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.

HiddenSo, that felt like a busy weekend - though I keep telling Kevin, we only did two things all weekend. However, one was a wedding, and they do take it out of one.

It was a lovely wedding. The bride was beautiful, the guest list was full of old friends, the kids coped, and apart from a heart-stopping moment when Henry pushed his high-chair away from the table, and it tipped over backwards, it all went very well (he’s fine - Carys Groves grabbed him, and more or less saved him from cracking his head on the floor - he still hit the floor, but his fall was broken).

On Sunday, we were part of a family service at church. Our church finds family services a bit alien, but I think we pulled it off. We did a dramatic reading of the story of Zacchaeus, and a sort of obstacle race, amongst other things, and still managed to have a ministry time and Serious Meeting With God at the end. Though, the way our church is at the moment, I think that could happen at a Knobbly Knees Contest.

It was heading for 11pm before we got our kids into bed on Saturday (and even then, we left straight after the speeches!), and we couldn’t have a lie-in on Sunday morning, so we took the rest of yesterday very gently indeed!

Yellow Submarine sculpture,
Liverpool

Yesterday, Daisy learned about the Beatles. We were driving back from Yellow Sub (which is the name of the soft play), and she asked me why it was called Yellow Sub. So we talked about the Beatles, and the fact that they came from Liverpool, but were famous all over the world, and that one of their songs was about a Yellow Submarine. Then I had to sing it. Then I had to stop the car to look for the CD, so she could hear THEM singing it (she didn’t believe that it was as short as I’d made out, though it is). By then, we were nearly home, and the same CD played Penny Lane just as we turned the corner onto Penny Lane, so we talked about how they wrote a song about a road near our house - she knows where Penny Lane is, so she was quite impressed.

I love conversations like that. I love introducing her to a whole new world, which she may be only casually interested in, or she she may equally take it on as part of her identity. It’s all part of her becoming the person she’s going to be, and I find it fascinating.