Take Seven: 21st February

Welcome to my Take Seven compilation which incorporates all 21 words (or derivatives) from the Three Things Challenge for the past week.
You are most welcome to join in using as many or all of the words too. Just pingback to this post and then leave a link to your post in the comments so that I can see it and respond directly.

Our words this week were:
bead, chocolate, comfort, crib, exercise, fear, flower, ice, isolated, mask, muddle, nice, pen, rice, scout, shout, spouse, storm, sweat, tidy, why.
Mum liked to keep a tidy house and was always telling us kids to put our muddles away. Naturally knowing we were only going to get them out again would make us voice the inevitable ‘Why?’
We never had a lot, but we never went without the important things, and I learned at an early age how to exercise restraint in spending my pocket money in order to save for something in particular.
Mum would mask her own money worries and take comfort in baking, decorating her cakes with chocolate buttons, tiny beads of icing or delicate flowers, but there were times when we’d notice her mind wasn’t really on what she was doing and once she put salt instead of sugar in the rice pudding.
If cross, it wasn’t her way to shout at us, not like the woman next door who was forever yelling at her spouse for one thing or another. They had six kids so they obviously ‘made up’ a lot, and I remember sneaking upstairs to see their latest baby in the crib as home births were common then.
I had a friend called Penelope (though everyone called her Pen) who was an only child, and she said sometimes she felt isolated because she had no siblings. She lived in a very nice house, but wasn’t allowed to get dirty, and so had a fear of causing a storm if she so much as produced a sweat stain on her clothes. We didn’t play at her house, but she loved to come to mine where we’d scout around and get all my toys out, then she’d go home.
Toys were also muddles and I always seemed to be putting them away too.
Happy days though.