and tried to make all the meals sound really fancy and modern for some reason. It was just things like pizza and normal meals like that. They said it was simple to do but they used lots of stupid words to describe it all so it sounded like it was written by a fourteen year old. One thing was called awesome cod. I can’t really trust a book like that. It doesn’t sound sensible.

There was one I ended up liking. It looked a bit older. It wasn’t dusty or torn or anything it just had an older looking style to it. I flicked through it to try and see if there was anything useful in it. A lot of the food looked a bit beyond me to be honest. I’d need to do a new shop to get half the stuff for lots of the recipes. I saw a page on traditional roast dinners. I thought about how Christmas dinner had gone and knew I needed to work on it. I think it would be nice if at the weekends I could do us a big family meal like a roast. I decided that would be a good thing to practice.

I went to Tesco to pick up a few things that were missing at Christmas. It went ok I think. The potatoes were better the way it told me to do them in the book. Having stuffing and parsnips made a big difference. Neither of those things were very complicated either. The book was quite easy to follow. I did a few vegetables too. I ended up not eating them because I ate so much of the other stuff but they looked ok. It said in the book it was hard to get them too wrong anyway. With the kids I’ll make sure to eat my vegetables first so they know they should too.

It took much longer to cook it all than to eat it but that’s ok. I think you’ll think it’s worth the effort. Having you look over me while I did everything convinced me it was the right thing to do. I had chicken instead of turkey but apart from that it was pretty much exactly how it’ll be for us at Christmas.

It was so much better than last time. Just having you watching me made it so much easier.

I love you.

Yours,

Andrew