Yet again, yesterday, we got home to discover the street was full of police cars, and cordoned off at one end. To be fair, it’s been about a year since the last time, but even so, it’s not exactly reassuring. The item in the paper didn’t tell me much that the neighbours didn’t, though.

More importantly, it occurs to me that we’ve not had much news on the children recently so: Henry is cruising the furniture, and seems quite taken with the idea of walking. Occasionally, he tentatively lets go to see what happens - looks stricken for a moment, then holds on again. He seems to be going from the Finally Crawling Properly stage to the Starting to Walk stage quite quickly, but that impression is based on the assumption that I can remember how quickly Daisy did it. I know real, independent walking happened at about 15 months, and I can imagine him getting there before that, at his current pace, but I don’t know, really.

The Witt-Twit family home,
in the neighbourhood of Figgy Woggo

Daisy is currently obsessed with a new computer game - The Sims 2. I’d have to admit to being the one to introduce her to it, but considering it’s heavily menu-based, and therefore quite wordy in places, she’s playing fairly independently. She much prefers the creation of people to actually playing the game, and she makes up random words as her characters’ names, which I then have to try to transpose phonetically into some kind of written word. She also likes the building/decoration/furnishing of houses, and has made some fairly extraordinary aesthetic decisions on that basis. Today she paved over an entire garden with grey block paving. And the attic. And the cellar. And bits of the ground floor. She hasn’t really come to terms with the need to play the game for long enough for someone to go to work, to earn money, to facilitate further building works, but I’m working on it…

This is the last week of term, which, perversely, affects us hugely. None of my children are old enough for school, irrespective of the fact that neither of them are going anyway, but all the activities we do engage in grind to a halt in the summer. So, six weeks of wondering how on earth to fill the day are stretching ahead, in a slightly daunting way.

It’s impossible the convey the intonation of this one, which is a shame, because it was the intonation that made me crack up laughing, but:

I think we should go to the circus, Mummy, ‘coz the circus looks so great and juggley, and I would really laugh, at the circus!

Except the emphasis was more of a wistful drawl than anything else. It made me laugh, anyway.

It’s ages since they’ve done it - we’d actually come to the conclusion that they’d finally grown up a bit, or else that she’d left him - but our next door neighbours had one of their stand-up fights in the street at about 3am, and now we’re Wide Awake.

Still, we’ve discussed the most likely location of the nearest cow, whether it’s too simplistic to say flat land is arable and hills are for livestock, and whether JMU Tower was really a death trap that would have killed us both if we’d stayed. So, not an unproductive night.

A bit sad that I can’t sleep, and the kids will be up soon, though.