Italian Noodles

I was rather excited this morning.  Despite my terror of the pain of labour, every time I have a contraction my hopes are up that I might meet my little one soon insh'Allah.  So after about three or four hours of contractions this morning, I was convinced something would happen.  It's also my birthday, so I quite liked the idea of an extra special gift arriving today.

I should be used to this by now, I have been having a few hours of mild, irregular contractions every day or other day for the last two weeks or so, only for them to stop by about mid-morning.  The same happened today.

So to distract myself we had friends over for lunch.  They are a family from Italy who were here for a month which hubby knew through his dawah work.  They are due to go back to Italy tomorrow and we thought it would be nice to break bread with them before they went back.

Hubby asked that I make some kind of non-Pakistani food without chilli, something English - like noodles he suggested.  That had me giggling away all day.  So after an early morning shop, I got down to work.  I ended up making chicken chow mein (because it has noodles), chicken pasta (with a bit of chilli) and macaroni salad.  Hubby invited a few more people from the masjid (the boys teacher and the imam), so I decided to fry chips and wedges to make sure we didn't run out of food.  I added slices of baguette, garlic butter, potato salad, coleslaw and red pepper hummus which everyone really liked (shop bought).

My favourite was a simple salad with a lemony dressing which was the easiest thing to make.

Everyone enjoyed the meal and I enjoyed hanging out with my new friend from Italy.  The kids also made firm friends.

I'm trying not to think about the birth and I'm trying to keep busy so that the time passes.  At least there's plenty of food in the fridge and I won't have to cook tonight.