Grand little person

It’s been a very long and enjoyable day. Our little grand daughter, Esmeralda - Esme for short - is staying with us for a three days while Jess is having her first proper holiday in a couple of years, a long weekend in Amsterdam with her boyfriend.
Esme was awake at 5, but Hanne Lene persuaded her to sleep for another hour. But it was all systems go at 6 am. I managed to catch another hour and a half while they were downstairs, before I got up...and then we were straight out into the garden and the
meadow to greet the day.
Esme is still small enough to bath in our washing up bowl, but we opted for the more
conventional showers, in shifts. Around ten we headed out for breakfast at the
Wiveton Hall
Café . The staff and most of the customers are really child friendly...soon Esme was being introduced to a miniature Labradoodle sitting with the folk at the table opposite....we couldn’t persuade her to sit in a high chair, and before long she has made friends with a young waitress who carried her around on her arm. There was a rather humorous reality check when she went over rather close to an elderly woman who looked less than cheerful, and told her to
“Clear off!”, just as we were just coming over to gently intervene and steer her away. Being only eighteen months old and of
a cheerful disposition, it went right over her head...
After breakfast we went for a toddle down a
path on the edge of the marshes to Blakeney Harbour where we talked to a lot of sucks, and on the way back, encountered
a pair of beautiful black pigs who came over and rooted around in the mud next to us. These are the first pigs Esme has met.
On the way back in the car, those little eyes got narrower, soon she was rubbing them, all snuggled up in her child seat and then... complete silence...she was out of it, and in the land of the fairies.

I was rather frustrated that I forgot to take the camera along on our outing. Any parents or grandparents reading this will know how it is....baths and showers, dressing a toddler, remembering to pack milk, rusks, a spare nappy, raincoats and scarves and all...it’s easy to forget crucial
stuff like photographic apparatus.

By the time Esme woke and I was back from my daily walk-run it was getting towards dark. I had a go at a few snaps in low light at a slow exposure (I am not a fan of flash photography)...and was surprised that the results turned out fairly well.

Anyway now I am flat out on the sofa like a beached whale and fit for little more than a cup of tea and a dvd recordIng of David Attenborough’s new series.
Have a good evening. The circus starts again in the morning....