Beakful

Well I've certainly had a beakful of painting today. That's Katherine's room first coated... Happily the paint I moved onto for the second half of the room (of which Mr B will be bringing a car load when he arrives) is far better than the rubbish I was using yesterday. After the painting was done I washed up with our new (as of Friday I think) INSIDE tap! Yes, a tap actually in the house. Ok, so it's in the piano room, which isn't ideal, but at least I don't have to traipse out through the mud in 18th century style to get a bucket of water any more. After washing most of the paint off visible parts of me, I was off into town for a blissful hour mooching about the shops, posting a parcel, chatting to the butcher, buying some bread... But the post office had no prepaid things to put my parcel in, meaning I had to come home and properly wrap it, and every other shop in town was closed. Not sure why. Obviously the supermarket was open - which was where I ended up buying dinner - but was a little annoyed that I'd tried to support local businesses and been thwarted. I'm sure I'll get used to the opening hours once I'm a lady of leisure again.

Home to homework with the kids. Katherine has to learn a poem every fortnight: write it out neatly, illustrate it and then recite it from memory in class. Obviously illustration is her favourite bit, and the part she spends most time on. Of course it's the reciting in class that gets all the marks... but I'm sure the teacher appreciates the drawing time too. Tomorrow's poem is, obviously, about a Pelican. I rather liked this drawing. She was going to copy from 'life' (Conor's playmobil pelican), but that couldn't be found, so she used the Encyclopaedia instead. Later, we caught up on Downton Abbey, with lots of interesting new vocabulary for Katherine (eloping, plighting of troths and such like). Conor, obviously, only perked up for the bit where a gent was in a bedroom with a maid and acting in a rather ungentlemanly manner. "But why's that wrong" he wanted to know. "Well, when you're married you can only kiss the person you're married to, not anyone else". "But Mammy" (shocked face) "you kiss people all the time". How to explain that there's kisses ("hello, mwah mwah") and, you know, kisses.

In other news, Katherine is growing up too fast.

Edit: Don't want to forget the surreal conversation while Mr B was facetiming us about hypocrites and hippos and how they live in our shed of death (hippos, not hypocrites, obviously). Mr B is very poorly and this has delayed his journey home by at least a day. Boo.